CEGU

How has “nature” been understood and investigated in the modern world? Building upon diverse approaches to environmental history and philosophy, the history of science, and cultural studies, this course surveys the major frameworks through which the environment has been understood, investigated, and transformed since the origins of global modernity. Such issues are explored with reference to the mobilization of science, technology, and politics in several major areas of socio- environmental transformation in the modern world. Case studies might explore, among other issues, empire, race, and public health; cities and infectious disease since the Black Death; the ‘great enclosures’ of land associated with settler colonialism; the ‘Green Revolution’ in industrial agriculture; strategies of resource stewardship, land conservation, terraforming, hydrological engineering and watershed protection; the politics of global warming; and current debates on urban sustainability, carbon capture and geo-engineering. The course also considers the rise and evolution of environmentalist movements and conservation strategies, and the contested visions of nature they have embraced. The course concludes by investigating the competing paradigms of knowledge, science, and environment that underpin divergent contemporary programs of environmental governance and visions of ‘sustainability’.

How do great writers convey sense-of-place in their writing? What are the best ways to communicate scientific and social complexity in an engaging, accessible way? How can we combine academic rigor with journalistic verve and literary creativity to drive the public conversation about urgent environmental and urban issues? These are just some of the questions explored in WRITING THE CITY, an intensive course dedicated to honing our skills of verbal communication about issues related to the built and natural environments. Students will research, outline, draft, revise, and ultimately produce a well-crafted piece of journalistic writing for publication in the program's new annual magazine, Expositions. Throughout the quarter we will engage intensely with a range of authors of place-based writing exploring various literary and journalistic techniques, narrative devices, rhetorical ​approaches, and stylistic strategies.

Class and race are through lines in the determinative processes that transform urban space and inform conceptual models of urban growth and change. This lecture course examines historical geographies of class and race relations in crucial domains of urban life like employment, housing, public space and urgently during the contemporary era, climate change. The course emphasizes how Chicago-based models emerged as dominant frameworks purporting to make sense of urban morphology writ large, epitomized in publication of The City in 1925.

The Abrams Environmental Law Clinic attempts to solve some of the most pressing environmental and energy challenges throughout the Chicago area, the Great Lakes region, and the country. On behalf of a range of different clients, the clinic takes on entities which pollute illegally, fights for stricter permits, advocates for changes to regulations and laws, holds environmental and energy agencies accountable, and develops innovative approaches for improving the environment, public health, and the energy system.

Through clinic participation, students learn substantive environmental law and procedures for addressing concerns through the courts, administrative agencies, and legislative bodies. Students develop core advocacy competencies, such as spotting issues, conducting factual investigations, performing practical legal research, advocating through written and oral communications, planning cases, managing time, and addressing ethical issues and dilemmas. In addition, students develop an appreciation for the range of strategic and tactical approaches that effective advocates use. Enrollment is by application only. 

How environmental issues and challenges in the United States are addressed is subject to abrupt changes and reversals caused by extreme partisanship and the heightened significance of the issues for the health of the planet and all its inhabitants. The relatively brief history of this policy area, and the separate and distinct tracts in which public lands and pollution control issues are adjudicated, makes for a diverse and complex process by which humanity's impact on the natural world is managed and contained. This course focuses on how both types of environmental issues are addressed in each branch of the Federal government, the states and localities, as well as theories of how environmental issues arrived onto the public agenda and why attention to them is cyclical. Students are encouraged to understand the life cycle of public policy from its initial arrival on the public agenda to the passage of legislation to address adverse conditions, as well as how changes in the policy occur after the inevitable decline of intensive attention.

This course will investigate the foundational texts on environmental justice as well as case studies, both in and out of Chicago. Students will consider issues across a wide spectrum of concerns, including toxics, lead in water, waste management, and access to greenspaces, particularly in urban areas. These topics will be taught in accompaniment with a broader understanding of how social change occurs, what barriers exist to producing just outcomes, and what practices have worked to overcome obstacles in the past. The class will welcome speakers from a variety of backgrounds to address their work on these topics.

In the Fall 2024 Quarter, Students in Exhibiting the Environmental Humanities will have the opportunity to collaborate with the Sterling Morton Library at the Morton Arboretum to tell the story of May Theilgarrd Watts, an early environmental educator at the Arboretum, naturalist, author, and UChicago alumna.

Expositions Magazine is a quarterly publication on environmental change and the built environment—written, edited, designed, and produced by students. The goal of the publication is to communicate broadly and in an engaging, persuasive manner about important issues in the contemporary world. Since issues relating to the environment, geography, and urbanization almost invariably have spatial, visual, and expressive dimensions, the magazine showcases cartography, photography, illustration, and other modes alongside exceptional narrative and place-based writing. The primary goal of this practicum is to help students hone a broad range of analytic and representational tools associated with communicating complex issues to a general audience.

Weekly two-hour lab meetings provide collaborative work time for the three primary stages of publication—editing, design, and production—while bi-weekly one-hour seminar meetings introduce relevant technical skills, theoretical frameworks, and historical context. Through this diverse program, students will confront the wide range of questions and problems involved in publishing and design in the environmental social sciences and humanities. This course requires 3 quarters of enrollment for 100 credits.

This course is a grand tour of conceptual frameworks, general phenomena, emerging data and policy applications that define a growing scientific integrated understanding of cities and urbanization.

It starts with a general outlook of current worldwide explosive urbanization and associated changes in social, economic and environmental indicators. It then introduces a number of historical models, from sociology, economics and geography that have been proposed to understand how cities operate. We will discuss how these and other facets of cities can be integrated as dynamical complex systems and derive their general characteristics as social networks embedded in structured physical spaces. Resulting general properties of cities will be illustrated in different geographic and historical contexts, including an understanding of urban resource flows, emergent institutions and the division of labor and knowledge as drivers of innovation and economic growth.

The second part of the course will deal with issues of inequality, heterogeneity and (sustainable) growth in cities. We will explore how these features of cities present different realities and opportunities to different individuals and how these appear as spatially concentrated (dis)advantage that shape people’s life courses. We will show how issues of inequality also have consequences at more macroscopic levels and derive the general features of population and economic growth for systems of cities and nations.

Climate change is one of the greatest global health threats facing the world in the 21st century. Through this course, students will gain foundational knowledge in the health effects of climate change. We will begin with several lectures on climate science as it related to the patterns of weather extremes experienced by populations. We will then identify the varying health outcomes linked to different climate-related exposures, emphasizing the specific impacts in vulnerable and high-risk populations. Specific topics include the effects of air pollution, extreme heat and heat waves, droughts, tropical cyclones, changes in vector habitats, and sea-level rise. Finally, we will discuss strategies for public health practitioners to aid communities in preventing or alleviating these adverse effects.

This colloquium is designed to aid students in their thesis research. Students are exposed to different conceptual frameworks and research strategies. The class meets weekly.

This colloquium is designed to aid students in their thesis research. Students are exposed to different conceptual frameworks and research strategies. The class meets weekly.

This course emphasizes basic scientific understanding of ecological principles that relate most closely to the ways humans interact with their environments. It includes lectures on the main environmental pressures, notably human population growth, disease, pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, and harvesting. We emphasize the ongoing impacts on the natural world, particularly causes of population regulation and extinction and how they might feedback on to humans. Discussion required.

This interdisciplinary course explores aesthetics, environmental racism, and a human rights approach to the Commons to inform our perspective on the politics and aesthetics of water from the local to the global. The course will look at issues of scarcity and abundance through the lenses of art and human rights. The course will incorporate work by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who will visit the class. Students will consider works by other artists including Mel Chin, Allan Kaprow, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Fazal Sheikh, to understand how art can confront the 21st century’s environmental challenges. Readings will include Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. The course will include visits to site specific installations by artists Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Mel Chin, and visits to Chicago-area natural sites such as the Big Marsh and Lake Michigan. This course is an extension of a collaborative project at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry with human rights lawyer Susan Gzesh, artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and curator Abigail Winograd.

This course is a hands-on introduction to core principles and techniques associated with cartographic design, especially with regards to digital map design and the geographic visualization of data. Main topics include map generalization, symbology, scale, visual variables, scales of measurement, 2D and 3D design, map animation and interaction, and web mapping. Students will work with open-source GIS software and web tools, culminating in a final project and peer critique.

Ecological governance has emerged as an aspirational concept in recent years in political science, philosophy, and anthropology in response to concerns over the increasing likelihood of an unprecedented global ecological crisis as a result of human driven climate change. This course will trace the conceptual genealogy of ecological governance in Western and Eastern political theory and environmental history as it explores the political ecologies of Israel and the Middle East. In so doing, the course embarks from the assertion that environmental justice and the struggle for justice overall are inseparable challenges. Of central concern will be to understand how Israel’s politics, culture, and history technological development together with its particular environmental conditions provide conceptual and methodological interventions into current and historical articulations of ecological governance. Note: Enrollment in this class is by consent only. Please request via the enrollment site. 

In this co-taught course between the departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy those senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism–hearing, taste, touch, and smell–to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding the bulk of our classes out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city’s foundations in phenomena such as the filling in of swamp; the river as pipeline; and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure–all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in history and theory of the Anthropocene together with examples of how artists and activists have made the Anthropocene visible, tangible, and audible, providing forums for playful documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene into a final experimental book project. Admission is by consent only: please write a short paragraph briefly sketching your academic background and naming your interest in the course. Send this submission to: jscape@uchicago.edu, amberginsburg@gmail.com.

This course is a hands-on introduction to core principles and techniques associated with cartographic design, especially with regards to digital map design and the geographic visualization of data. Main topics include map generalization, symbology, scale, visual variables, scales of measurement, 2D and 3D design, map animation and interaction, and web mapping. Students will work with open-source GIS software and web tools, culminating in a final project and peer critique.

How has “nature” been understood and investigated in the modern world? Building upon diverse approaches to environmental history and philosophy, the history of science, and cultural studies, this course surveys the major frameworks through which the environment has been understood, investigated, and transformed since the origins of global modernity. Such issues are explored with reference to the mobilization of science, technology, and politics in several major areas of socio- environmental transformation in the modern world. Case studies might explore, among other issues, empire, race, and public health; cities and infectious disease since the Black Death; the ‘great enclosures’ of land associated with settler colonialism; the ‘Green Revolution’ in industrial agriculture; strategies of resource stewardship, land conservation, terraforming, hydrological engineering and watershed protection; the politics of global warming; and current debates on urban sustainability, carbon capture and geo-engineering. The course also considers the rise and evolution of environmentalist movements and conservation strategies, and the contested visions of nature they have embraced. The course concludes by investigating the competing paradigms of knowledge, science, and environment that underpin divergent contemporary programs of environmental governance and visions of ‘sustainability’.

This course introduces critical theories and techniques for visualizing interconnected transformations of urban, environmental, and planetary systems amidst the pressures of climate change, urbanization, and global economies of capitalism. Weekly lectures will introduce major themes and theoretical debates, paired with hands-on lab tutorials exploring a selection of methods in conventional and experimental geographic visualization. Thematically, the course will be organized around critical interpretations of the Anthropocene, a concept designating the epoch in which anthropogenic activities are recognized as the dominant force of planetary climatic and ecological change. We will present these interpretations through modules structured around different conceptual paradigms and alternative epochal designations (e.g. the Urbanocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene). Through weekly lab exercises and a final, synthetic project, the course will move from critically analyzing prevalent theoretical frameworks, geospatial data, and associated visualization techniques to creatively visualizing critical alternatives. Students will learn how to construct visual narratives through a variety of spatial media (e.g. maps, diagrams, visual timelines), scales (e.g. bodies, neighborhoods, landscapes, the planetary), and techniques/platforms (e.g. GIS, web mapping, basic programming language tools, and vector/raster visualization programs).

Often considered a “City of Neighborhoods,” Chicago has a fascinating network of community areas that were shaped by historical events and developments. Many of the city’s neighborhoods include parks that have their own significant architectural, landscape and social histories. The class will introduce students to some of Chicago’s most interesting historic neighborhoods and parks; expose them to key regional digital and on-site archives; and instruct them in appropriate methodologies for conducting deep research on sites and landscapes, with a special focus on Chicago’s historic park system. Students will utilize an array of resources including Sanborn maps, US Census records, historic plans, photographs, and archival newspapers to provide in-depth studies of unpreserved sites. The course will also expose students to historic preservation policies, methodologies, and guidelines to provide practical strategies for preserving lesser-known places and sites. As a Chicago Studies class, its pedagogy will also include excursions into the city, engagement with local guest speakers, and research in relevant Chicago-area archives/special collections.

This course explores how organizations-civic, private, governmental-working in the field of environmental advocacy construct, deploy and are shaped by distinct discourses governing relationships between nature and society. The environment is a field of social action in which organizations attempt to effect change in large domains like resource conservation, access, stewardship, and a basic right to environmental quality in everyday life. The work of effecting change in these complex domains can assume a variety of forms including public policy (through the agencies of the state), private enterprise (through the agency of the market), 'third sector' advocacy (through the agency of nonprofit organizations) and social activism (through the agency of social movements and community organizations). State, market, civil society and social movement organizations are where ideas are transmitted from theory to practice and back again in a recursive, dialectical process. These contrasting forms of organization have different histories, wellsprings and degrees of social power. Moreover, they bring different epistemologies to their claims about being legitimate custodians of nature-that is to say they can be understood genealogically. As such, organizations working to effect environment change are at once animated by and constitutive of distinct discourses governing the relationships between nature and society. The course explores how those distinct discourses are associated with a suite of different organizational realms of social action; the goal is trying to connect the dots between discursive formations and organizational forms.

This course will use the Chicago region as the setting to evaluate the social, environmental, and economic effects of alternative forms of human settlement. Students will examine the history, theory and practice of designing cities in sustainable ways - i.e., human settlements that are socially just, economically viable, and environmentally sound. Students will explore the literature on sustainable urban design from a variety of perspectives, and then focus on how sustainability theories play out in the Chicago region. How can Chicago's neighborhoods be designed to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals? This course is part of the College Course Cluster program: Urban Design.

In this quarter, students will learn and practice methods to conduct a research project with a local environmental organization. Building on knowledge gained in the first half of this course, students will examine what makes a condition an environmental justice issue, how to conduct a literature review, how to develop and administer a questionnaire for key informant interviews, and how to access, understand, and utilize Census data. Students should expect to work in the community as well as the classroom, and in close collaboration with classmates. The class will conduct "deep-dive" research into the community selected, and will learn not only about the area, but techniques for how to do community-based research in a manner that acknowledges and appreciates the lived wisdom of the neighborhood's residents. The result will be a research report delivered to the community organization with students in the class listed as co-authors.

This lecture course provides a broad, multidisciplinary introduction to the study of urbanization in the social sciences. The course surveys a broad range of research traditions from across the social sciences, as well as the work of urban planners, architects, and environmental scientists. Topics include: theoretical conceptualizations of the city and urbanization; methods of urban studies; the politics of urban knowledges; the historical geographies of capitalist urbanization; political strategies to shape and reshape the built and unbuilt environment; cities and planetary ecological transformation; post-1970s patterns and pathways of urban restructuring; and struggles for the right to the city.

Expositions Magazine is a quarterly publication on environmental change and the built environment—written, edited, designed, and produced by students. The goal of the publication is to communicate broadly and in an engaging, persuasive manner about important issues in the contemporary world. Since issues relating to the environment, geography, and urbanization almost invariably have spatial, visual, and expressive dimensions, the magazine showcases cartography, photography, illustration, and other modes alongside exceptional narrative and place-based writing. The primary goal of this practicum is to help students hone a broad range of analytic and representational tools associated with communicating complex issues to a general audience.

Weekly two-hour lab meetings provide collaborative work time for the three primary stages of publication—editing, design, and production—while bi-weekly one-hour seminar meetings introduce relevant technical skills, theoretical frameworks, and historical context. Through this diverse program, students will confront the wide range of questions and problems involved in publishing and design in the environmental social sciences and humanities. This course requires 3 quarters of enrollment for 100 credits.

This colloquium is designed to aid students in their thesis research. Students are exposed to different conceptual frameworks and research strategies. The class meets weekly.

This colloquium is designed to aid students in their thesis research. Students are exposed to different conceptual frameworks and research strategies. The class meets weekly.

This is a two-course sequence that introduces students to theory and method in landscape studies and the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to analyze archaeological, anthropological, historical, and environmental data. Course one covers the theoretical and methodological background necessary to understand spatial approaches to landscape and the fundamentals of using ESRI’s ArcGIS software, and further guides students in developing a research proposal. Course two covers more advanced GIS-based analysis (using vector, raster, and satellite remote sensing data) and guides students in carrying out their own spatial research project. In both courses, techniques are introduced through the discussion of case studies (focused on the archaeology of the Middle East) and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory times, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample archaeological data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.

Over the past three decades Germany has become a global leader in environmentalism and sustainability practices. This course develops students’ proficiency in all four skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing) and reviews basic grammar while exploring various aspects of “Green Germany,” from recycling and transportation to renewable energies (die Energiewende) to the history of the green movement. We investigate environmental practices and attitudes in German-speaking countries while comparing them with those in the US and other countries. In doing so, we consider whether environmental practices in German-speaking countries represent positive and feasible models for other countries. Students work with authentic and current materials (articles, websites, videos) and pursue a variety of independent projects (research, creative), including a final project on how to make the university campus more sustainable.

Over the past three decades Germany has become a global leader in environmentalism and sustainability practices. This course develops students’ proficiency in all four skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing) and reviews basic grammar while exploring various aspects of “Green Germany,” from recycling and transportation to renewable energies (die Energiewende) to the history of the green movement. We investigate environmental practices and attitudes in German-speaking countries while comparing them with those in the US and other countries. In doing so, we consider whether environmental practices in German-speaking countries represent positive and feasible models for other countries. Students work with authentic and current materials (articles, websites, videos) and pursue a variety of independent projects (research, creative), including a final project on how to make the university campus more sustainable.

Recent concerns about monkeypox, COVID-19, Zika virus, and Ebola have attracted renewed attention to previous disease outbreaks that have significantly shaped human political, social, economic, and environmental history. Such diseases include: smallpox during the 16th-century Columbian exchange; syphilis during the 18th-century exploration and settlement of the Pacific; bubonic plague in the late-19th-century colonization and urbanization of South and East Asia; and yellow fever during America’s 20th-century imperial projects across the Caribbean. Through readings, discussions, library visits, and written assignments that culminate in a final project, students in this course will explore how natural and human-induced environmental changes have altered our past experiences with disease and future prospects for health. First, we will examine how early writers understood the relationship between geography, environment, hereditary constitution, race, gender, and human health. We will then analyze the symbiotic relationship among pathogens, human hosts, and their environments. Finally, we will explore how social factors (e.g. migration, gendered divisions of labor, poverty, and segregation) and human interventions (e.g. epidemiology, medical technology, and sanitary engineering) have influenced the distribution of infectious diseases and environmental risks.

In this seminar, we will read short stories, ethnography, philosophy, and cultural/art criticism that obsesses over one ecological thing e.g., petroleum, axolotl, pecans, palm trees, or fungi. We will study how a seemingly simple living or non-living object can be a guide, source, muse, and catalyst for social, political, and cultural knowledge. How do thinkers mix scholarly critique with creative/generative practices like autobiography, ancestral storytelling, and speculative fiction to express the politics of the earth? In a final research paper intersecting literary art, activism, and critique, students will reflect on this question to frame their own ecological obsessions. The course literature will focus on themes like deep time, extractivism, futurity, the nature-culture divide, and the relationships between human and nonhuman life. We will close-read representative modern and contemporary works of ecological obsessions from Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

Imaginaries of the “wild” have long been employed as part of colonial projects, from the conquest of lands of the Great Eurasian Steppe to modern conservation initiatives. In this course, we examine ideas about the “wild” with a focus on the easts of “Europe” and easts of Russia, whether Ukraine, Qazaqstan, or Bulgaria, and ways in which these lands have been constructed as “wild” territories. We discuss ecologies and cultures of the steppe, nuclear and (post)industrial wastelands, and contemporary practices of re-wilding to study the violence of being framed as “wild”, as well subversive and liberatory potentials of (re)claiming all things “wild”. The course takes on an interdisciplinary approach, examining works of fiction alongside history books, and films alongside memoirs; additionally, a possibility of a field trip to Site A/Plot M Disposal Site, where the world’s first nuclear reactor is buried, is to be confirmed.

How are we to understand the ancient Greek world and how it was shaped and inhabited? How can the study of the past inform our perception of the present world around us? This course introduces students to the built environment of the ancient Greek world through the study of the architecture, monuments, and urban forms developed in the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. Rather than solely focusing on examples from the ancient Aegean, this course will take a geographically broad perspective that spans from Sicily to Afghanistan to highlight the diversity of styles and cultural influences incorporated into Greek architecture and urban development. This topic will be approached thematically, ranging from the architecture of sanctuaries to monuments in public spaces to modern receptions of ancient Greek architecture.

The environmental humanities – that is, the study of nature through humanistic disciplines such as literature and history – has long been dominated by texts and theories from privileged sections of Europe and North America. However, alternative understandings of our natural world, including the role of living beings within it, have always existed. In this course, we will explore how contemporary francophone literature can renew, expand and complicate our perceptions of the oceans, deserts, mangroves and forests that surround us. Particular attention will be paid to questions of race, gender, language and indigeneity; course material may include theoretical texts, fiction, poetry, songs, podcasts, film, graphic novels and social media material.

From colonial travelers to contemporary popular culture, the Amazonian forest has been a source of endless fascination, greed and, more recently, ecological concern. The numerous actors that have been shaping the region, including artists, writers, scientists, anthropologists, indigenous peoples, and the extractive industry, among others, bring a multifaceted view of this region that has been described as the paradise on earth as much as a green hell. This course offers an overview of Amazonian history, cultures, and environmental issues that spans from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. What are the major topics, works, and polemics surrounding the ways the Amazon has been depicted and imagined? How can the region’s history help us understand the state of environmental policies and indigenous rights today? What can we learn about the Amazon from literature and film? What is the future of the Amazon in the context of Brazil’s current political climate? From an interdisciplinary perspective, we will cover topics such as indigenous cultures and epistemologies, deforestation, travel writing, modern and contemporary literature, music, photography, and film, among others. Authors may include Claudia Andujar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Euclides da Cunha, Susanna Hecht, Davi Kopenawa, the project Video in the Villages, among others.

This course will examine the development of environmental justice theory and practice through social scientific and ethical literature about the subject as well as primary source accounts of environmental injustices. We will focus on environmental justice issues in Chicago including, but not limited to waste disposal, toxic air and water, the Chicago heat wave, and climate change. Particular attention will be paid to environmental racism and the often understudied role of religion in environmental justice theory and practice. Throughout the course we will explore how normative commitments are expressed in different types of literature as well as the basis for normative judgments and the types of authorities authors utilize and claim as they consider environmental justice.

Optimizing the location of facilities and services – agricultural, industrial, retail, and knowledge-based – has long been a focus for geographers, regional scientists, and urban planners. This course covers several foundational location problems in economic geography and urban planning, such as: covering problems, center problems, median problems, and fix charge facility location problems. This course incorporates several GIS exercises to teach students the basic principles of spatial optimization and to help illuminate the foundational theoretical principles of location modeling.

Mars seems to be on everyone’s mind. Is there life there? Will humans ever set foot on the surface? Should we try to establish a settlement? How did we become obsessed with the Red Planet in the first place? This course will prepare you to communicate effectively about space science and join conversations about Mars happening across society. Through readings, activities, and discussions focused on history, science, and culture we will build an understanding of important figures, events, ideas, and trends required to communicate about Mars. A major focus will be learning how Mars has factored into different social and cultural movements here on Earth, including theological debates, military conquest, scientific exploration, and commercial settlement. We combine this foundation with theories and practices from science communication, including how to engage non-expert audiences, explain complex terms and concepts, convey uncertainty and ambiguity, and counter misinformation and conspiracy theories. The course moves from the earliest visual observations of Mars to present-day robotic missions on the planet’s surface, and also considers plans for future human exploration and habitation. Students can expect a deepened understanding of our important cosmic neighbor and how to think, write, and speak about it. No prior knowledge of Mars is required.

This colloquium explores selected aspects of the social, economic, environmental, and cultural history of tropical export commodities from Latin America– e.g., coffee, bananas, sugar, tobacco, henequen, rubber, vanilla, and cocaine. Topics include land, labor, capital, markets, transport, geopolitics, power, taste, and consumption.

This class will provide an introduction to quantitative analysis in public policy. Much of the class is devoted to learning about the effects of policies and answering empirical, policy-relevant questions from observational data. In doing so, the course provides an introduction to critical and quantitative thinking in general. Students will be introduced to the basic toolkit of policy analysis, which includes sampling, hypothesis testing, Bayesian inference, regression, experiments, instrumental variables, differences in differences, and regression discontinuity. Students will also learn how to use a statistical software program to organize and analyze data. More importantly, students will learn the principles of critical thinking essential for careful and credible policy analysis.

Latin America is one of the world’s most urbanized regions and its urban heritage long predates European conquest. Yet the region’s urban experience has generally been understood through North Atlantic models, which often treat Latin American cities as disjunctive, distorted knockoffs of idealized US or European cities. This class interrogates and expands those North Atlantic visions by emphasizing the history of vital urban issues such as informality, inequality, intimacy, race, gender, violence, plural regulatory regimes, the urban environment, and rights to the city. Interdisciplinary course materials include anthropology, sociology, history, fiction, film, photography, and journalism produced from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

This two-quarter course explores the historical roots of climate change and other global environmental problems with a special attention to how energy use shapes human societies over time. Part I covers energy systems across the world from prehistory to the end of the nineteenth century.

This two-quarter course explores the historical roots of climate change and other global environmental problems with a special attention to how energy use shapes human societies over time. Part I covers energy systems across the world from prehistory to the end of the nineteenth century.

This course investigates the theory and practice of computational approaches in Geographic Information Science. Geocomputation is introduced as a multidisciplinary systems paradigm necessary for solving complex spatial problems and facilitating new understandings. Students will learn about the elements of geographic data models, geospatial topologies, spatial operations, visualizations, and their implementation in Python using libraries such as GeoPandas and Shapely.

This course provides an overview of methods of spatial analysis and their implementation in geographic information systems. These methods deal with the retrieval, storage, manipulation and transformation of spatial data to create new knowledge. Examples are spatial join operations, spatial overlay, buffering, measuring accessibility, network analysis and raster operations. The fundamental principles behind the methods are covered as well as their application to real-life problems using open source software such as QGIS.

The Abrams Environmental Law Clinic attempts to solve some of the most pressing environmental and energy challenges throughout the Chicago area, the Great Lakes region, and the country. On behalf of a range of different clients, the clinic takes on entities which pollute illegally, fights for stricter permits, advocates for changes to regulations and laws, holds environmental and energy agencies accountable, and develops innovative approaches for improving the environment, public health, and the energy system. Through clinic participation, students learn substantive environmental law and procedures for addressing concerns through the courts, administrative agencies, and legislative bodies. Students develop core advocacy competencies, such as spotting issues, conducting factual investigations, performing practical legal research, advocating through written and oral communications, planning cases, managing time, and addressing ethical issues and dilemmas. In addition, students develop an appreciation for the range of strategic and tactical approaches that effective advocates use.

Independent study with an individual faculty member.

In this architecture studio course, you will learn and practice a range of architectural skills, using as a starting point the library as an institution, and in particular the range of libraries in and around Chicago. You will look at, sketch, and work within libraries across the campus and city, and think about the role the library plays in our time. Studio projects will focus on the library as a locus for learning, a public space, an organizational system, a set of social services, and an architectural opportunity. After a series of short design exercises, you will work in groups to design a proposal for a new library for Chicago, on a real site that you choose. The bulk of your time will be spent on these studio projects, but there will also be reading and conversation. Materials for drawing and making will be provided. While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 18, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

This course will examine the life of buildings– how they perform, evolve, and adapt over time. How do particular design decisions influence human experience and behavior? Which parts of the building align with its intended use and what are surprising outcomes or changes? These questions aim to provide students with a deeper understanding of the built environment and the series of decisions that shaped them. Through readings, surveys, site visits, and conversations with architects and building users, we will measure and examine the spaces around us. Students will begin with a series of short analysis and design exercises and create short films, projective collages and diagrams, and architectural concept models. Building on our collective observations, research, and analysis, we will then finish with a final project where we respond to an existing building and propose an alternate life path. The format of the course is part-seminar, part-studio that aims to equip students with practical tools and strategies needed to shape our world and account for the long-term impact of design. While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 18, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.

Politics determines not only what particular faction holds power, but the parameters upon which contests for power are conducted. Competing political factions may diverge in the details of the policies they favor, but may agree on a central organizing principle upon which their policy differences are contested. This course acknowledges that such principles exist and structure politics, economics, and social arrangements, but also challenges the notion that these are immutable, and argues that other principles could be substituted which would drastically change these arrangements. The course introduces students to alternative theories of economics, politics, and environmental policy that challenge mainstream notions of what is acceptable under the current structural and institutional constraints, including how the retreat to notions of realism and practicality place limits on changes necessary to preserve and protect the natural environment.

Expositions Magazine is a quarterly publication on environmental change and the built environment—written, edited, designed, and produced by students. The goal of the publication is to communicate broadly and in an engaging, persuasive manner about important issues in the contemporary world. Since issues relating to the environment, geography, and urbanization almost invariably have spatial, visual, and expressive dimensions, the magazine showcases cartography, photography, illustration, and other modes alongside exceptional narrative and place-based writing. The primary goal of this practicum is to help students hone a broad range of analytic and representational tools associated with communicating complex issues to a general audience.

Weekly two-hour lab meetings provide collaborative work time for the three primary stages of publication—editing, design, and production—while bi-weekly one-hour seminar meetings introduce relevant technical skills, theoretical frameworks, and historical context. Through this diverse program, students will confront the wide range of questions and problems involved in publishing and design in the environmental social sciences and humanities. This course requires 3 quarters of enrollment for 100 credits.

Environmental issues have become a prominent part of the work of international organizations and their member nations. However, the resolution to issues and concerns shared in common by the nations of the world often faces obstacles based on access to wealth and resources, political and military power, and the demands of international economic institutions. While multinational agreements have been achieved and successfully implemented, resolutions to issues such as climate change have been harder to achieve. The course will look at the origins of international cooperation on environmental issues, several case studies of issues upon which the international community has attempted to bring about cooperative solutions (climate change, the ozone hole, climate refugees, etc.), and the work that regional associations of nations have done to jointly address shared environmental challenges. In addition, speakers from various consulates have addressed the class to discuss environmental policymaking in their countries.

This course traces the economic, social, and physical development of the city in North America from pre-European times to the mid-twentieth century. We emphasize evolving regional urban systems, the changing spatial organization of people and land use in urban areas, and the developing distinctiveness of American urban landscapes. All-day Illinois field trip required. This course is part of the College Course Cluster, Urban Design.

How do the movies shape our collective imagination about cities? Why do we so often turn to them for visions of disaster and dystopia, on the one hand, or a futuristic utopia on the other? How has film responded to cities in the past, and how can it help investigate our present urban condition? How can film be understood as a tool for exploring what a city is? In this seminar, we will watch and discuss feature films in which the built environment or urban issues play important roles. Students will improve their film literacy — learning not just what a film does but how it does it — and understand applications for film in the analysis of social, spatial, temporal, and immersive phenomena, as well as how it can help inspire and communicate design more effectively.

Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the present could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes and more).

Huge sections of the Earth’s crust resonate across hundreds of miles: seismology, infrasound. Fish larvae differentiate tiny vibrations in ocean water produced by diverse coral ecosystems: hydroacoustics, ultrasound. Humans gather in large numbers to watch each other carefully manipulate air pressure: music, architecture, psychoacoustics. Each of these phenomena can be understood to fit within the field of sound studies, and each among many further examples has an effect upon each other, contributing to a delicately interlinked planetary system of pressure, vibration, and resonance within air, water, land, and body. This system is now in crisis. From the most densely populated cities to the remotest nature preserves and industrial hinterlands, the extraction, processing, transportation, and consumption of natural resources by humans interferes with delicate systems of sounding and listening essential to almost all forms of life on Earth. How can sound studies and audio technology help us navigate this moment? 

This course takes students of environment, geography, and urbanization through a survey of sound studies and audio technology, from physics, electronics, hearing, and psychoacoustics to the aesthetics, politics, and poetics of musical and non-musical sound production. Foci include acoustic ecology, deep listening, field recording, and sound mapping; infrasonics and ultrasonics; human and non-human listening; seismographic, atmospheric, and underwater acoustics; urban noise, acoustic construction, and human health; sound and historical time; music and naturalism; data sonification; and the auditory aesthetics of combustion and electricity. Students will also learn the basics of acoustic recording, audio processing, and data sonification through hands-on workshops and collaborative projects.

The Abrams Environmental Law Clinic attempts to solve some of the most pressing environmental and energy challenges throughout the Chicago area, the Great Lakes region, and the country. On behalf of a range of different clients, the clinic takes on entities which pollute illegally, fights for stricter permits, advocates for changes to regulations and laws, holds environmental and energy agencies accountable, and develops innovative approaches for improving the environment, public health, and the energy system. Through clinic participation, students learn substantive environmental law and procedures for addressing concerns through the courts, administrative agencies, and legislative bodies. Students develop core advocacy competencies, such as spotting issues, conducting factual investigations, performing practical legal research, advocating through written and oral communications, planning cases, managing time, and addressing ethical issues and dilemmas. In addition, students develop an appreciation for the range of strategic and tactical approaches that effective advocates use.

Independent study with an individual faculty member.

Food cultivation within the city—urban agriculture—is a vast and fascinating terrain of social practice associated with diverse historical geographies. The course examines urban agriculture as a global phenomenon with an intensely local presence by incorporating experiential education with Chicago-based projects that are exemplars in the contemporary urban food movement.