CHID 480 A: Special Topics: Advanced Study Of The History Of Ideas

This course turns to environmental studies, feminist studies, and critical animal studies in order to grapple with the realities of environmental destruction. We will look at multiple sites of unsustainable practices including pollution, toxic waste dumping, resource extraction, and animal agriculture. In analyzing patterns of environmental destruction as well as environmental protection discourses, we will strategically apply an intersectional framework to assess how both value certain lives and disregard others. More specifically, we will analyze how racism, colonialism, sexism, transphobia and speciesism shape our environment and our discussions of protecting it. Course materials will include scholarly texts, activist works, and popular media. Because this course has an emphasis on writing, we will also be thinking about how writing can be a useful medium to resist environmental destruction. In order to hone their writing skills, students will be regularly writing and reviewing each other’s work in class.