Jason Cons

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This course will introduce students to core concepts in environmental anthropology. The course covers both on the history of environmental anthropology and different trajectories in the field today including: cultural ecology, political ecology, environmental racism, slow violence, multi-species ethnography, toxic ecologies, and climate change. Students will apply course ideas to a range of contemporary issues in environmental, culture, and society. 

To say that “nature” is a pivotal category of the contemporary moment is to profoundly understate the case. Ecology, environmental degradation, and climate change have become watchwords of contemporary politics. The always tenuous and constructed boundaries between “nature” and “culture” now appear profoundly eroded. How do, and how have, thinkers in the environmental social sciences engaged with these issues? And what do ethnographies at the intersections of nature, culture, and power contribute to our understandings of both epochal and everyday environmental change? This graduate seminar explores these questions and the rich theoretical and methodological debates opened in environmental anthropology and related fields. It traces debates over nature, culture, and power back through cultural ecology, political ecology, agrarian studies, and science and technology studies. It traces them forwards through ethnographies of sustainability, water, race and ethnicity, resistance, material politics, and human/animal/plant relations.

This course provides a rigorous introduction to the anthropology of the state. Focusing primarily on key theoretical interventions within anthropology and cognate disciplines, the course introduces a set different ways to understand the exercise and accomplishment of rule. Course readings are oriented around a series of key questions and debates in both historical and contemporary discussion of state power. Namely, the course asks:

·       What is the state?

·       What does it mean to examine “state formation” historically and ethnographically?

·       What different forms (states?) might a state take?

·       What is state power and how does it work?

·       How might one understand and trace everyday experiences of and encounters with the state?

·       What is the relationship between sovereignty, violence, and legitimacy?

·       What is territory and how is it lived?

The course explores different ways that these questions have been engaged in Marxian thought, post-structural critique, and other schools of critical social theory. Though course readings are primarily theoretical in content, the course is targeted broadly at students interested in carrying out ethnographic and/or historical qualitative research on questions related to politics, power, and rule.

Development—with its complicated relationship to modernity, progress, nature, and empire—remains one of the central and most challenging concepts of the contemporary moment. This course explores the complex and contested meanings of development and humanitarianism through rich ethnographies of aid. Situating current debates against longer trajectories of development, we will explore issues such as the use of technology in intervention; the role of development and aid in debates over security, climate, and migration; the negotiation and meanings of ethics in humanitarian intervention; the contested cultural politics of development; and more. Through reading ethnographies of NGOs, the development state, rural development schemes, “informality” and microenterprise initiatives, cash transfer programs, environmental protection plans, and refugee camps we will thus explore the contemporary state-of-play of development. Along the way, we will question the meanings, roles, and possibilities of, as well as alternatives to, development and humanitarian intervention. 

This graduate seminar offers an in-depth exploration of ethnographic encounters with the politics, political economy, and political ecology of nature. The course will cover a range of lenses for exploring the intersections of nature, culture, and power, including: agrarian and peasant studies, cultural and political ecologies, and science and technology studies. Course readings will encompass both classic and more recent ethnographies of environmental change. The course will provide students with opportunities both to develop critical readings and to explore their own interests in anthropological and critical environmental studies. The course will culminate in a writing project that either develops an analysis of a particular case or outlines a proposal for future research.

 Over the past three decades, Political Ecology has emerged as a powerful interdisciplinary critique of ecological change. Simply put, Political Ecology is a strategy for mapping political, economic, and social factors onto questions of environmental degredation and change. Political Ecology has been a powerful strategy for reinserting politics into apolitical discussions of ecology and the environment; writing disposed groups—human and non-human—back into discussions about conservation; and unsettling common sense understandings of “the environment” as separate from “the social.” This course will provide an introduction to core tenets of political ecology. Particularly focusing on ethnographic approaches, this course will introduce students to key debates in the field—such as the relationship between environment and violence, the critique of Malthusian and neo-Malthusian notions of scarcity and limits, the links between conservation and dispossession, and more. It will further explore the uses of political ecology in key contemporary debates over social and environmental change—from climate change to waste management. 

This course explores the various debates, concepts, and issues clustered around human security from an anthropological standpoint. The concept of human security is relatively new, yet it refers to a serious of longstanding challenges including, but not limited to, the deprivations of poverty, vulnerability to environmental change, and risk in conflict and post-conflict situations. In short, it is often referred to as freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom to live life with dignity. This course will ask what “human security” as a term adds to and enables within global intervention. It will ask what is gained or lost when considering issues such as conflict and climate together as "human security." It will explore a range of issues in the broad field of human security, touching on theoretical and practical concerns around climate change, violent conflict, and humanitarian intervention.  It will explore the various meanings of “human” and “security” embedded within the term. Students will engage with these issues through ethnographies of security and insecurity, analyses of the foundational approaches to human security, and in-depth case studies.