Type of Credit: Partially Required
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Number of Students
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.
能力項目說明
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Week-by-week Syllabus and Readings
2/19 Week 1 Course Orientation
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2/26 Week 2 Nature and Society Required reading: Hinchliffe, S. (2008) “Reconstituting Nature Conservation: Towards a Careful Political Ecology” Geoforum 39: 88-97
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3/5 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)
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3/12 Week 4 Grassroots Innovation or Market 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)
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3/19 Week 5 Following Actors: Your Issue and Case Study Workshop Based 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 Winds of Change - Offshore Wind in the North Sea
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3/26 Week 6 Documentary: Rewilding, restoring and reconnecting with nature in Derbyshire
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4/2 Week 7 Holiday
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4/9 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
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4/16 Week 9 Mid-term Week (Catching up week)
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4/23 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
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4/30 Week 11 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
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5/7 Week 12 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. |
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5/14 Week 13 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
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5/21 Week 14 University Anniversary Sports Day
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5/28 Week 15 Documentary: Anthropocene - The Human Epoch
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6/ 4 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.
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6/11 Week 17 Self-Learning Week
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6/18 Week 18 Self-Learning Week
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