SUST 581C - Practices & Methodologies

Credits: 4

This course will demonstrate linkages between climate change, ecological devastation, and human violence. It will cover a wide range of these connections from the ways in which climate changes leads to mass atrocities to the ways in which mass atrocities cause environmental devastation. The patterns of this interplay will be covered in case studies from historical and contemporary moments. Readings and films will explore stories of how Indigenous civil society erosion typically entails illegal land development, how the survivors of mass atrocity demand recognition for the environmental devastations their lands have also suffered, and how ecologies are integral to memorializing violence. Throughout the course, we will operationalize the concept postwar ecology, taken from recent scholarship in military waste. Our approach focuses on ethnographic understandings that integrates social relations with environmental relations when it comes to the aftermath of violence. Students will engage with experimental ethnographies of visual and auditory media as well as written ethnographies that explore these relations in places across the world. We will consider how postwar reconciliations are affected by and affect the remnants of war like bombs that become ghosts, planes that become gods, and rats who become landmine detectors.