ANTHR 2482 - Anthropology of Climate Change

(crosslisted) SHUM 2482
(GHB) (CA-AS, SSC-AS) (CU-SBY)

Spring. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Recommended prerequisite: ANTHR 1400 or some familiarity with anthropology.

C. Ahmann.

What does it mean to study humanity at a time when it has become a geological force? What is required of us as thinking subjects under the Anthropocene? In this course, we will argue that anthropologists have an important role to play at this historical juncture. But we will also consider how climate change troubles some of the discipline’s central categories. Time, space, nature, power, reason – climate change throws these concepts into question. It inflects our ways of knowing. It demands adaptive thinking. Throughout the semester, we will take on this work in common, proceeding from the presumption that it is not enough to think of climate change as a simple ethnographic object. Climate change is the unavoidable context of contemporary anthropology.