教學大綱 Syllabus

Anthropocene and Geopolitics

人類世與地緣政治

2024, Spring, Dr Chihyuan Yang, ICI, NCCU

Course Organization

Since the 1970s, the social sciences have undergone an “environmental turn” as many scholars have attempted to adapt their theoretical and methodological tools to better respond to the growing environmental crisis. Environmental and political issues are important topics for social science and Science and Technology Studies (STS), not only because of the urgency of the environmental problems facing modern society but also because the social study of the environment has opened up a highly interconnected web of social, cultural, and political controversies involving competing professional knowledge, social organisation, notions of progress, modernity, and debates over freedom and justice within democracy. In addition, the focus of this course acknowledges a “planetary turn”. The advent of the Anthropocene means that the cumulative impact of the human species on the Earth system as a whole now exceeds the influence of key geological forces, making humans one of the major driving forces behind geological or geophysical change. The Earth has left the Holocene era and entered a new geological epoch, the characteristics of which are yet to be defined and explored in this course. This not only places the humanities and social sciences at the centre of understanding the Earth's fate but also challenges social scientists to imagine how large-scale environmental politics can be intertwined with art exhibitions.

This course explores several basic challenges that exist within the visions of a sustainable society and examines the claim of low-carbon transition from different perspectives, such as technological, institutional, and political-economic. Firstly, it will start with a review of the understanding of sustainability and ask what the underlying conceptualisation of Nature is in this encompassing term. What are the different and sometimes competing strategies to achieve sustainability? A historical relationship between Nature and Society follows, pointing out that nature is not an existing entity that is just over there. The concept of "Nature" is actively constructed by modern society through ideas such as conservation and natural history. Secondly, it explores the theme of environmental politics and governance, foregrounding the institutional and power effects of environmental issues such as the politics of Climate Change. Lastly, we are going to discuss the buzzing term, Anthropocene, the scientific controversy, and the social and cultural implications it brings to contemporary social studies on planetary Earth.

Course Aims

14. Understanding the different versions of sustainability and seeing how existent political economy structure comes into play in environmental politics.
14. Understanding the historical-cultural construction of Nature, climate change and the relevant policies, with particular emphasis on technoscience.
14. Examining the social sciences' role in understanding environmental politics and conflicts on a global scale and exploring the emerging idea of Anthropocene.

Week-by-week Syllabus and Readings

2/22 Week 1

Course Orientation

2/29 Week 2

Nature and Society

Required reading:

Hinchliffe, S. (2008) “Reconstituting Nature Conservation: Towards a Careful Political Ecology” Geoforum 39: 88-97

3/7 Week 3

Nature Reconstructed: Sustainabilit(ies)

Required reading:                                                           

Kierstin C. Hatt, Debra J. Davidson, and Ineke Lock (2005) Power and Sustainability., in Davidson, Debra J; Hatt, Kierstin C (eds.) Consuming Sustainability: Critical Social Analyses of Ecological Change. 2005, p8-19.

Ana João Gaspar de Sousa & Elisabeth Kastenholz (2015)  Wind farms and the rural tourism experience – problem or possible productive integration? The views of visitors and residents of a Portuguese village, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 23(2015), 1236-1256 (only the paragraphs before methodology)

3/14 Week 4

Grassroots Innovation and Locality

Required reading:

Gill Seyfang & Adrian Smith (2007) Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda, Environmental Politics, 16:4, 584-603

Edith Chezel and Olivier Labussière (2018) Energy landscape as a polity. Wind power practices in Northern Friesland, Landscape Research, 43(4), 503-516. (only the paragraphs before section 3)

3/21 Week 5

Following Actors: Your Issue and Case Study

Drawing on STS’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT),

we are going to draw an environmental controversy map locating and documenting the more-than-human actors and knowledge claims

3/28 Week 6

Field Trip

National Taiwan Museum: Nanmen Park

Island and Life of Power- The Era of Taiwan's Electrification

4/4 Week 7

Holiday

4/11 Week 8

Globalised Environmental Knowledge

Required reading:

Mike Hulme (2020) Climate change forever: the future of an idea, Scottish Geographical Journal, 136:1-4, 118-122 , DOI: 10.1080/14702541.2020.1853872

Clark A. Miller. (2004) Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order. In Sheila Jasanoff edited States of Knowledge, The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order. New York: Routledge

4/18 Week 9

Mid-term Week (Catching up week)

4/25 Week 10

Environmental Governance and Politics

Required reading:

Dunlop, C. A. (2012). Epistemic communities. In E. Araral, S. Fritzen, M. Howlett, M. Ramesh, & X. Wu (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Public Policy (pp. 247–261). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203097571-28

Lo, A. Y., & Chen, K. (2019). Policy selection of knowledge: The changing network of experts in the development of an emission trading scheme. Geoforum, 106, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.07.021

5/2 Week 11

Environmental Ethics and Values

Required reading:

Rolston III, H. (1991). Environmental ethics: values in and duties to the natural world. Ecology, economics, ethics: The broken circle, 73-96.

5/9 Week 12

Environmental Justice and Pluralism

Required reading:

Schlosberg, D. (2013). Theorising environmental justice: The expanding sphere of a discourse. Environmental Politics, 22(1), 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.755387

Brush, E. (2020). Inconvenient truths: pluralism, pragmatism, and the need for civil disagreement. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 10(2), 160-168. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-020-00589-7

5/16 Week 13

Citizen Science and Participatory Knowledge

Required reading:

Irwin A (2015) ‘Citizen science and scientific citizenship: same words, different meanings?’ in Science Communication Today – 2015 (Bernard Schiele, Joëlle Le Marec and Patrick Baranger eds) Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine: Nancy pp 29-38.

Fan, Fa‐ti, and Shun-ling Chen. 2019. "Citizen, Science, and Citizen Science." East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 13, no. 181-193.

5/23 Week 14

Resilience and Nature-based Solutions

Required reading:

Lockie, S. (2016). Beyond resilience and systems theory: reclaiming justice in sustainability discourse. In Environmental Sociology (Vol. 2, Issue 2, pp. 115–117). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2016.1182308

Mabon, L and Kawabe, M (2017) ‘Making sense of post-disaster Fukushima fisheries: a scalar approach‘ Environmental Science and Policy 75: 173-183

5/30 Week 15

Documentary: Anthropocene - The Human Epoch

6/ 7 Week 16

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Required reading:

Castree, Noel (2014) ‘The Anthropocene and geography I: the back story,’ Geography Compass, 8(7), pp. 436-49.

Davies, Jeremy. 2016. "Versions of the Anthropocene." In the Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press.

6/13 Week 17

Self-Learning Week

6/20 Week 18

Final Exam Week

Assessment Arrangements

14. (20%): Continuous participation in class, including attending, reading articles, asking questions, weekly post-reading thoughts and discussing with each other.
14. (40%): Summering articles for the class. A group of two students, at least 40 minutes at a time with a detailed summary of the main arguments, post-reading questions and initial responses.
14. (40%): Issue-oriented final report based on a group of two students, containing 5000 words for introduction, literature review, case studies, and conclusions. At week 13, the title of the final report needs to be confirmed.