B4815 - Geographies of Climate Change (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the students will be able to use and apply geographic concepts and place the climate crisis in a wider geographic and historical frame. They will be able to assess humanity’s critical relation with the Earths’ natural resources, with ecological risk, with food security and with climate resilience using a geographic conceptual and methodological framework. The dynamic teaching method (based on critical reading, class discussions and presentations) will enable them to acquire the theoretical and empirical skills to critically analyse the global strategies of climate resilience in relation to uneven economic development, to work in groups and to critically assess academic readings on the subject.

Course contents

The course’s main objective is to offer a conceptual and methodological framework for understanding, interpreting, and contextualizing humanity’s problematic relation with the Earth from a geography perspective. The course engages with key human geography concepts and methods through in-depth reading and discussion, as well as through specific thematic case studies.

At the end of the course, students will be able

(1) To read and understand leading academic debates in the domain of geography with respect to climate crisis

(2) To critically use key human geography concepts – of place, space, territory, borders, mobility, and difference – as a framework to understand, interpret and contextualize complex planetary phenomena

(3) To apply such concepts to the specific study fields through in-depth reading, collective discussion and individual (written and oral) elaboration

Readings/Bibliography

Attending and non-attending students are required to read all ‘key readings’ in preparation for the exam.

Key readings (in order of appearance in the course)

Taylor, M. (2015) The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation Livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development, London: Routledge: preface and chapters 1-2

Lahoud, A. (2014) ‘Floating Bodies’, in E. Weizman and A. Franke (eds) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Grove, K.(2018) Resilience, London and New York: Routledge (chapters 1, 2 and 7)

Nightingale, A. J. et al (2019) Beyond Technical Fixes: climate solutions and the great derangement. Climate and Development, 12(4), 343–352

Tuana, N. (2019). Climate Apartheid: The Forgetting of Race in the Anthropocene. Critical Philosophy of Race, 7(1), 1–31.

Moore, J (2015) Capitalims in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital, London and Brooklyn; Verso: chapters intro, 1, 2 and 7.

IPES Food (2022) Smoke and mirrors: examining competing framings of food system sustainability: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and nature-based solutions

Friedmann, H. (2005), "From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and Emergence of Food Regimes", Buttel, F.H. and McMichael, P. (Ed.) New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Research in Rural Sociology and Development, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 227-264

Bezner Kerr, R., Postigo, J.C., Smith, P., Cowie, A., Singh, P.L., Rivera-Ferre, M. Cristina Tirado-von der Pahlen, M., Campbell, D., Neufeldt, H. (2023) Agroecology as a transformative approach to tackle climatic, food, and ecosystemic crises, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, (62): 101275.

Fairhead et al. (2012). Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39:2, 237-261

Escobar, A. (2015). Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation. Sustain Sci 10, 451–462

Park, L.S.-H. and Pellow, D.N. (2019) ‘Forum 4: the environmental privilege of borders in the anthropocene’, Mobilities, 14(3), pp. 395–400.

Walker, S. (2023) Dakar has lost its lungs: What the spatialised inequalities of waste can tell us about climate (im)mobilities, EPC: Politics and Space (online first)

Non-attending students are required to read one additional text, to be selected from the following list:

Armiero, M. (2021) Wasteocene: stories from the global dump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Barca, Stefania. 2020. Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-hegemonic Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ghosh, A. (2016). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Newark (UK) Polity Press.

Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.

Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Teaching methods

For attending students, this course adopts a ‘flipped class’ format, which means that students prepare the ‘key readings’  for each session (the calendar will be communicated during the first session). Attending students are required to attend at least 75% of the course sessions.

For non-attending students, the method of study involves the key readings plus one additional text from the reference list above

Assessment methods

For attending students, the overall mark consists of the following elements: short essay (70%) and oral exam (30%)

The exam involves an individual oral test in the teachers’ office on the course’s key readings. Students will be asked to answer three open questions, which broadly cover the readings and the discussions held in class. Registrations for examination dates are made on AlmaEsami. The evaluation is aimed at verifying the level of understanding of the key readings.

The essay should answer one of the following questions, using a minimum of three key readings form the course material:

1. How is the climate crisis political?
2. How does place matter in addressing the climate crisis?
3. How can scholarship overcome the ontological boundaries of climate change as a sphere of political intervention?
4. What should climate justice look like in practice?

Structurally, each essay (min. 1000-max. 1500 words excluding bibliography) is composed of the following parts: (1) an abstract detailing the research question and thesis statement (hypothetical answer), (2) a body of text in which you address the question point by point in a conceptual way (i.e. addressing the main concepts and briefly evoking one or more examples); (3) a conclusion that links the argument back to the initial question; (4) a bibliography containing a minimum of 3 references to the texts used and selected from the course literature.

THE ESSAYS MUST BE SENT TO THE TEACHER'S ELECTRONIC ADDRESS NO LATER THAN 5 WORKING DAYS BEFORE THE CALL FOR THE ORAL EXAM IN MICROSOFT WORD OR ANOTHER WRITING PROGRAM (NOT PDF) IN THE FOLLOWING MODE: Surname_essay GLOC

ESSAYS WHICH DO NOT MEET THESE CRITERIA WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED

Non-attending students book an oral exam during which they will be asked to discuss three open questions based on the key texts as well as the additional reading they have selected for this course.

Exam sessions for all students are scheduled for the following months of the academic year:

- May

- June

- July

- November

- December

- January

Precise exam dates will be communicated on the platform of AlmaEsami.

 

Teaching tools

All Power Point presentations and other materials for attending students will be available via the "teaching materials" ("materiali didattici") on the virtual area of this course. Access is restricted to University of Bologna students. The slides are not to be considered as exam matter but serve as a didactic support for the course.

The course outline and assessment methods will be fully described during the first lecture and published in detail on the power point "Presentation of the course".

Students who require specific services and adaptations to teaching activities due to a disability or specific learning disorders (SLD), must first contact the appropriate office

Office hours

See the website of Timothy Raeymaekers