SS-382 Politics of Climate Change

3 Credits

• SS-382-01

Climate change is transforming both physical and intellectual landscapes. It is destabilizing ecological and political systems and raising new problems for existing debates about the relationship between markets, political structures, and the natural world. In this course we first strive to understand the realities of climate change by surveying relevant scientific and sociological literature. We then attempt to assess the situation critically, considering how and why the problem arose, which individuals, institutions, and structures share responsibility for it, and what sort of political response is called for. We review how thinkers from various political traditions-liberal, cosmopolitan, ecosocialist, anarchist, postcolonial, and others-have answered these questions, and develop our own positions on effective and just ways of addressing the issue.