CEGU

This hands-on methods course trains students how to turn streams of satellite imagery into persuasive, narrative visualizations of urban, environmental, and planetary change. Using Google Earth Engine and other open-source tools, you will learn how to acquire, preprocess, analyze, and map earth-observation data, from spectral indices and machine-learning classification methods to time-series composites and cartographic design. Short lectures frame the technical labs within larger questions of power, representation, and justice, encouraging you to critique the assumptions that shape geospatial workflows even as you master them. Each year, the class grounds these skills in a fresh, high-stakes theme, ensuring that evolving geospatial methods confront the most pressing environmental and urban challenges. No prior coding or mapping experience is required; curiosity and a willingness to experiment are essential. The course fulfills the CEGU methods requirement and may also be eligible to meet methods requirements in other social sciences, sciences, and humanities majors.

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 discussion-based course surveys the major frameworks through which the environment has been understood, investigated, and transformed since the origins of global modernity. Because of its outsized impact (intellectually and materially) on the globe, North American environmentalism and understandings of nature are used as our point of departure. Starting with debates about what to name our current epoch, the course approaches shifting definitions of environmental knowledge through decreasing scales of analysis, from the global, to communities and ecosystems, to species and individuals, ending with the microscopic. The course asks questions such as: What historical and cultural trends shape our current understandings of nature and the environment? At what scales can and should we intervene to shift the ways we know and interact with the natural world? How and to whom should the answers to these complex questions be communicated? 

Recent concerns about infectious diseases and the environmental determinants of health have attracted renewed attention to previous accounts of disease, many of which have significantly shaped human political, social, economic, and environmental history. Former examples include: respiratory diseases and sexually transmitted infections among Indigenous communities during the age of European exploration and colonial settlement; nutritional deficiencies resulting from the forced relocation and labor of enslaved Africans throughout the Atlantic World; “filth” diseases and urban sanitary reform during the Bacteriological Revolution; zoonotic diseases and pest control campaigns during imperial expansion projects across the Caribbean; and cancers borne of industrial pollutants in the modern era. Through readings, in-class discussions, 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 physical environments. Finally, we will explore how social factors and human interventions have influenced the distribution of infectious diseases and environmental health risks.

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 is the second of a two-course sequence of weekly workshops designed to support student work on projects developed with partner organizations in Chicago. This second course begins with an assessment of work to date to determine the need for and scope of additional planning and research. Collaterally, students begin to develop a communication strategy for how their projects will be represented to partner organizations and their constituencies. Students engage in a collaborative process of community curation of their project work in focus group and other settings. Community and organization feedback returns students “back to the drawing board” to incorporate necessary changes. The course sequence concludes with students executing plans for final presentations of their work. Weekly workshops in the second course will maintain focus on project management skills so students achieve completion goals established with partners. The second course in the sequence focuses particularly on students gaining skills to identify and deploy necessary resources to complete projects and develop public presentation skills. Enrollment is by application only.

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.

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.

This course covers relevant portions of introductory microeconomics and economic issues associated with climate change and energy using the problems of climate change and energy to illustrate basic economic concepts. It also introduces students to tools for mitigating emissions, such as taxes, subsidies, regulation, and quantity controls. As with the climate science course, this course requirement could be satisfied with one or more advanced economics courses.

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.

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.

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.

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 II covers energy systems across the world from the early twentieth century to the present, examining themes such as the uneven globalization of energy-intensive lifestyles, the changing geopolitics of energy, and possible futures beyond fossil-fuel dependence.

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.

In this course, students will discover how climate animates colonial literature and in turn cultural attitudes toward the British and American empires. From Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) to Rita Indiana’s experimental novella Tentacle (2015), students will encounter poisonous islands, providential storms, and blistering heat among other environmental phenomena by-the-century. In each period, we will become attuned to how “climate”—weather, atmosphere, and ecology—expresses or negotiates structures of imperial power. Students in this class will develop fundamental skills for critical secondary analysis and become adept interpreters of climate aesthetics in Anglophonic media.

In this discussion-based, reading- and writing-intensive seminar, we will explore “consumption” and “commodities” from an anthropological perspective. Drawing from a range of works from anthropology and other disciplines, and thinking with material from many different cultural contexts, we will reflect critically on everyday practices of consumption and relationships with things that are so often taken for granted. We will investigate the enchanting aspects of commodities; how things can materialize claims about identity or status and produce and reproduce social relationships; shopping and fashion and their relationships to capitalism, gender, and colonialism; ethical, political, and ecological aspects of various kinds of consumption; and more. Previous coursework in anthropology, while beneficial, is not required to do well in this class.

Ecocide is defined as a crime against the environment, originating from legal debate in the context of the Vietnam War. Taking Vietnam as our starting point, this course engages with a wide range of materials (from novels to poetry to ethnographic studies) and different places (Ukraine, Vanuatu, Iraq, Palestine, and many others) in order to examine the broader context in which the campaign to criminalize environmental destruction emerged. We discuss what forms of environmental justice we can envision and pursue today, and debate possibilities and limitations of legal accountability. The readings are inter- and multidisciplinary, drawing from environmental humanities, anthropology, legal studies, history, and other fields. The assignments include a possibility to develop one’s own research topic, which could take the form of a traditional paper or a critical-creative project (video essay, poster, other creative forms).

Dams, sewers, container ships, water pipes, power lines, air conditioning, and garbage dumps: the critical infrastructures that enable modern life are so often invisible, except when they fail. This course explores the historical role of infrastructure as a set of planet-spanning systems of resource extraction and crucial conduits of social and political power. Looking at cases from apartheid South Africa and the Suez Canal to Mumbai and Chicago itself, we will consider the relationship of infrastructure with capitalism, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development. We will see how forms of citizenship and exclusion have been shaped and negotiated via wires, leaky pipes, and improvised repairs, and we will consider perhaps the biggest question of all: In this age of ecological crisis, do energy-guzzling infrastructural systems have a strange form of more-than-human agency all of their own?

How does value move through the world? With what concepts and practices do individuals and groups ascribe value to the things they make, to the people they care about, and to the lives they lead? Why do questions of politics and ethics (i.e., how to convene as a community and how to conduct ourselves as individuals) so frequently turn on disagreements over the having, holding, giving, and taking of value? This course addresses these questions by investigating value as a terrain of struggle. First, we use topical readings to build a repertoire for understanding value as a material, symbolic, and semiotic force. We then use this repertoire to analyze three contemporary texts on the role of value within political catastrophe, globalization, and human-environment relations. This course is interdisciplinary in approach and is structured around three multimodal assessments (value story, value game, and value project). It is open to advanced undergraduates by consent request.

This course examines the US-Mexico Borderlands from a time before political borders to the contemporary moment. As a vast geographical and conceptual space of cooperation and antagonism, the borderlands that include what is today the southwestern United States and northern Mexico comprise a crucial site to interrogate the formation and limits of colonial imposition, national identity, state power, racial segregation, environmental transformation, and capitalist expansion. In this course, we will map the history of the Mexico-US borderlands by drawing from testimony, fiction, images, cartography, music as well as scholarship that centers the experiences of those who have lived in and moved through this territory. This course is open to all.

This course is a socio-spatial analysis of Florence and its most important urban complexes, which incorporated the interactive experience of images, objects, buildings, and urban communities. As a result, it draws on, both implicitly and explicitly, on the material, methods, and approaches of other disciplinary territories such geography, anthropology, social and cultural history, art and architectural history, as well as urban studies and it encourages you to think broadly about what it means to analyze history through an analysis of site specific practices both in terms of their design and production but also their historical reception, use, and experience. The motivation for this course comes from the way in which both Florence and the Renaissance have largely been explored from the perspective of design and production, artists, planners and patrons. Therefore, this course attempts to look at the way the city’s inhabitants actually responded to some of the most important developments in early modern cultural production, and how actively they contributed to some of the most familiar environments of western Europe and continues to be the site of some of the most intense cultural tourism.

What do we mean by nature, and how do humans relate to it? A recent French translation of Virgil’s “Georgics” was titled anew: “Le souci de la terre” (“care for the earth”). What does it mean to care? Is care disinterested, or does it serve a purpose? What logics of dominion or obligation shape it?

This course traces ideas of nature and care from Antiquity to early modernity. How did humans conceive of their place in the world? How did they understand its resources and their impact? From the commons to enclosures, from caretaking to exploitation, from interpreting nature to organizing it (aménagement), we will question linear narratives of progress (humans caring more) and degradation (humans caring less). Focusing on France and French texts while engaging classical and theological sources, we will also consider exploration and exploitation beyond France. We will examine how religious ideas, canonical texts, and philosophical concepts have shaped discourses on nature, as well as the relevance of contemporary ecological terms. Attending closely to the multiple ways in which human beings variously have articulated their relationship to nature or the environment permits us to ask, instead of assume, what might be the conditions and practices of care incumbent upon human beings today.

The figure of “The Ecological Indian” has been critiqued on anti-colonial grounds as a racist inheritance of the conquest era and also affirmed and mobilized by Indigenous scholars and activists as capturing something true about pre- and post-colonial Indigenous forms of life. Despite these tensions, “indigeneity” and the idea that Indigenous peoples are uniquely attuned to nonhuman reality persist as givens in much environmental thought. In this class we will examine and evaluate this persistence, asking, Why are Western environmentalists so attracted to the idea of indigeneity and what do they mean by it? Where does the idea of “the Ecological Indian” come from? In what ways does this idea track reality and how might it obfuscate or distort distinctive Indigenous perspectives? How do different Indigenous people understand and take up this concept? In pursuit of these and related questions, our readings will span Renaissance utopias, theories of colonialism, studies of the religious roots of environmentalism, historical and contemporary environmental writing, and various Indigenous perspectives on empire, the environmental movement, and the other-than-human.

This course looks at urbanism and urbanization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a focus on selected cities in East, Southern, and West Africa. Beginning with existing trade routes and economic centers onto which some colonial cities were mapped, the course explores waves of migration over different historical periods, infrastructural imaginaries and the policies that shaped them, informal and formal economies, and cultural expressions and representations of life and living in the city. We will draw from a diversity of sources including fiction, non-fiction, architecture, town planning, photography, and the arts to examine political, social, economic, and topographical features and forces that drove the growth and development of each city studied, and also to reflect on commonalities that emerged between cities across different regions of the continent.

Global climate change, the increase in authoritarian government worldwide, the COVID pandemic aftermath, disruptions of global supply chains, inflation, and deepening sovereign debt have fallen with particular ferocity on the post-colonial Global South. The World Bank’s 2024 Poverty, Prosperity and Planet Report refers to a ‘polycrisis’ – multiple and interconnected crises occurring simultaneously – that has stalled or reversed the forces of globalization slowed human development, amplified the dilemmas of ‘fragile and conflicted states’ and unleashed powerful forces of dispossession condemning millions to lives of radical precarity. This course will focus on a set of problems associated with the contemporary political economy of basic resources – land, forests, food, energy, minerals, water, marine resources, shelter – and ‘provisioning systems’ from the particular vantage point of social justice and human rights, drawing upon case studies from Latin America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in particular. This course seeks to understand the sorts of conflicts and struggles over resources and extractive economies in postcolonial settings placed on a wider canvas of transnational capital flows, multi-lateral development institutions, neoliberal state policies, authoritarian populisms, NGOs and social movements. Connections will be made between resources politics in the Global South and the Global North.