Climate and Empire

Climate change destabilizes the ontic certainty of this world, time, and history. This course in MESAAS will introduce students to the literature on climate change and its relationship to ontology, religion, violence, politics, and gender. We will explore the resilience and limitations of various theoretical approaches as they relate to empirical cases. Students will become familiarized with important arguments that have been advanced to explain climate change in its more recent incarnations in the Middle East and Asia. How have different trajectories of understanding climate change led to different kinds of political cultures and governing institutions? Have some qualities of the “environment” or “climate” remained the same throughout history and across the globe? What is the role of colonialism in modern understandings of climate change?  The core of this course will seek to develop a mode of conceptualizing the present by rendering relevant geological time in addition to historical time, earth’s history in addition to world’s history.

The course begins with the question of how the “climate” has been historically and ethnographically conceptualized in various intellectual trajectories of human sciences. We consider how religion is connected to environmental change, how the “human” and “non human” are conceptualized in various ontologies, and how religious norms and ethics enact environmental practices. We interrogate the everyday sociality of climate adaption and how climate conflict informs social, political, and environmental citizenship. The course concludes by contemplating the creative ways of being in this new world. We study the innovative forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism (post- humanism) that emerge from the specter of environmental change.