Handbook

Subject Area: Environmental Humanities

This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: Development Studies

UNSW’s 2025 strategy offers a framework for addressing social justice aspirations of disadvantaged and marginalized communities.  This course will give you the research tools to understand the cultural, social, and political dimensions of environmental problems like poor air and water quality caused by industrial pollution.  You will learn about the environmental justice movement, which has sought to rectify the ways that environmental harm is disproportionately experienced by groups of people who live with structured social inequality.  Exploration of a range of key historical and contemporary case studies, will give you the opportunity to consider the contradictions, dilemmas and complexities of environmental issues. Key questions running through this course include: What does justice mean?  Who benefits from particular ways of imagining and interacting with the environment?  What do practices of responsibility and care look like in situations where slow violence is taking place?  This course will consider these questions with respect to people who are living with complex global entanglements and who are impinging upon the worlds of other species.   The course is taught with an interdisciplinary approach that draws on materials from anthropology, multispecies ethnography, development studies, gender studies, human geography, political science, science and technology studies, and sociology.