At the graduate level, I teach courses on Political Ecology, Space and Place, and Anthropological Theory.
In 2017 - 18, I will be teaching the graduate course on Critical Political Ecologies (Geog 5326/Anth 5030). The course will be offered in Winter term on Mondays from 1-4pm.
The course is designed for MA and PhD students who are interested in the contemporary politics of nature, its commodification, transformation, and agency in rural and urban contexts, and wish to develop a theoretical repertoire for their research. The course draws mainly (but not only) from recent debates in anthropology, geography, political ecology, and science studies that havenot only drawn our attention to the sociality of nature and to the agency of matter/nature/ecology but have also forced us to acknowledge the constitutive role of more-than-human agents in shaping the contested terrain of environmental politics.
The central question that guides this graduate seminar is: what constitutes the politics of nature in the anthropocene? It engages with questions such as: what constitutes nature/s, how is such a profoundly unstable entity called nature produced and reproduced in everyday life, what are the symbolic and material contestations that underlie the politics of nature and (re)make nature, how are meanings assigned, and nature remembered, in diverse yet historically and geographically specific ways. The course takes a political ecology perspective and introduces graduate students to the foundational debates and concepts that have animated the field of political ecology.
Some of the topics we will cover this year are focused on the question of land in rural and urban contexts, conservation regimes, ecological knowledges, agrarian-urban transformations, debates around politics and practice in political ecology research, and research methodologies.
Who Can Take the Course
Students who are not in Anthropology or Geography, and do not have a background in social theory, are strongly encouraged to consult me beforehand so that we can discuss whether the course is suitable.
Please contact me if you have any questions about the course.
At the undergraduate level, I teach courses on urban anthropology, environmental anthropology, development, and core courses.
