ENV 320 - Race, Gender, Nature

We will examine race, gender, and nature through the interdisciplinary frameworks of science studies, critical geography, and allied fields (GSS, anthropology, sociology, history). By paying attention to the processes of knowledge production, circulation, and application, we will trace how the colonial sciences-many of which form the foundations for the disciplines and majors of higher education today-understood, produced, and utilized categories of race, gender, and nature to enable extractive violence and colonial rule, setting the conditions for what has been taken for granted as “legitimate” bodies, practices, and knowledges. We will then trace the afterlives of these processes and practices to ask questions about how these legacies have shaped how we know (epistemology) and what we assume to know (ontology) about the relationships between race, gender, and nature today.

Exciting new literature has been produced on these topics, and we will emphasize much of this new literature that is increasingly produced by scholars who have historically and systematically been excluded from institutions of higher education

Satisfies Environmental Studies -Social Science track major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement.