Nature: History & Politics of Environmen

This course offers an understanding of an interdisciplinary field of environmental, health and population history and will discuss historical and health, environmental and disease policy debates with a cross cutting, comparative relevance. This course uses global South Asia as a microcosm, and views it as a connected space with mobile human networks and migrations, and as an analytic lens to discuss critical, global debates on the politics of public health, the uses of science and power of experts and expertise in the South; and to analyze continuing structures of colonization, marginalization and the connected implications of globalization for environment and health in society. This course will help students analyze debates on the historical structures and transnational relations underlying colonization, decolonization and globalization in the domain of environment and health

They will be able to describe and explain how public health and environmental knowledge has been focused on prejudices and misconceptions relating to race, ethnicity, gender and poverty, that are also justified by narrow teleological, biological, ecological and social ideas and justifications. It focuses on several historical conjunctures and scales of historical analysis set in Asia and more widely in the global South, and aims to demonstrate and critique current social actors and multinational and local private, corporate interests that have limited equitable access to health, safe environments for communities and societies, and to see the pathways that have led to 'endemic risks' and crises to our global health and climate.

It is in a seminar format and expectations are to critically analyze, present readings build class participation and training in research paper writing, and strengthen conceptual methods and analysis of primary sources.