Sea Level Rise and a Sustainable Future
This course provides an overview of sea level rise (SLR), with lectures on basic geophysics of SLR, the projected future impacts from climate models, and uncertainty around these projections. The impacts of SLR are discussed in a historical, present, and future context, focusing on social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions. This course is highly interdisciplinary and is designed to be accessible and engaging to students from across the university. Instructor: Patrick Keys
Air Quality Characterization
Ambient air pollution is a burden that is not evenly shared. This graduate course is centered on a service learning project where students partner with a community to design, plan, and execute a hypothesis-driven air pollution measurement campaign over the course of the semester. Through this exercise, students will examine environmental injustice in an air pollution context, and gain an in-depth understanding of a particular environmental justice case in Colorado. They will learn to design, propose, and execute community-centered air pollution research, gain familiarity with multiple new low-cost air pollution monitoring technologies, and learn to communicate scientific findings centered on community concerns.
Ambient air pollution is a burden that is not evenly shared. This graduate course is centered on a service learning project where students partner with a community to design, plan, and execute a hypothesis-driven air pollution measurement campaign over the course of the semester. Through this exercise, students will examine environmental injustice in an air pollution context, and gain an in-depth understanding of a particular environmental justice case in Colorado. They will learn to design, propose, and execute community-centered air pollution research, gain familiarity with multiple new low-cost air pollution monitoring technologies, and learn to communicate scientific findings centered on community concerns.
Economics of Environmental Sustainablity
Professor Joanne Burgess Barbier is leading this course after being awarded a Sustainability Curriculum Innovation Grant from SoGES.
Development in Indian Country
Critical examination of history, public policy, and tribal strategies for economic development and natural resource management in Indian country.
Mapping Diverse Perspectives in Conservation
Principles and geospatial tools to explore conservation science and practice through diverse social and cultural perspectives. Through discussions and hands-on mapping exercises, develop a spatial understanding of diverse perspectives and social justice issues in conservation, including mapping local ecological knowledge, patterns of environmental injustice, hotspots of biological and cultural diversity, human-wildlife conflict, and non-colonialist geographies. No GIS experience required. Instructor: Sara Bombaci
Environmental Politics in Developing World
Examines environmental politics in developing countries and evaluates climate change, natural resource governance and environmental justice.
Power, Justice, and Democracy
Examines research related to the key themes of power, development, democracy, inequality, justice, labor/work, and social transformation. Analyze themes through a variety of theoretical literatures and practical examples.
Green Transitions? Just Transitions?
Dimitris Stevis
Fridays 2:00-4:50, in person
This seminar explores questions of social and environmental justice during green/sustainability transitions through the lens of the concept of just transition. A just transition is one that is socially and ecologically just towards the people and natures affected by a transition. In this seminar, in fact, we will expand the universe of transitions in a variety of ways, particularly to reflect your interests. First we will assume that all social transitions are also environmental and all environmental transitions are also social. Second, we will move beyond energy to address a range of sociotechnical transitions, including transitions in the organization of production and consumptions and the nature of work (The Future of Work). Third, we will also focus on social transitions, whether related to gender, race, ethnicity or class. Finally, because of the foundational significance of global social divisions of labor, this seminar will be particularly attune to questions of positionality across and within borders. Thus this is not a seminar exclusively and narrowly on just green transitions but, rather, uses the concept to explore broader debates in green political economy and political ecology with particular attention to socioecological justice, power and democracy.
Water Resources, Planning and Management
Management and planning of natural and constructed water systems. Integrated management and case studies of water use and environmental resources.
Infrastructure & Utility Management
Infrastructure and utility planning, management, and security. Systems approach to life cycle management. Problems, analysis, decision support systems.
Biological Basis of Public Health
This course is designed for students from diverse backgrounds, providing a foundation in biological and clinical concepts relevant to public health and epidemiology.
Health Impact Assessment
This course introduces Health Impact Assessment (HIA), emphasizing health equity and practical application across various sectors.
Global Environmental Justice Movements
How the world's poor and minorities self-empower to challenge institutional racism and government apathy in order to secure basic environmental goods.
Power, Equity and Inclusion in Environmental Justice
Examines procedural environmental injustice, as defined by the exclusion of marginalized groups from decision-making processes and the underenforcement of environmentally protective regulations in marginalized communities. Exploration of the degree to which power, equity and inclusion in policy processes create and perpetuate marginalization, weaving a single case study throughout the semester for illustration.
Globalization, Sustainability, and Justice
Public and private policies to promote sustainability and social justice in a globalizing world.
Environmental, Food, and Social Justice
The course is designed to critically evaluate the complex interaction between social systems and the environment. In doing so, pressing environmental issues are investigated using environmental sociological theories. The primary goal of the course is to examine why and how environmental benefits and burdens are unequally distributed among different classes, races, genders, and nationalities and what are the consequences of the unequal distribution. Identifying and investigating possible solutions to the problems is also one of the major goals of the course. - Instructor, Azmal Hossan
Introduction to Environmental Justice
This introductory course explores and analyzes vital topics related to environmental degradation, human health, and social activism. More specifically, how are environmental problems experienced by different racial/ethnic groups, social classes, and genders? How do access to financial resources or geographic location impact people’s exposure to environmental toxins? What roles do corporations, governments, communities, and social movements play in these outcomes?
Soc. of Environmental Cooperation & Conflict
Roles of government and civil society in creating environmental problems and in developing effective responses to those problems.
Food Justice
Investigates the institutional drivers and social experiences of inequities in the food system. Examines how the food justice movement responds by organizing for grassroots, community, and global, as well as cultural, economic, and political change.
Society & Environment
Technology as a social phenomenon interacting with social organization and the natural environment.
Sociology of Disaster
Determinants and consequences of behavior and response to environmental extremes including floods, earthquakes, wind, severe storms, and technological emergencies.
Water Justice
Analyzes how human societies interact with and depend upon water with attention to institutions and inequalities. Examines various power dynamics of water access, control, rights, and management, and sustainable and just solutions to complex water problems.
Food Systems & Agriculture
“Food is necessary for human survival.” We hear this hackneyed axiom regularly. But what does this mean? In and of itself, it masks the social with an appeal to the biological and overlooks the ecological as an invisible prerequisite. In the spirit of unmasking the complexities of food systems this course delves into why food matters to society beyond the obvious need for sustenance. We investigate the economic, political, and social underpinnings of food and agricultural systems as well as ecological and non-human animal entanglements to better understand entrenched problems. Turn on the television or dive down a web portal and you are inundated with a barrage of information and lurking ideologies to sway your views. Debates rage over how to amply remunerate food chain workers, stave off the environmental degradation associated with industrial capitalist agriculture, use mechanical- and bio-technologies, solve global hunger and obesity, respect cultural foods and culinary traditions, reimagine gendered divisions of food labor, re-center the production of food within cities, and so on. In the mix are food social movements that navigate the complicated terrains of colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, institutional racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression as they struggle for different food futures. In brief, we foster a sociological imagination on the matrices of power that weave their way through and into food. Topically, food is noteworthy. Sociologically, food systems become an analytical framework for understanding the uneven relationship people have with this vital life source. Roll up your sleeves and dig in. You are about to cultivate new insights and tools to unpack the ongoing transformation of food and agricultural systems. Instructor- Joshua Sbicca
Climate Grief to Active Hope
The effects of anthropogenic climate change are ever more apparent, with rising sea levels, eroding coastlines, higher temperatures, and extreme weather events outpacing anything that human communities have faced in the history of the species. And yet climate change – as impactful as it is and will be in the coming decades – is only one facet of the ecological disruption and disorder. The earth is experiencing its sixth mass extinction, in which populations of plants, animals, and microorganisms are increasingly under threat due to habitat loss and shifting temperatures.
The human mind and psyche do not seem capable of processing the scale and scope of the losses and threats that occur as a result of industrial societies’ interactions with the more-than-human-world. So called “climate anxiety,” “climate fear,” and even “eco-neurosis” are the spreading psychological correlate of the climate crisis. Yet anxiety, fear, and neurotic symptoms — while understandable responses to an overwhelming situation — do not provide individuals or human societies with the necessary resources for mitigating environmental crises, adapting to new realities, and envisioning ecological thriving.
Instead, we need to understand the structural and systemic conditions that have helped create climate crisis – and the ways that those systems can be changed. And we need to create space to process and envision solutions to those systemic problems. Understanding your individual experience as nested within communities, collectives, and larger systems helps process your climate grief, identify what brings you joy and where you can help create communities of change, and relate that to larger transformative changes to political and economic systems.
In this course, we will discuss — from a variety of disciplinary perspectives — the complex relationship between individual experiences, structural conditions, communities of change, and reasons for active hope. In particular we will explore:
*The nature of global climate crises
*Individual experiences of climate and eco-grief and anxiety
*Individual practices like mindfulness & identifying your joy and role in building new systems
*Sociological imagination & the power of collective action
*The Anthropocene versus Capitalocene
*Political and Economic issues and opportunities for change
*Building more distributive and regenerative systems
*Active Hope
*Visioning more just futures
Environmental Justice
This graduate level course examines the unequal distributions of environmental risks, benefits, policies and regulatory practices across different populations. The course explores the meaning of social justice, environmental justice, environmental quality and environmental equity and examines the history of the environmental justice movement and evidence of environmental injustices. Processes of social control in response to environmental harms and policies that address environmental inequities are considered as well as political economic explanations of injustices.
Environmental Sociology
Connections between social organizations, the environment, and science and technology.