Anthropology

ANTHRO 7: Introductory Biosocial Anthropology

An introduction to our evolved, universal human nature, the evolution of the human mind, and how they shape behavior, social life, and culture. Topics include friendship, mate choice, incest avoidance, cooperation, revenge, status, jealousy, emotions, group formation, and intergroup aggression.

ANTHRO 103, Human-Wildlife Interactions

Survey of human-wildlife interactions (e.g., bushmeat, pet trade, crop-raiding). Students examine cascading effects on wildlife, landscapes, and human populations, as well as mitigating approaches relating to our changing perceptions of wildlife and nature.

ANTHRO 104H, People, Poverty, and Environment in Central America 

Analysis of the interrelated social, demographic, economic, political, and environmental crises occurring in Central America from an anthropological perspective. Emphasis on the evolution of contemporary problems, current conditions and future prospects for the region.

ANTHRO 110, Technology and Culture

Theories of technological evolution and innovation. Meanings of technology. The social and cultural impact of technology on our everyday lives, including automobile culture, industrial farming, the telephone, and technologies of the body.

ANTHORO 111: Anthropology of Food 

Critical survey of different anthropological approaches of food production and consumption: biological implications of diet; relations between agricultural forms and political systems; the meanings of feasting; cooking, class and gender; food and national identity.

ANTHRO 115, Language, Culture, and Place

Focuses on the dialectical interplay between humans and the environment and how people use language to classify, make sense of, and attribute moral and symbolic meaning to places and landscapes.

ANTHRO 117, Borders and Borderlands 

The theoretical concept of “borderlands” examined through a discussion of the societies, economics and cultures that form on geopolitical borders. The Mexico-U.S. border will be discussed in detail

ANTHRO 122, Anthropology of World Systems

Focuses on the penetration and impact of global capitalist economy (national and multinational) upon local level third world societies, communities, and groups. A world system perspective is taken and anthropological case studies are presented from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

ANTHRO 127, Hunters and Gatherers

What do Pygmies, Aborigines, and Eskimos have in common? What is the relationship between nature and culture in these simple societies? These questions and others will be examined through case studies and cross-cultural comparisons.

ANTHRO 129MG, Behavioral Ecology of Hunter-Gatherers

A thorough introduction using a behavioral ecology approach to the diversity of behaviors found among foragers in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Topics include: diet and subsistence, mating, demography, social behavior, mobility and settlement patterns, gender, indigenous rights, and conservation.

ANTHRO 130A, Coupled Human and Natural Systems: Risks, Vulnerability, Resilience, and Disasters 

Examines human dimensions of global environmental change in developing countries from an interdisciplinary and social science perspective. Compares and contrasts alternative conceptual and analytical models of dynamic, interrelated human-environmental systems and presents recent approaches to understanding risk, vulnerability, resilience, and disasters.

ANTHRO 130B, Global Tourism and Environmental Conservation 

Focus on the contradictions between international tourism as an economic development strategy and environmental conservation efforts, especially in an era of climate change. One major objective is to help students make more informed decisions about their own tourist experiences.

ANTHRO 130C, Global Food Systems and Human Food Security 

Examines history of global food systems and its impacts on ecosystems, ecologies, and human nutrition and food security. How agricultural, capture fisheries, and aquacultural industries were integrated into the global food system. Provides information to make more informed decisions about consuming these products.

ANTHRO 131CA: California Indians

Investigation of the diversity of California Indian societies at the beginning of European colonization, including social organization, economy, material culture, and ideology. Also considered are origins and historic changes. Emphasis is placed on central and southern California.

ANTHRO 147, Water and Society 

Covers the longstanding debate over the relation between irrigation and state formation, as well as current developments in the study of water and society. Emphasis is placed on people living in arid and semi-arid environments.

ANTHRO 148, Ecological Anthropology 

Focuses on the complex and dynamic interactions between human beings and their physical environment. Examines ecological thinking in anthropology and the various theoretical approaches within the discipline that have developed from the coalescence of natural and social sciences.

ANTHRO 149, World Agriculture, Food, and Population 

Evolution, current status, and alternative futures of agriculture, food, and population worldwide. Achieving environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable food systems; soil, water, crops, energy, and labor; diversity, stability, and ecosystems management; farmer and scientist knowledge and collaboration; common property management.

ANTHRO 152, Environmental Anthropology 

Examines human behaviors and perceptions of the environment across time and in different settings.

ANTHRO 160, Cultural Ecology 

Ranging from moose hunters to rice farmers, cultures seem tremendously diverse, yet cultural forms do show clear patterns. The relationship of these patterns to the natural and social environment will be examined.

ANTHRO 161: Evolutionary Medicine

Applies evolutionary principles to understanding human health and disease past and present. Topics include host/parasite co- evolution, aging and senescence, influence of human migration and culture on disease patterns, and evolutionary origins of “diseases of civilization.”

ANTHRO 166, Climate Change in Prehistory

Survey of the impact of short- and long-term climate change on human prehistory from the later Ice Age to the Medieval Warm Period (c. A.D. 1000). Course surveys the relationships between climate and changing human societies.

ANTHRO 166BT, Biotechnology, Food, and Agriculture

Social, cultural, ethical, biological, and environmental issues surrounding biotechnology (BT) and the food system. Includes theory and method of BT; scientific, social and political control of BT; effect of BT on genetic diversity, small-scale farmers, the environment, food supply, consumer health.

ANTHRO 166FP, Small-Scale Food Production

Biological, ecological, social, and economic principles of small-scale food production and their practical applications. Includes each student cultivating a garden plot; lab exercises, field trips to local farms and gardens.

ANTHRO 168, Ethnology in Rural California: Transformation in Agriculture, Farm Labor, and Rural Communities

Provides a systematic review of research by anthropologists and other social scientists on the development of agriculture and its effects on rural society. Special emphasis is given to the settlement of immigrant farm workers and the formation of new communities.

ANTHRO 176B: The American West

The American West as a frontier and as a region, in transit from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, and from the seventeenth century to the present.

ANTHRO 180A: Osteology

Designed to teach students in archaeology and physical anthropology the basic skills necessary to identify and analyze the remains of animals recovered from archaeological excavations. Emphasis is placed on laboratory work with actual archaeological collections and testing hypotheses about prehistoric human behavior.

ANTHRO 184, Settlement Pattern Analysis in Archaeology 

How the arrangement of archaeological sites across the landscape indicates aspects of human culture, including subsistence strategies and socio-political complexity. Methods of obtaining and interpreting settlement data.

ANTHRO 185, Human Environmental Rights

Introduction to human environmental rights. Examines the expansion of human rights to include human environmental rights, abuses of human environmental rights, associated social conflicts, and emergent social movements including environmental justice and transnational advocacy networks.

Art

ART 7C, Intro to Contemporary Practice II: Spatial Studies 

The study of spatial art in all forms, including material, interactive and dynamic digital. Studio assignments are combined with related critical theory, historical practice, current strategies and new evolutions.

ART 106, Advanced Spatial Practices

Advanced study of new forms and spatial practices. Individual projects may encompass formal sculptural practices as well as investigations that engage new and alternative technologies such as data-driven forms, alternative architectures, interactive media, cyber/nano/neuro/bio forms and virtual environments. Course content detailed in syllabus each quarter.

ART 106W: Introduction to 2D/3D Visualizations in Architechture

Develops skills in reading, interpreting, and visualizing 3D objects and spaces by offering exercises in sketching, perspective, orthographic projections, isometric drawings, and manual rendering practices. Relevant for those interested in history of architecture, sculpture, and such spatial practices as installations and public art.

ART 120EL: Environmnt/Lndscape

Individual photographic projects organized and conceptualized by students. Proposal for research and development of design and production of body of work with a focus on the environment and landscape.

Art and Architecture History

ARTHI 5A, Introduction to Architecture and Environment 

Architecture is an act of place-making with which man has intertwined ever closer his world with the natural one. The course discusses basic architectural construction methods, discipline-specific terminology, design strategies, and interpretative concepts. Students must keep a visual, architectural journal.

ARTHI 6F Survey: Architecture and Planning

A selective and chronological survey of architecture and urban design in social and historical context. Individual buildings and urban plans from the past to the present will be used as examples.

ARTHI 6J: Survey: Contemporary Architecture

Global survey of architectural production in the twenty-first century. Emphasis on form and technology, as well as economic, sociopolitical context. Explores built form at a variety of scales (buildings, cities, virtual spaces), as well as the concept of a “contemporary.”

ARTHI 117C, Nineteenth-Century British Art and Culture

An interdisciplinary study of British art and culture in the nineteenth century. Topics may include: Romantic landscape painting and poetry; art and the Industrial Revolution; London and Victorian images of the city; images of childhood; Romanticism in Britain; and more.

ARTHI 121A, American Art from Revolution to Civil War: 1700-1860 

Painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts in the original 13 colonies, through the formation of the United States, to the crisis of the Civil War. Particular attention paid to environmental and social issues.

ARTHI 121B, Reconstruction, Renaissance, and Realism in American Art, 1860-1900

Painting and human-made environments from the onset of the Civil War to just before World War II, tracing the role of art in the rise of modern, corporate America.

ARTHI 132A, Mediterranean Cities 

An exploration of the most important Medieval cities of the Mediterranean world, their urban forms, layout, architecture, and physical patterns. Venice, Cairo, and Baghdad will be among the cities discussed.

ARTHI 132J: Modern Arab Art

Explores modern and contemporary art, artists and art movements of the Arab world from nineteenth century to the present.

ARTHI 134E, The Art of the Chinese Landscape 

Chinese approaches to landscape as subject matter in art, with a focus on painting and garden architecture. The course begins with the immortality cult in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.221) and ends with contemporary artists of the twentieth century.

ARTHI 134K: Chinese Calligraphy

Examines the different scripts in historical context, surveys significant movements and artists, and considers the ideas, theories and aesthetic principles that have enriched the art of writing to elite status in China.

ARTHI 136A, Nineteenth-Century Architecture 

The history of architecture and planning beginning with eighteenth-century architectural trends in Europe and concluding with late nineteenth-century efforts to reform the city. Exploration of the culture of nineteenth-century modernity through architecture and urban design centered around the themes of industrialization, colonialism, and the idea of landscape. The scope is global.

ARTHI 136B, Twentieth-Century Architecture

The history of architecture from 1900 to the present. Examination of modern and post-modern architecture and city planning in its social, political, and artistic context. The scope is global.

ARTHI 136C, Architecture of the United States 

History of architecture and urban planning: buildings and builders, patrons and occupants, but especially the historical forces and events that transformed the landscape. Course subjects include art, design, technology, economics, politics, and social forces.

ARTHI 136H, Housing American Cultures 

The history of American domestic architecture from the colonial period to the present within a framework of cultural plurality. Examination of the relation between ideas of domesticity, residential design, individual, regional, and ethnic choices.

ARTHI 136I, The City in History 

An historical introduction to the ideas and forms of cities with emphasis on modern urbanism. Examination of social theory to understand the role of industrial capitalism and colonialism in shaping the culture of modern cities, the relationship between the city and the country, the phenomena of class, race, and ethnic separation.

ARTHI 136J, Landscape of Colonialism 

Examination of architecture, urbanism and the landscape of British and French colonialism between 1600 and 1950. Introduction to the different forms of colonialism, colonial ideology and the architecture of colonial encounter in North America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

ARTHI 136O, Sustainable Architecture: History and Aesthetics

Course examines history and theory of sustainable and “green” architecture since the early twentieth century. Emphasis is placed on the critical analysis of a distinct “green” architectural aesthetic; the scope is global.

ARTHI 136Q, Deviant Domesticities 

Suburban landscape, single-family detached house and the nuclear family, is both an architectural and a social pattern. Despite its ubiquity in North America, it now poses an acute challenge to ecological and economic sustainability.

ARTHI 136S, Contemporary Architecture 

Presents a critical overview of global architecture since 1990 and focuses on three conditions that have changed architectural practice: the impact of digital media and computer-aided design and construction, globalization and geo-political shifts, and the environmental crisis.

ARTHI 136X, Culture of Architecture: Perception and Analysis of the Built Environment

Introduces the student to a first-hand experience of the built-environment through perception and analysis of design; understanding historical, theoretical, technical and artistic structures that shape and sustain the culture of architecture.

ARTHI 140E, Landscape Design History 

Explore the significance of landscape design through social, political, and artistic influences and interpret “humanity’s control over Nature” and how this affects our views of nature. Discover how and why landscape design canons were formed.

ARTHI 142D, Gardens, Land, and Landscape in the West 

Special topics in architectural history.

ARTHI 142E: Architecture, Planning, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Paris (and Versailles) from the Sun King to the Revolution, rococo, neoclassicism, origins of urbanism; extensive use of primary texts in translation to study architectural debates in the press and their connection to contemporary political battles.

ARTHI 143E: Adaptive Reuse

Most public places, buildings, galleries, and museums are transformed to varying degrees over the course of their history. This lecture explores how contemporary architects and artists rethought and repurposed historic structures.

ARTHI 186SS, Seminar in Architectural History and Urbanism

Advanced studies in architectural history and urbanism. Topics will vary. This course requires weekly readings and discussion, and the writing of a research seminar paper.

ARTHI 186Y, Seminar in Architecture and Environment

Advanced studies in architecture and environment. Topics vary including active archival research. The course requires weekly readings and discussions, and the writing of a research seminar paper.”

Black Studies

BL ST 14: History of Jazz

A survey of the historical origins and development of jazz, beginning with the West African heritage and the African-American folk tradition, and examining the social and cultural context of this twentieth-century music.

BL ST 129, The Urban Dilemma

Examines the evolution of African-American urban communities. Focuses on theoretical and historiographical debates including: social organization; conditions; daily life; culture; social movements; sustainable development; and class, gender, race relations. Analysis of current policy debates and community initiatives.

BL ST 142: Music in African-American Cultures: USA

Introduction to the music of African-Americans in the U.S.A. from the antebellum era to the present, including folk, religious, popular, and classical music forms. The sociology of Black music in America forms the basis for lectures and discussions.

BL ST 154, Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice

This course investigates environmental injustice-that some people, especially poorer people, bear a disproportionate burden of living in communities with environmental hazards-and environmental racism-that a high coincidence exists between the location of toxic waste sites and Black and Brown communities, even when they are predominantly middle class.

BL ST 174: From Plantations to Prisons

An introduction to the historical roots of the U.S. penal industry and current policies. Provides a structural understanding of the contemporary prison crisis and questions contemporary notions of crime, punishment, rehabilitation, restoration and justice. Focuses on the unprecedented prison population explosion in terms of race, gender and class.

Chincan@ Studies

CH ST 118: The Scientific Revolution and Non-Western Epistemologies

Overview of the Scientific Revolution and its impact both within Western Europe and outside of the Mediterranean region through colonialism. Contrast of resulting “Western” scientific perspective with non-Western epistemologies, principally of the indigenous Western Hemisphere.

CH ST 149: Body, Culture, and Power

Exploration of the construction, imaging and experience of the body in light of modern regimes of power/knowledge. Particular attention is paid tothe work of Michel Foucault on disciplinary technologies, medical practicesof ab/normalization, and the emergence of bio-power.

CH ST 179A, Race and Environmental Justice

Provides an introduction to the topics of environmental inequality and environmental justice. Of particular interest is how race is implicated in the unequal exposure of populations to environmental pollution and in the social movements developed to address environmental inequality.

CH ST 168E: History of the Chicano Movement

History of the Chicano Movement. An examination of the Chicano movement in the United States from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Topics will include the student movement, the farmworker movement, the Plande Aztlan, the Raza Unida Party, Chicana feminists, the anti-war movement, and Chicanostudies.

CH ST 189: Immigration and the US Border

Immigration and the U.S. border. An analysis of the socioeconomic and political factors which have determined and continue to form the basis for the development of United States immigration policies and practices toward Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican border.

Classics

CLASS 40 – Greek Mythology

Introduction to the principal myths of ancient Greece and the ways in which these myths have been understood. Format and readings vary.

CLASS 155 – Greek Religion and Identity

The ancient Greeks defined themselves through their religion, and this course examines different forms of Greek identity from the standpoint of religious practice and belief. Topics addressed include the role of animal sacrifice, material objects dedicated to the gods, gender and class distinctions among the worshippers, the built environment, athletics, and local myths and variations in practice. By considering ancient evidence through the lens of contemporary theory, we will attempt to reconstruct the richness and diversity of Greek religious experience.

CLASS 160, Greek Cities and Sanctuaries

Surveys the evidence for the primary archaeological sites of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek world, with special emphasis on town planning and architectural responses to important Greek institutions such as colonization and democracy.

Comparative Literature

C LIT 35/GER 35: Making of the Modern World

Description and analysis of decisive events contributing to the world we are inhabiting. Various themes presented: City planning, war and industrial warfare, technology and media-technology, ideologies of modernity, and modern master theories.

C LIT 36: Global Humanities

What do literature and critical theory contribute to the reflection on human rights and the analysis of their violation? Inquiry into different ways in which the humanities can re-frame the debate on human rights and act as a social force.

C LIT 186LS: Literature of the Sea 

While the ocean has often been represented as an alibi for the development of British maritime empire, it has recently been read as a critical resource for postcolonial writers (Césaire, Danticat, Walcott) for re-evaluating effects of colonial history & expanding our sense of a shared planet. Course examines complicated & imbricated histories of the ocean & imperialism through literatures & travelogues of 19th century & beyond. Begins with Shakespeare’s The Tempest to outline recurring themes in course: mutiny, wars, ships & shipwrecks, the stranger, the savage. Other themes: scale, planetarity vs globalize., catastrophe, passage, sovereignty. Approach informed by contemp. theories of planetarity & oceanic lit (Spivak, Dimock, Glissant).

CCS

ART CS 125: Sculpture-Related Studies

Non-studio emphasis on generation and development of images, ideas, and imagination through field trips, slides, presentations, and videos. Primarily for sculptors.

LIT CCS 102, Writing Natural History

This two-part historical literature and writing course will encourage students to engage with the genre of natural history, which aims to represent the origins and functions of organisms or places. Students will learn about the history of the genre first, then write their own natural history of an organism or location near UCSB.
In the first part of the class, students will read important natural history writings, including Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, John Muir’s selected essays, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. They will learn about the political and commercial ramifications of natural history, as well as its aesthetic, inspiring qualities. The first half of the class will encourage students to understand the history of natural history, so that they may proceed securely to their own studies.
During the second half of the class, students will write their own natural histories, using information they have gathered throughout the quarter. Students choose an organism or location to observe, and write their own natural history of it, taking their inspiration from the writers we have read in class, and imagining the role natural history can play today. The preservation of threatened environments and the political ramifications of natural history seem particularly relevant in the twenty-first century, especially in light of the recent Gulf oil spill.

LIT CCS 103, Environmental Media

The study and practice of environmental media. Students study the ways and means of how to inform the world on environmental problems and issues, then learn the techniques of writing and shooting DOCUMENTARY media. Students either write a research paper on media and environmental issues (climate change, pollution, population, etc.) or write and/or make a short documentary video. In-class viewing and discussions of environmental documentaries (Food, Silent Spring, Fuel, An Inconvenient Truth, etc.) and feature films (Erin Brockovich, China Syndrome, etc.).

LIT CCS 110, Travel Writing: Writing Beyond Place

If you’ve ever had an experience that you were dying to share–some trip around the world, a dining excursion, a horrendous moment or one that shook you to your core–then chances are you’re a travel writer. Gone are the days of boring reviews and nose-to-the-air perspectives. With creative nonfiction ever so prolific in popular culture, with websites such as Yelp and Travel Advisor creating an “every person is a critic” marketplace, the popularity of travel writing has increased exponentially. A good travel writer is one who writes beyond place… who can take experiences and form them into meaningful stories… who can create a persona, a voice, a particular point of view from which they see the world. But, of course, there’s more to it than just your point of view. And who are you to have an opinion anyway?
In this course, students will learn techniques for successful travel writing. They will work to create a voice, a perspective, a deliberate niche in the market. Students will read novels and magazines, blogs and opinion pieces and develop the skills to share their experiences. They will write everything from food and hotel reviews to much deeper personal nonfiction centered around place. The market for travel writing is broad and inclusive. It is a viable talent that not only pays the bills, but also comes with many perquisites. Being a “critic” is only a small part of this course. The larger goal will be to develop as a nonfiction writer, to weave stories of time and place so that the reader feels as if he or she has experienced everything that you have.

LIT CCS 113, Environmental Media

The study and practice of environmental media. Students study the ways and means of how to inform the world on environmental problems and issues, then learn the techniques of writing and shooting documentary, writing environmental blogs, web pages, PSA’s, poetry films, blogs, short films, mashups, webisodes, etc

LIT CCS 114, Borderlands: Revisions & Reimaginings U.S.-Centered Media and the Transnational Imaginary

In this course we will follow the thread of “U.S.-produced” texts as they engage the idea of “borders” – chiefly after World War II. We will interrogate the sociopolitical and spatial formation of the region produced by the U.S.-Mexico boundary (among other boundaries), examining the imaginative and “real” parts of this border. By focusing on the contradictions associated with border militarization, immigration and environmental racism we will look at media to investigate the ways in which globalization and the flows of people, capital, and ideologies has shaped the borders of the United States. How are borders imagined by the writers/artists at hand? What is at stake in the reclamation of “lost” and “mythical” lands? Lastly, how do the most current of writers and directors re-present some of these issues?

LIT CCS 114, Contemporary Literature of Food and the Environment: The Politics of Consumption

This course combines the disciplines of Food Studies and Environmental Justice. We begin with a simple question: why are the descriptions of one’s physical body so often accompanied by scenes of consumption and incorporation (both of and by subjects)? The ecological cost of America’s overconsumption is a frequent topic in today’s media but it is often exclusively spoken of in terms of meat and oil. To address these issues we will examine visual and written texts of our times and investigate the representations of consumption (of land, peoples, toxins, and capital).

Earth Science

EARTH 4: Introduction to Oceanography

An introduction to oceanography covering the major physical, chemical, and geological features of the oceans, their role in earth history, and potential use as a natural resource.

EARTH 9: Giant Earthquakes 

Study of the character and causes of large earthquakes, the hazards they pose, and how society can prepare for and mitigate their impacts. Historical case studies will illuminate why their slip characteristics and destructive effects vary so widely.

EARTH 20, Geological Catastrophes

Course deals with geologic catastrophes, e.g., earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and landslides. Students will learn the basic physical causes of these naturally occurring events and discuss the consequences.

EARTH 30: History of Life

Examination of the geological and biological processes affecting the evolution of life on Earth from 3.8 billion years ago to the present. Strong emphasis on the nature of the “scientific method” as a way of understanding natural history.

EARTH 105: Earth’s Climate: Past and Present Description and quantitative analysis of climate processes and paleoclimate proxies. Processes include radiation and the Earth’s energy budget, the influence of orbital cycles, ocean circulation, monsoons, ENSO, and ice sheets. Paleoclimate reconstructions from tectonic-scale to the last millennium, with emphasis on glacial cycles and Plio- Pleistocene climate evolution.

EARTH 130, Global Warming – Science and Society

Introduction to the scientific and societal issues surrounding global climate change. Includes introduction to physical climatology, greenhouse effect, climate history, anthropogenic changes, and future predictions. Student discussion and debate on the potential societal scenarios available to mitigate future climate change.

East Asian Studies

EACS 4A – East Asian Traditions: Pre-Modern

An introduction to the social structures, institutions, systems of thought and belief, and the arts and entertainments of China and Japan during the pre-modern period.

EACS 5 – Introduction to Buddhism

The historical and cross-cultural exploration of Buddhism through the examination of basic texts, institutions, and practices of diverse Buddhist traditions.

EACS 141, Environmental Justice in Asia

Examines environmental perceptions and practices and in East Asian settings.

Economics

ECON 115, Environmental Economics

Provides a rigorous treatment of environmental economics. Topics include welfare analysis, ethical dimensions of economic criteria for protecting the environment, measuring the demand for environmental goods, property rights, economic incentives, including marketable permits and emission fees, and regulating risk.

ECON 122, Natural Resource Economics 

Microeconomic theory and capital theory applied to problems of conservation and management of natural resources. Analysis of public policy with special emphasis on nonrenewable energy resources, management of forests, deforestation and species extinction, and use of fish and game resources.

ECON 127, Climate Change

Economic and policy issues underlying threat of global climate change, in particular, the role of economics in designing efficient climate policy. Present some of the scientific methods in assessing climate change processes. Topics include externalities, taxation, valuation, discounting, and cost-benefit analysis.

English

ENGL 22, Literature and the Environment

Beginning with “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, one of the West’s earliest texts, this course surveys nearly 5000 years of literature in order to explore the literary history of the relationship we have with our planet, as well as to better understand our current environmental beliefs.

ENGL 22S, Seminar on Literature and the Environment

Seminar course for a select number of students enrolled in English 22 designed to enrich the large lecture experience for the motivated student. Course includes either supplementary reading or more intensive study of the English 22 reading list, as well as supplemental writing.

ENGL 99, The Rhetoric of the Anthropocene and Climate Change

See the below description for ENGL 199.

ENGL 100LE, Honors Seminar: Introduction to Literature and the Environment

A seminar course for a select number of students. Designed to enrich the lecture experience for the motivated student.

ENGL 122AP, Cultural Representations: Literature and the Environment: Imagining Asia and the Pacific

This course explores the environment as a site of imagination via the works of literary writers and filmmakers who have tried to take their readers beneath the seas, over the ice sheets, across islands and continents and beyond into space.

ENGL 122CS, Cultural Representations: Cityscapes

A study of literary works, paintings, films, and other representational forms as they influence cultural attitudes. The courses offered will focus on such topics as the body, the city, the everyday, the marketplace, and the machine.

ENGL 122CS, Cityscapes: Globalism & Urban Cultures

This seminar examines different representations of the modern metropolis from the 19th to the 21st century, by turning to literature, cinema, and urban theory. The city and urban life crucially shaped the experience of modernity. From fin de siècle Paris to 1920s Berlin, to mid-twentieth century Algiers to contemporary London, New York, Dubai, and L.A., we will study urban space in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Emile Zola, J.G. Ballard, Hanif Kureishi, Buchi Emecheta, Roland Barthes and Georges Perec, together with current critiques of urbanism (David Harveym Rem Koolhaas, Mike davis, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord).

ENGL 122EA: Cultural Representations

This course is an experiment. It begins with the assumption that global climate change is real and that its causes are anthropogenic (i.e. human caused). Consequently, solutions will not be just technological, or even mostly so, but will also need to involve profound cultural changes to our beliefs, practices, and styles of life. The difficulty in bringing this about is not only that a broad swathe of Americans are skeptical of climate change, but even if this is acknowledged, the causes and solutions to the problem are being fiercely debated on the public stage. It has also, sadly, become a political issue dividing our nation. This course will carefully look at the rhetoric of these debates.

ENGL 122LE, Cultural Representations: Literature and the Environment 

A study of literary works, paintings, films, and other representational forms as they influence cultural attitudes. The courses offered will focus on such topics as the body, the city, the everyday, the marketplace, and the machine.

ENGL 122LS, Cultural Representations: Landscape and the Social Imaginary 

ENGL 122NE, Cultural Representations: Nature and the Environment 

A study of literary works, paintings, films, and other representational forms as they influence cultural attitudes. The courses offered will focus on such topics as the body, the city, the everyday, the marketplace, and the machine.

ENGL 122NM, Cultural Representations: Making Up Monsters 

Why do we imagine monsters (aliens, vampires, hermaphrodites, cyborgs, Barney …), and what do monsters have to say about the cultures that imagine them? How does the category of the monstrous help us define what’s human? We’ll examine monstrous narratives from Shakespeare’s _The Tempest_ to Shelley’s Frankenstein to David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man and the TV series The X-Files, with stops in between and beyond.

ENG122RW: Reading the World

In this course, we will be critically reading a variety of contemporary texts that deal with “controversial” issues, such as climate change and childhood vaccinations, where there is no real controversy at all. Climate change is real. Since 1880, our global climate has warmed by 1.2-1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. With respect to childhood vaccinations, studies involving millions of children have found no verifiable link between vaccinations and conditions like autism. Why then do millions of Americans doubt the truth? This course will explore the role that reading skills play in these “controversies.”

ENGL 122SA, Cultural Representations: South Asia in the Popular Media

We will examine not only some of the persistent characters, icons, and stories through which we, in the global North “know” South Asia, but deepen our understanding of these by encounters with postcolonial interventions in fiction, non-fiction, film, television, painting, comics, photographs, and cookbooks. Whenever possible, texts with a common link will be paired for contrast, enabling us to consider the capture of the same subject in different media technologies.

ENGL 122UM, Cultural Representations: The City As a Way of Life — Urban Modernity Post 1940

A study of literary works, paintings, films, and other representational forms as they influence cultural attitudes. The courses offered will focus on such topics as the body, the city, the everyday, the marketplace, and the machine.

ENGL 122WE, Cultural Representations: Water Imaginations

This course will investigate the complex struggles over the environment in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the worlds of the literary texts and films that have tried to take their readers beneath the seas, over the ice sheets, across deserts, through cities, islands and continents and beyond into space. The course will take a specifically literary approach to environmental questions in relation to water and climate change.

ENGL 133SO: Studies in American Regional Literature

Courses on American writing associated with particular regions such as the South, the West, New England.

ENGL 131LE, Studies in American Literature: Literature in the Environment

This course examines the complex relationship between the environment and representation, looking at literary, photographic, and filmic landscapes of fear, pastoralism, extreme sports, and animal encounters.

ENGL 134NA, Studies in the Literature of Cultural and Ethnic Communities in the United States: Native American Writers

ENGL 162, Milton and Ecology

Because air pollution, acid rain, deforestation, endangered species, wetland loss, animal rights, and rampant consumerism were all issues of great concern in Renaissance England, in this course we will consider a range of Milton’s works, including Paradise Lost, against the backdrop of these environmental issues.

ENGL 165AL, Topics in Literature: Artificial Life 

ENGL 165EM, Topics in Literature: What Else is Pastoral?

In this course we will be tracing the remarkable mode of pastoral writing from its earliest beginnings to its height in the Renaissance and 18th century, while also considering how it is still very much at work in the world today.

ENGL 165EM, Topics in Literature: Cities and Literature: London and Boston in the 17th and 18th Centuries

This course will investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, historically distinct forms of literature, and, on the other, the production of space into the lived places between the 16th and 18th century. Among our chief lines of investigation will be: How do distinct spaces and performances of literature (whether aural and silent) mediate each other? Can we understand literature, whether written or spoken, as vibrant matter that thrives within the ecological niche provided by the early modern city and town? Just how are the distinct genres and forms of literature (drama, poetry, non-fiction narrative, novel) shaped to urban spaces so they can proliferate as private and public entertainment? What sort of audience practices and experiences do they afford?

ENG165HN: EcoFictions: The Human/Non-Human Mesh

This small seminar (capped at 15) looks at ways of understanding relations among human and non-human beings. As far back as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, writers of speculative fiction have been thinking across the boundaries between individual beings, species, even kingdoms/domains. We’ll read a few poems and four novels together: LeGuin’s science-fiction The Word for World is Forest; When the Killing’s Done, T. C. Boyle’s fictionalization of Santa Barbara Channel Islands a decade and a  half ago ecological restoration projects; Sinha’s magical-realist Animal’s People (about the Bhopal disaster); Bacigalupi’s dystopian biopunk The Wind-Up Girl. Along the way we’ll look at how environmental ethicists understand complex interrelations among human and non-human, living and non-living, organic and inorganic entities – bodies, alliances, and systems made up of strange hybrids.

ENGL 165IF: Topics in Literature: Imaginary Futures

This course examines the literary history of fictitious futures, or to use Frederic Jameson’s phrase, we will mine “the archaeology of the future,” to determine the central concerns of authors and film-makers who imagine, in particular, dystopian visions of the world to come. Beginning with fiction from the end of the Victorian period, we will read several novels, short stories, and consider some films, that provide glimpses of a variety of futures, and consider how they approach respectively the disintegration of the political, social, and natural world.

ENGL 165JT, Topics in Literature: Mythopoeic Ecology: J.R.R. Tolkien

In this reading-intensive course, we will discuss key works by J. R. R. Tolkien, primarily The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) and selections from the “feigned history” and mythology found in The Silmarillion.

ENGL 165LA, Topics in Literature: Literature and Atrocity

This course will examine how modern and contemporary literature has engaged with the problem of atrocity. Beginning with the Jewish Holocaust and working through apartheid South Africa and the Rwandan genocide, the course will broach such themes as the limits of representation, the work of mourning, ethics and the Other and literature as testimony.

ENGL 165LE, Topics in Literature: Literature and the Environment

In a time of ever worsening ecological crisis, exploitation of resources, and oppression of and violence toward animals, it is important to understand the dominant attitudes we hold toward what we call nature and the species with whom we inhabit the planet. The purpose of this course is to begin asking questions about what nature is and how our understanding of it facilitates its exploitation and about how we relate to animals and why. These questions provide an opportunity for us to rethink some basic assumptions we tacitly hold that have led us to our contemporary apocalyptic moment. We will be reading a variety of literary works—poetry, fiction, philosophy, nature writing, film—to aid us in this project.

ENGL 165LM, Topics in Literature: Literature and Medicine

This course will inquire into the culture of current Western medicine through the reading of literature, including non-fiction essays, fiction (including Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road), poetry and drama (including Margaret Edson’s Wit and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America). We will consider the perspectives of patients and families as well as those of health care providers.

ENGL 165LP, Topics in Literature: Literature of the Pacific

In this course we will consider alternative forms of storytelling in the Pacific, and how they interact with mass circulated imaginations of this place. We will begin with Herman Melville’s Typee, which we will read alongside viewings of episodes of the TV series Lost. We will then proceed into the deep ocean to engage with poetry and film about underwater ecologies.

ENGL 165ME, Topics in Literature: Media Ecology 

ENGL 165MP, Topics in Literature: Renaissance Pastoral

Of all the different ways of writing, pastoral may be the most versatile–and most misunderstood and overlooked. Pastoral can be lighthearted fun, scathing, subversive, and dangerous political allegory, astonishingly beautiful nature writing, or any number of other forms. In fact, pastoral can take nearly any shape: a play, a lyric poem, an epic, a novel, or even a film. In this course we will be tracing this remarkable mode of writing from its earliest beginnings to its height in the Renaissance, while also considering how it is still very much at work in the world today.

ENGL 165NT, Topics in Literature: Nature in Wordsworth, Dickinson, Bishop

This course examines representations of the natural in works by these three poets. How does each writer engage the idea of a nature/culture binary? How does each draw differently on conventions for representing nature (pastoral literature, but also tourism, cartography, scientific description)? What were the historical and cultural contexts of their ways of framing nature?

ENGL 19OGE, Postcolonial and Global Ecological Imaginations

ENGL 192, Science Fiction

This course will offer a selective survey of the themes animating science fiction since WWII. Discussions will engage in questions about how the genre has become one of the more influential, intellectually rigorous and pleasurable ways to speculate about the accelerating changes in our world.

ENG192EF: Science Fiction: Ecofiction

This course will introduce the literary genre of science fiction (SF) and its engagements with the science of ecology. SF writer Frank Herbert famously wrote that ecology is not only the study of the relations between organisms and environment, but also the “study of consequences.” This definition suggests that ecology shares an affinity with the literary genre of science fiction, since both involve the act of speculation, imagining how new technologies, species, or contact with aliens could affect the future of the planet. Focusing on SF from the post-WWII period (1945-present), we will consider shifts in contemporary environmentalism (conservation, sustainability, the Anthropocene) alongside literary texts and their imaginations of both alien ecologies and planetary futures. During the quarter, we will consider topics including cybernetics, species extinction, hierarchy, deep ecology, ecological Marxism, biopolitics, the Anthropocene, the posthuman, gender, race, collectivity, and dystopia. For English Majors, this course counts for either the “Literature & Environment” or “Literature & Cultures of Information” specializations.

ENGL 197, Indigenous Literature

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Darwin’s Culture

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Theories of Literature and the Environment

In the first half of this course we will explore how the relationship between human beings and the environment has been imagined in the West. We will be considering how these attitudes toward the environment influenced writers such as Theocritus, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and so forth. The second half of the course will consider works from modern ecocritics with an eye to directly applying this theory to the reading of texts.

ENGL 197, Cultural Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Environmental Ethics

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Natural Representations: Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Bishop

This class examines representations of the natural world in works by these three poets and asks about the relation of nature and natural phenomena to their literary work. Guiding questions: how does each writer respond to the idea of a nature / culture dichotomy? How are nature and naturalness coded in their writing? How does each engage with existing generic conventions for representing nature, whether these are drawn from polite literature or other systems of representation?

ENGL 197, Dickinson and Whitman

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Feeling, Place, Expression

Until the post-World War II period, the interdependence of human psychology with our environments was, for the most part, unthought.  But the advent of nuclear power forced scientists and humanists alike to think more deliberately about this interdependence.  The publication of groundbreaking work on ecology and psychology in the 1970’s, during the First Wave of the contemporary environmental movement, led to what is now a rich interdisciplinary body of work on the subject.  This course will introduce you to that body of work, drawing on the work of philosophers (“ecosophy”), scientific psychologists, and psychoanalysts (“eco-psychoanalysis”) that now asks us, not just to understand better our “place” in the environment, but also to understand better the “place” of the environment within ourselves.  Literature, of course, fictional or otherwise, has always understood the evocative power of these emplacements, from Homer’s fascination with the structure of the city of Troy to the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Let’s Go to Pluto.”

ENGL 197, Thinking about Animals in Literature & Film

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Thoreau 

This seminar addresses Henry David Thoreau’s major works from the perspectives of literary criticism and cultural history. We will read Thoreau’s Walden in its entirety and consider that work as both a literary masterpiece and a telling example of romantic environmentalism. We will also read several of Thoreau’s essays, which shed light on his political commitments, his philosophical roots in American Transcendentalism, and his growing sophistication as a natural historian.

ENGL 197, Writing Nature in 18th Century 

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 197, Cultures of Nature in the 18th Century 

Against the idea that Enlightenment science fatally divided humans from the natural world, this course traces an early-modern history of environmentalism and environmental ethics, mostly in British contexts. The course will explore ethical, historical, aesthetic, scientific, ethnographic, and political questions in a variety of literary genres while engaging critical perspectives from environmental ethicists / ecophilosophers, literary ecocritics, and post-colonial theorists.

ENGL 197, What is Ecocriticism? 

Content will vary with each instructor. Students will be asked to do a project that acquaints them with some of the resources of the library and results in their reading beyond the primary course materials.

ENGL 199, The Rhetoric of the Anthropocene and Climate Change

Scientists have suggested that the earth has recently entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which has been caused by sweeping changes that human beings have brought about on the planet, climate change being the most notable. The Anthropocene may seem to be something that can only be studied by scientists; however, scholars from across the humanities are trying to understand the human implications of the Anthropocene, such as how it will change our lives, values, and understanding of our place on the planet, as well as why so many individuals are currently denying that it and climate change are real.

Environmental Studies

ENV S 1, Introduction to Environmental Studies

“Environmental Studies” requires insights from many disciplines, including the social as well as biophysical science and the humanities. This introduction offers an overview of the field, examining both our planet and the ways in which we humans depend on it.

ENV S 3, Introduction to the Social and Culture Environment

An introduction to the relationship of societies and the environment from prehistorical times to the present. The course is global in perspective, and includes history, literature, philosophy, economics, science, and culture as evidence for examining the human social environment.

ENV S 30: Introduction to Environmental Economics 

Economic processes underlie many of the environmental problems facing humanity but can also play an important role in solving those challenges. This course introduces key theories from micro- and macroeconomics and applies them to a variety of environmental problems. Topics covered include individual preferences, efficiency, valuation, market failures and policy analysis.

ENV S 103S, History of Surfing

The history of surfing from its Polynesian origins to today’s global, commercial, and cultural force, with perspectives from history of politics; economics; science and technology; the developing world; sex, ethnicity, gender; popular culture; and special focus on the environment.

ENV S 106: Critical Thinking About Human-Environment Problems and Solutions

An in-depth examination of critical thinking in environmental contexts. Identification of deceptive methods of environmental critique and debate in policy and public matters. Comprehension of approaches to environmental solutions as well as common thinking traps in developing such solutions. Emphasis on reasoning patterns and leverage points of environmental arguments, systems thinking about environmental problems and solutions, exploration of common errors in scientific reasoning, and framing scientific and environmental issues for clarity and effective communication.

ENV S 107C, The Darwinian Revolution and Modern Biology 

Examines the social and scientific impacts of evolutionary ideas from around 1800 through Charles Darwin, the modern evolutionary synthesis, the birth of ecology, and molecular biology.

ENV S 107E, History of Animal Use in Science 

Examines history of scientific uses of animals from antiquity to the present. Topics include vivisection, field trials, and the development of drugs and
vaccines. Changing ethical ideas about animals, including the relationship between animal rights and environmental ethics, is also considered.

ENV S 1080, History of the Oceans

Explores how people have experienced, understood, transformed, and attempted to conserve the world’s oceans throughout human history. Interdisciplinary approach includes aspects of science, technology, politics, law, culture, and material biophysical relationships.

ENV S 108W, Wildlife in America

Explores the turbulent, contested, and colorful history of human interactions with wild animals in North America from the Pleistocene to the present. Readings will explore historical changes in science, politics, law, management, and cultural ideas about nature.

ENV S 115: Energy and the Environment 

Focus on learning how to use energy efficiently in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics and in harmony with the environment. Topics include the nature of energy and the fundamentals for a sustainable environmental energy policy.

ENV S 116, Building Sustainable Communities 

Examines sustainability, communities, and urban systems in a global context. Covers impacts cities have on the environmental systems that support them, and explores ways to improve urban systems through technology, policy, and design.

ENV S 118, Industrial Ecology: Designing for the Environment

Industrial Ecology is a philosophical and methodical framework interwoven with concepts in ecology and economics used to aid in understanding of how industrial systems interact with the environment. Capital, energy, and material flows are examined and viewed in cultural context.

ENV S 119: Ecology and Management of California Wildlands

Explore ecological processes in California habitats and the challenges of their management through field trips, discussions with land managers, lectures and readings. Focus on regional habitats including specialized habitats such as coastal salt marsh and vernal pools, and more widespread such as oak savanna and chaparral.

ENV S 120: Toxins in the Environment

Effects and implications for the future of introducing toxins into the biosphere. Examination of physiological and biochemical effects and the mechanisms of action of the potential toxins. Discussion of methodological approaches and legal ramifications of studies in environmental toxicology.

ENV S 122NE: Cultural Representations: Nature and the Environment

Perceptions of nature have changed throughout history and vary across cultures. Course explores changing expressions of our changing relations to the world we live in, with emphasis on cultural movements (films, literature, newspapers, etc.) that have affected contemporary American experience.

ENV S 122LE, Cultural Representations: Introduction to Literature and the Environment

Environmental survey of Western literature that explores the often-ignored literary history of the natural world.

ENV S 125A, Principles of Environmental Law

An introduction to the history and methodology of law as it relates to human use of the environment. Case studies are used to examine common law, constitutional and modern environmental laws, with an emphasis on current theories and principles.

ENV S 125B, Land Use and Planning Law

An examination of local, state, and federal laws regulating land use and development. Selected problems analyzed through case studies.

ENV S 127, Concepts of Environmental Education and Practicum

Conceptual introduction to Environmental Education (EE) through study and research of EE history, learner characteristics, models of excellence, and professional networks. Students utilize sound educational principles and hands-on experiences to plan, implement, and evaluate a quality EE experience for others.

ENV S 129, Ecopsychology

Course explores the theories and practices of psychologists, educators, and others whose work is focused on the connections between “inner” human nature and “outer” nature within which humans experience themselves and the rest of the world.

ENV S 130A, Coupled Human and Natural Systems: Risks, Vulnerability, Resilience, and Disasters

Examines human dimensions of global environmental change in developing countries from an interdisciplinary social science perspective. Compares and contrasts alternative conceptual and analytical models of dynamic, interrelated human-environmental systems and presents recent approaches to understanding risk, vulnerability, resilience, and disasters.

ENV S 130B, Global Tourism and Environmental Conservation

Focus on the contradictions between international tourism as an economic development strategy and environmental conservation efforts, especially in an era of climate change. One major objective is to help students make more informed decisions about their own tourist experiences.

ENV S 130C, Global Food Systems and Human Food Security

Examines history of global food system and its impacts on ecosystems, ecologies, and human nutrition and food security. How agricultural, capture fisheries, and aquacultural industries were integrated into the global food system. Provides information to make more informed decisions about consuming these products.

ENV S 131, International Environmental Law and Politics

An examination of the actors and institutions of international environmental law and politics, with an emphasis on explaining patterns of success and failure in addressing global environmental problems.

ENV S 135A, Principles of Environmental Planning

Introduction to the history, theory, and trends of urban, regional, and environmental planning in both California and the United States. Field trips to local urban areas.

ENV S 135B, Advanced Environmental Planning

Advanced seminar applying principles presented in environmental studies 135A to regional and local government planning processes. Field analysis of local planning issues.

ENV S 136, Green Works – Exploring Technology and the Search for Sustainability 

A multi-disciplinary class examining the interplay of technology, society, science, and history. Investigate green technologies in an interactive class format designed to encourage discussion and debate. Innovative science and social science labs provide hands-on learning.

ENV S 146, Animals in Human Society: Ethical Issues of Animal Use

An exploration of the ethical issues which arise when humans interact with other animals, and an examination of conflicting attitudes toward the value of animal life in such specific areas as food production, recreational activities, research and environmental protection.

ENV S 147:Air Quality and the Environment

Types, sources, effects, and control of air pollution. Topics include gaseous pollutants particulates, toxic contaminants, atmospheric dispersion, photochemical smog, acid rain control measures, the clean air act and regulatory trends, indoor air.

ENV S 149, World Agriculture, Food, and Population 

Evolution, current status, and alternative futures of agriculture, food, and population worldwide. Achieving environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable food systems; soil, water, crops, energy, and labor; diversity, stability and ecosystems management; farmer and scientist knowledge and collaboration; common property management.

ENV S 152: Applied Marine Ecology 

Introduction to the application of ecological principles and methods to environmental problems in marine habitats. Focus on problems that are local, regional, and global in scale. Concepts illustrated with case studies.

ENV S 157, The Santa Barbara County Agrifood System

This class investigates current agrifood system and potential benefits and costs of localization. Covers theory, data collection, analysis methods, key indicators (greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, migrant labor, nutrition, community health), policies and actions for change. Students conduct and present research as team.

ENV S 160, American Environmental Literature

Assesses contributions of literary texts to American environmental movements. Examines influences of writers such as Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Edward Abbey upon environmental perceptions, values, and attitudes in American cultural history and upon rhetoric and politics of contemporary environmental debates.

ENV S 161, Environmental Communications: Contemporary Strategies and Tactics 

Surveys strategies and tactics for communicating about the environment and sustainability in various organizational, political, cultural, business, mass media and social media contexts. Students will analyze, evaluate and practice communications methods using a spectrum of communications channels.

ENV S 165A: Environmental Impact Analysis

Analyzes the historical and theoretical approaches to environmental assessment methodology and procedures for preparing and reviewing environmental impact reports. Explores strengths and weaknesses of current public policy context.

ENV S 165B: Advanced Environmental Impact Analysis 

Advanced seminar during which students prepare their own focused environmental impact report on a specific development project. Includes in-depth discussion of baseline, mitigation, impacts, and public comments. Assignments based on research and fieldwork provide reality professional environmental planning experience.

ENV S 166FP, Small-Scale Food Production

Biological, ecological, social, and economic principles of small-scale food production and their practical applications. Includes each student cultivating a garden plot; lab exercises, field trips to local farms and gardens.

ENV S 166BT, Biotechology, Food, and Agriculture 

Social, cultural, ethical, biological, and environmental issues surrounding biotechnology (BT) and the food system. Includes theory and method of BT; scientific, social and political control of BT; effect of BT on genetic diversity, small-scale farmers, the environment, food supply, consumer health.

ENV S 171BT, Biotechnology, Food, and Agriculture

Social, cultural, ethical, biological, and environmental issues surrounding biotechnology (BT) and the food system. Includes theory and method of BT; scientific, social and political control of BT; effect of BT on genetic diversity, small-scale farmers, the environment, food supply, consumer health.

ENV S 172, Waste Management: Product Stewardship, Recycling and Renewable Energy 

Overview of policy, technology, and economic dimensions of managing wastes in the twenty-first century. Covers the emergence of product stewardship, domestic and international recycling, composting of organic materials, conversion of organic materials to renewable energy, waste incineration and land filling.

ENV S 173, American Environmental History

Traces the history of American attitudes and behavior toward nature. Focus on wilderness, the conservation movement, and modern forms of environmentalism.

ENV S 174: Environmental Policy and Economics 

Introductory course on economic analysis of environmental policy. Topics include market failure, the evaluation of environmental policy, energy sources, population growth, sustainable development, the optimal levels of biodiversity and pollution, and dispute resolution.

ENV S 175, Environmental Economics

Provides a rigorous treatment of environmental economics. Topics include welfare analysis, ethical dimensions of economic criteria for protecting the environment, measuring the demand for environmental goods, property rights, economic incentives, including marketable permits and emission fees, and regulating risk.

ENV S 176A, Water Policy in the West: Linking Science and Environmental and Economic Values

Examines water supply and use, the science of water systems and watersheds, key concepts in water policy, and the basics of water law as a fundamental element of the history and context for water policy in the West.

ENV S 177: Comparative Environmental Politics 

Course is structured around the major issues in environmental politics, for example: global warming, nuclear waste, deforestation, and chemical pollution. The roles of economics, technology and social organization are each considered as explanatory variables for understanding environmental problems.

ENV S 178, Politics of the Environment

Analysis of environmental policy issues and their treatment in the political process. Discussion of the interplay of substantive issues, ideology, institutions, and private groups in the development, management, protection, and preservation of natural resources and the natural environment.

ENV S 179, Natural Resource Economics

Theory and capital theory applied to problems of conservation and management of natural resources. Analysis of public policy with special emphasis on nonrenewable resources, management of forests, deforestation and species extinction, and use of fish and game resources.

ENV S 180: Global Environmental Movements 

Examines historical and contemporary environmental and human rights movements around the world. Subject matter includes: policy- driven/reformist environmental movements, radical underground and militant movements, indigenous peoples’ movements, environmental movements in the Global South, and coalitions and transnational advocacy networks focused on confronting climate change and resource extraction associated with industrial agriculture, mining, timber harvesting, hydroelectric dam construction, fracking, oil and tar sands, and the international hazardous waste trade. Students Learn theories and concepts from the social sciences and environmental humanities.

ENV S 183, Films and the Natural and Human Environment 

Course presents a series of popular films and professional documentaries representing a range of trends, images, and issues associated with the natural and human environments. Visual images and critical thinking skills are combined to enhance understanding of environmental issues presented by the media.

ENV S 184, Gender and the Environment 

A philosophical, evolutionary, and cross-cultural analysis of the ways women and men may relate differently to their environment resulting in the design of gender-sensitive and sustainable policies for planning and development in both the developing and the developed world.

ENV S 185, Human Environmental Rights 

Introduction to human environmental rights. Examines the expansion of human rights to include human environmental rights, abuses of human environmental rights, associated social conflicts, and emergent social movements including environmental justice and transnational advocacy networks.

ENV S 188, Ethics of Human-Environment Relations 

Survey of contemporary environmental ethics, focusing on both philosophical and applied issues. Topics include anthropocentrism and its alternatives, the role of science and aesthetics, multicultural perspectives and the problem of relativism, and the conflict between radical and reformist environmentalism.

ENV S 189, Religion and Ecology in the Americas 

Focus on spiritual traditions and land based knowledge indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.

ENV S 193CE: Circular Economy – Waste Not: New Perspectives on Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling

ENVS 193CE will evaluate the emerging concept of circular systems within the capitalist economy to eliminate the concept of waste and promote more sustainable consumption. Course will examine the theory of a circular economy, the ways in which products and materials could be designed to eliminate waste across the life of products and materials, the systems that could facilitate repair, remanufacture, recovery and recycling and potentially make circular systems possible, and practical applications.

ENV S 193FE: Fire in Western USA Ecosystems 

Investigates the influence and management of fire in the western USA with special emphasis on California ecosystems including chaparral and conifer forest. Discussion will include understanding historic fire regimes and how fire regimes are changing as well as how human management of fire has changed. Participation in Friday and one weekend field trip are required.

ENV S 193GB: Green Building

 A new or one-time course focusing on a special area of interest in environmental studies. ENVS 193GB will focus on introducing Green Building tools and practices. Students will learn about organizations currently leading the march in sustainable building design and operations as well as technical audits and analysis performed in order to evaluate a building’s efficiency.

ENV S 193WM: Water Resources Management 

Water underpins all aspects of development. In 193SD we learned how to evaluate water resource supply and demand. To manage water resources effectively, we also need to understand anthropogenic drivers of change and water policy. This class builds on topics covered in 193SD (strongly recommended). This is a project-based course (independent AND group) that focuses on water tradeoffs and opportunities for management; the class prioritizes science communication skills.

Feminist Studies

FEMST 30, Women, Development, and Globalization 

Examines the impact of development policy and globalization on women’s lives. Emphasis is placed on women’s activism and feminist critiques of neo-liberal measures intended to rid the third world of poverty.

Film and Media Studies

FLMST 75, Introduction to Environmental Media 

What are all the ways media and the environment influence, structure and inhabit each other? How are environmental issues figured in documentary and feature films, advertising, and the internet? How does media affect the environment, e.g., the problem of e-debris?

FLMST 182, Introduction to Environmental Media 

Ties the acquisition of critical viewing skills for film to the practice of conceiving and writing short environmental documentaries. Students screen narrative films and documentaries, deconstruct them, and use their new proficiency to write their own documentary treatments.

FLMST 183, Film and Media of the Natural and Human Environment 

Presents popular films, professional documentaries representing trends, images, and issues associated with natural and human environments. Visual images and critical thinking skills are combined to enhance understanding of media presentation of environmental issues. May be linked to short creative projects.

FLMST 187ND, Narrating Deep Time

Can we tell stories that span 1,000 or 10,000 years? Can an individual’s affect be contextualized not only by her immediate environment but by the epoch in which she lives? What formal techniques—time lapse, montage, allegory—can be used to convey that our creaturely fragility is shared not only with species contemporaneous to us, but with species extinct before we ever knew them?

Perceptions of geological time—what this course will refer to as “deep time”—systematically developed since the mid-1700s, are especially relevant for our contemporary moment defined by environmental crises of long duration. Attempts to predict anthropogenic climate change 100 years into the future; the redefinition of our era as the “Anthropocene,” an epoch in which humans have become a geological force; the production of radioactive waste whose half-life is measured in millennia: these and other environmental dilemmas require a flexible repertoire of narrative tools if we are to comprehend our current and lasting impact on the planet. Yet, as Rob Nixon has noted, “slow violence”—impacts that are temporally and geographically diffuse—is difficult to narrate, not least because of our short attention spans and distraction by the spectacular. This course places the contemporary turn toward “big temporal thinking” within a larger discourse of deep time and attempts to narrate the longue durée.

Geography

GEOG 2, World Regions

An examination of the interdependency, connectivity and diversity that characterizes world regions. The course explores the interactions of processes of global change with the environmental and social identities of individual landscapes, cities, and peoples.

GEOG 3A, Oceans and Atmosphere

Introduction to the oceans and atmosphere and their role in the Earth’s climate and its weather patterns. Focus on the flows of solar energy through the ocean and atmosphere systems. Human impacts on the Earth’s climate are also introduced.

GEOG 3B, Land, Water, and Life

Study of the interactions among water, landforms, soil, and vegetation that create and modify the surface of the Earth. Impacts of physical environment on human societies and humans as agents of environmental change.

GEOG 5, People, Place, and Environment 

Survey of spatial differentiation and organization of human activity and interaction with the Earth’s biophysical systems. Sample topics include human spatial decision-making behavior, migration, population growth, economic development, industrial location, urbanization, and human impacts on the natural environment.

GEOG 7, Energy, Water, and Climate

Oil and water are two strategic resources dominating the international scene. This class provides an overview of global distributions of oil and water resources and analyzes some of the social, economic, and geopolitical ramifications of these distributions.

GEOG 8, Living with Global Warming 

Overview of global warming and climate change processes. Description of complex relationships between scientific, technological, economic, social, political and historical facets of global warming and climate change. Introduction to the concept and practice of climate modeling.

GEOG 104, Physical Geography of the World’s Oceans 

Introduction to the processes which control the circulation of the world’s oceans. Topics include: wind-driven circulation, thermohaline circulation, water masses, waves, and tides.

GEOG 108, Urban Geography

Introduction to the study of the economic geography of cities and regions and its relation to planning: urbanization, internal structure of cities, settlement systems, regional growth and development, migration, transportation, housing.

GEOG 109, Economic Geography

Introduction to the study of spatial economic theories with applications at the urban, regional, and global scales. Topics include settlement system dynamics and regional development, land economics and land use policies, and regional inequality and poverty.

GEOG 112, Environmental Hydrology

Analysis of the water cycle with emphasis on land-atmosphere interactions, precipitation-runoff, flood, snow melt, and infiltration processes.

GEOG 119, Climatic Change and Its Consequences

Mechanisms and processes which produce climate change. Methods for reconstructing paleo-climates. Impacts of past climate change on human societies.

GEOG 130, The Urban Environment 

Environment and climate of cities, suburbs, and other settlements, focusing on the built environment, soils, water, solar radiation, atmosphere, vegetation, and human thermal comfort. Students produce field reports on a range of sites along an urban to exurban gradient.

GEOG 135S, Intense Mock Environmental Summit

Mock summit in which students act as representatives of different countries participating in environmental treaty negotiations. This three-week course immerses students in the topic of global change and its associated policies, mimicking pressures and intensity at real environmental summits.

GEOG 140, Environmental Impacts in Human History

Interactions between human history and the environment are explored. Example topics include early Earth history, long term climate change, the origin of agriculture, short term climate change, the origin of importance of disease and invasive species.

GEOG 141A, Population Geography

Various geographic dimensions of human population dynamics: fertility, mortality, and migration. The concepts and language of demography are introduced. The causes and consequences of population dynamics are investigated, including links among population, environment, and development.

GEOG 152: Health Geography 

Geographic approaches to health, disease, and well-being, with an emphasis on health disparities and inequalities. Topics include social determinants of health, migration, the natural and built environment, vaccines, development, and globalization and health.

GEOG 153C, Environmental Perception and Cognition

Research and theory on human perception and cognition of environments. Topics include spatial perception, spatial learning, knowledge structures, navigation and wayfinding, language and spatial cognition, map use, the spatial skills of special populations, and other issues.

GEOG 161, World Agriculture, Food, and Population

Evolution, current status, and alternative futures of agriculture, food and population worldwide. Achieving environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable food systems; soil, water, crops, energy and labor; diversity, stability and ecosystems management; farmer and scientist knowledge and collaboration; common property management.

GEOG 171BT, Biotechnology, Food, and Agriculture

Social, cultural, ethical, biological, and environmental issues surrounding biotechnology (BT) and food systems. Includes theory and method of BT; scientific, social, and political control of BT; effect of BT on genetic diversity, small-scale farmers, environment, food supply, consumer health.

GEOG 171FP, Small-Scale Food Production 

Biological, ecological, social, and economic principles of small-scale food production and their practical applications. Includes each student cultivating a garden plot; lab exercises, field trips to local farms and gardens.

GEOG 175, Measuring our Environment

Introduction to measurement and interpretation of physical-environmental data (temperature, humidity, precipitation) and integrated environmental measures (e.g. potential evapotranspiration). Working with micrometeorological towers deployed across an environmental gradient, students develop and test hypothesis using real-time tower data.

GEOG 182, Global Cities in the Information Age

Study of the economic, social, and political networks that link together cities of global importance. Specializations and roles of global cities in the information age economy. Examination of individual cities at the top tiers of the global urban hierarchy.

GEOG 185A, Geography Planning and Policy Making

Relevance of geographic knowledge and skills to aspects of planning and policy making. Includes review of core concepts in decision making, planning theory, systems analysis, information systems, urban and regional modeling, forecasting, impact analysis, implementation of decisions, planning policies.

GEOG 185D, Urban and Environmental System Analysis

Applications of operations research techniques and decision analysis in structuring approaches to urban and environmental problems. Examples are drawn from problems in facility location, regional models, transportation and other networks, utility corridors and similar problems.

GEOG 195KG: Smart Green Cities 

Smart Cities promote social and human capital, support a more competitive economy, expand participation in government, increase access to opportunities, and protect natural resources. Smart technology, including self-driving cars, can help us save lives, decrease pollutant emissions, and use resources in a sustainable way. Which technologies are smart, and can they achieve sustainable pathways? Which cities have done this and how? Are Smart Cities sustainable and resilient? This course will answer these questions by examining real-life experiments, review current technologies, and explore future developments using scientific papers, popular press, and online media.

Germanic Studies

GER 179A, Revolutions: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

This class is focused on close reading of English translations of the original texts from the pivotal German authors Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, alongside which for guidance we will be reading and discussing crucial texts from literary criticism, critical social theory, and modern philosophy. Reading these texts will teach us a lot about reading, interpreting, and writing about any other text—for example literature, fiction, history, and finally society and social, institutional practices treated as social texts. Substantive discussions will also revolve around my work at the United Nations and within the Climate Justice Movement. What are the implications of these authors in the arena of climate change policy, politics, and ethics?

Global Studies

GLOBL 2: Global Socioeconomic and Political Processes

Examination of contemporary social, economic, political, and environmental change in a global context; the emergence of a global economy and new systems of world order; and the debate over “globalization” and whether or not it is desireable.

GLOBL110: Global Culture and Ethics

Explores connections over the last century between global cultural developments and the quest for normative values on a global level. Topics include the communications revolution, cultural ideologies, international migrations and diasporas, the human rights movement, and new cosmopolitanisms.

GLOBL 111: Human Rights and World Order

This course will analyze theories, patterns, cases, and causes of human rights violations throughout the world. What are the international human rights standards? What remedies are available at the global, national, social, and individual levels?

GLOBL 120: Global Ideologies and World Order

Deals with conceptions of the world as a unitary political system and how these views come into confrontation with one another. Topics include the nation-state system, political ideologies, international organizations, global conflict, and the emergent civil society.

GLOBL 130: Global Economy and Development

Examines recent theories and perspectives on global political economy and development studies. Topics include, among others, the new global economy, transnational corporations, transnational labor markets, international trade and finance, social and economic development, and North-South relations.

GLOBL 159: Globalization and Culture

Discusses historical themes, oriental globalization and East- West osmosis, and theoretical perspectives. Topics include the clash of civilizations, McDonaldization, and hybridity narratives; and ethnicity, multiculturalism in different cultural settings, and global multiculture.

GLOBL 161, Global Environmental Policy and Politics

The evolution of international environmental negotiations, agreements, and organizations, and the role governmental and non-governmental actors are playing in shaping them are examined. Climate change, biodiversity conservation, and equitable global sustainable development are among the critical policy challenges considered.

GLOBL 167, Global Cities and Transnational Urbanism 

Explores the constitution of spaces and habitats of urban class structures, built forms, and kinds of expressive life at the intersection of global processes, governance formations and social movements. In particular, the focus is on mega-cities of the global south, as hubs of transnational commerce, ideology, culture, and power.

GLOBL 171, Global Environmental Law and Policy

A focus on global environmental problems in our time, particularly climate change and its impact on resource scarcity, human security, energy geopolitics, and democracy in an unevenly structured world system, including the search for world order solutions.

GLOBL 174: Global Perspectives on Environment and Society 

Introduces interdisciplinary approaches to analyzing societal interactions with the environment, and highlights political, economic and cultural processes that shape (and are shaped by) the environment. Topical coverage includes conservation, food, energy, climate, pollution and global industrial production. The class assignments emphasize critical evaluation of specific social-environmental problems and the ideas, policies and practices that people engage in addressing them.

History

HIST 20, Science, Technology, and Medicine in Modern Society

Explores how science, technology and/or medicine have helped shape modern societies (roughly 1850-present). Themes include formation of scientific and technical communities, the interactions of science with political and popular culture, and the social context of knowledge production.

HIST 74: Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice in a Global Context

Historical and interdisciplinary perspectives on poverty and inequality globally and in the U.S., tracing structural transformations, shifting modes of thought, policy, and action, dynamics of class, racial, gender, ethnic and geographic stratification, and major theoretical debates from antiquity through the present. Course features guest lectures to introduce students to varied conceptual and methodological approaches to studying poverty and inequality, and draws on readings, discussion, writing, and related assignments to explore issues within a social justice framework.

HIST 105A, The Atomic Age

The history of military uses of nuclear energy and the attendant problems. Topics included: Manhattan project, decision to use the bomb, legislation, AEC, arms race, testing, fallout, civil defense, disarmament efforts, foreign programs, espionage.

HIST 106B: The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800

The history of science in the West from Copernicus to Lavoisier: the transition from medieval, theocentric views of human nature and its operation to secular and mechanistic views in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the transition from natural philosophy to science. The role of science in Western culture.

HIST 107C, The Darwinian Revolution and Modern Biology 

Examines the social and scientific impacts of evolutionary ideas from around 1800 through Charles Darwin, the modern evolutionary synthesis, the birth of ecology, and molecular biology. Focus is on America and Western Europe.

HIST 107E, History of Animal Use in Science 

Examines history of scientific uses of animals from antiquity to the present. Topics include vivisection, field trials, and the development of drugs and vaccines. Changing ethical ideas about animals, including the relationship between animal rights and environmental ethics, is also considered.

HIST 107G, History of Global Environmental Problems 

Survey of global environmental problems from antiquity to the present. Topics include demography, agriculture, climate change, disease, and storage of toxic waste.

HIST 107P, Proseminar on Darwinism and Its Social Implications 

Evolution, natural selection, religion, teleology, social darwinism, using the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, and William Graham Sumner.

HIST 107R, History of Ecological Restoration 

An examination through case studies of ecological restoration from a historical perspective featuring the intersection between the historian and the restoration process. Consideration of the definition of natural and cultural resources and historical artifacts.

HIST 108O, History of the Oceans

Explores how people have experienced, understood, transformed, and attempted to conserve the world’s oceans throughout human history. Interdisciplinary approach includes aspects of science, technology, politics, law, culture, and material biophysical relationships.

HIST 108W, Wildlife in America 

Explores the turbulent, contested, and colorful history of human interactions with wild animals in North America from the Pleistocene to the present. Readings will explore historical changes in science, politics, law, management, and cultural ideas about nature.

HIST 109, Science and Technology in America

Science and technology in American intellectual, cultural, religious, and political life with focus on 19th/20th centuries. Examples include rise of scientific enterprise and infrastructure; technology and America’s economic growth; American research styles; science and the military; space program; environmentalism; biotechnology.

HIST 109T, Technology in Modern American History

Surveys social history of technology in American life with attention to 19th and 20th centuries. Focuses on history of U.S. industrialization, the place of innovation in U.S. history, and role of technology in intellectual, political, and social life.

HIST 117E. Society and Nature in the Middle Ages 

Human-environmental interaction from the fall of Rome to environmental and epidemiological disasters of the fourteenth century. Topics include agricultural impact on the environment, introduction of new animal species to northern Europe, and selective breeding of livestock and plant life.

HIST 148AU, African Urban History: From the Ancient City State to the Contemporary Metropolis

The changing meaning of African urbanity from historical case studies and more contemporary cityscapes through particular themes, such as statecraft, ideology, production, political economies of wealth and poverty, cultural performativity, politics and hegemony, labor migrancy and the rural-urban nexus.

HIST 173T, American Environmental History

Traces the history of American attitudes and behavior toward nature. Focus on wilderness, the conservation movement, and modern forms of environmentalism.

HIST 178B, American Urban History

A study of the political, economic, social, and intellectual impact of the city upon American history, and the impact of history upon the growth of American urbanization.

HIST 193F, Food in World History 

Explores the cultural, economic, and geopolitical roles of food and drink in world history. Topics include: trade, production, and consumption; global food chains; morality and food reform; identities and body image; scarcity, food scares, and food security.

Interdisciplinary

INT 84JC, Drinking Water for the 21st Century

The demand for drinking and irrigation water has soared in recent years creating supply problems globally. The 20th century solution, dam building, has lost its place among planners. New solutions, including conservation, recycling wastewater, and managed aquifer recharge, have become primary methods for meeting the new demand. This class will examine a recent book by Charles Fishman, “The Big Thirst,” that lays out this problem well and offers a solution.

INT 91, Interdisciplinary Issues in Aquatic Sciences and Policy 

A seminar-style course examining biological, environmental, political, and economic issues in aquatic topics, including oceanography, marine pharmacology and biotechnology, coastal geology and coastal processes, fisheries, and ocean policy.

INT 94CE: What’s Up with Global Climate Change?

A description of the state of the climate system, its natural and human-induced variability; the impacts of human activities, the predicted long-term changes and impacts and those that are already observed; a presentation and an analysis of the Kyoto protocol and other actions that are proposed or could be taken to limit human-induced greenhouse gases emissions into the atmosphere. The class will be a combination of lectures and active participation by students in the form of software simulations, classroom presentations, student collaboration and discussion on possible climate remediation actions.

INT 94BZ, Genetic Modification of Food Crops

The seminar will explore the implications of genetic modification of our food crops with special emphasis on the application of recombinant DNA technology for crop improvement. The scientific basis of these technologies will be explained at the level of a non-science major. Course materials will include articles from the popular scientific press concerning the dangers and benefits of genetically modified crops. The potential impact of GMO crops (both good and bad) on agriculture in developing countries will also be covered.

INT 94HU, Food and Religion

This seminar is an introduction to the study of religion based on the role food plays in myths and rituals. Attention will be given to the place of food in religions of hunting and gathering people, ancient civilizations, India, and in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

INT 94JS, A Walk in the Woods

This seminar will introduce students new to UCSB and the Santa Barbara area to the landscape and flora of the Santa Ynez Mountains. These mountains provide a spectacular backdrop, reaching just over 4,000 feet in elevation, and yet few UCSB students take advantage of the incredible recreational and natural history opportunities they offer. This all-day seminar will begin with a stop at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden to introduce students to some of the plants we will see on our hike. We will then drive to the Tunnel trailhead and begin our hike. One focus of the hike will be to monitor changes in plant communities, landscapes, and the geological substrate as we ascend.

INT 94LV, Biotechnology and Society

This course will cover topics including the high cost of drugs, finding a cure for cancer, genetically modified organisms, genetic profiling, gene therapy, cloning, stem cells, forensic biology, biotechnology and global warming, and will conclude with a “field trip” to a research lab.

INT 940S, Climate Justice for Beginners

This seminar will explore alternative ways to analyze and confront the planetary climate crisis, including how to understand the crisis, the global climate justice movements that are seeking solutions, the prospects of mounting successful climate justice campaigns both in the United States and globally, and strategies for organizing such movements.

INT 94PD: Understanding the Global Energy and Climate Systems to best invest in our Future 

Desires for energy independence for both economic and political reasons and plans to mitigate climate change are influencing the design of the US energy policy for the upcoming decades.  The choices made now will impact many aspects of our lives, and more importantly our future economic growth and environmental wellbeing. These decisions will require a population with a solid knowledge and understanding of the various options available and their potential consequences. The knowledge of the technical details of some of those options is also crucial for individuals to make personal decisions of energy type to use or the efficiency solutions to adapt and even to invest in the energy future.

INT 94PF, Tales of the City

The city is the key space of modernity, at the same time a place of excitement and narcosis, crowds and solitude.  In this seminar we will read texts that represent the city and urban experience in all its complexity and contradictions. The readings include texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Rhys, Emile Zola, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Carver. Through the readings we will discuss the figure of the flaneur, the spectacle, consumerism, and the presence of women in public space.

INT 94QB, Imaging and Imagining Sea Level Rise

How do different communities from the populations of sinking islands to the residents of coastal California experience, visually represent, and respond to sea level rise?  In conjunction with this year’s Critical Issues in America theme of sea level rise, students will meet as a group and attend film screenings, guest lectures, and other special events.

INT 94QE, Mono Lake, Owens Valley, and LA’s Water Supply

This seminar will introduce the history of the LA water supply starting with the construction of the LA Aqueduct, followed by a discussion of the Mono Lake ‘public trust’ court case and efforts to increase water reuse in the basin.  The class will include a 3-day field trip (Early Friday to Late Sunday) to Mono Basin to exam the aqueduct and tour Mono Lake.  We will stay at the UC reserve station, SNARL.

INT 94QS, Eating for Earth: Our Diets and Global Climate Change

This seminar explores the relationship between our food choices and global climate change by answering the questions: What determines the greenhouse gas emissions of our food? How can we make informed food choices that minimize greenhouse gas emissions? How can we encourage changes in attitudes, behaviors and policies to support more climate friendly food choices? What are other effects will change to a more climate friendly diet have? The seminar will include field trips to nearby agrifood sites. There will be discussion of assigned readings and written assignments.

INT 94QU, Waste

Waste, in modern societies, appears as a nuisance, a problem needing solution. Depending on its form and circumstance, trash is something to be discarded, removed, treated, collected, destroyed, concealed, recycled, managed and above all controlled. From sewage to garbage to e-waste, this course considers the historical, cultural, and technological dimensions of rubbish.

INT 94QW, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Why did the German Greens Become the Most Sucessful Environmental Party in the World?

In this seminar we will start by studying how Germans conceived of “nature” from the Romantic period of the early 1800s through industrialization and World War I to the Nazi period. After discussing “How green were the Nazis?” we will investigate the origins of the postwar environmental movement in the 1960s, the founding of the German Green Party in 1979, and its success winning seats in the national parliament in 1983.  What personalities, topics and events contributed to its early success? What problems did it have to overcome before it became part of a national governing coalition from 1998 to 2005? For this period we will examine election posters and speeches, and biographies of prominent individuals to see what made the party able to create a core constituency of voters.

INT 156BE: Bio-Medical Ethics

Moral, social, and legal questions surrounding the practice of medicine and related sciences. Topics may include patient’s rights, ethical duties of doctors, stem cell research, end of life care, and physician assisted suicide.

INT 156EE, Environmental Ethics 

Environmental Ethics probes questions of duty and policy regarding human impact on the natural world. Topics such as climate change, sustainable economics, population explosion, and the standing of non-human animals are examined from various perspectives.

INT 185AB, Ancient Borderlands 

Seminar hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and focused on selected topics, texts, theories, and/or methods in the humanities. See IHC website (www.ihc.ucsb.edu) for current listings.

INT 185HE, History and Ecological Restoration 

Seminar hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and focused on selected topics, texts, theories, and/or methods in the humanities. See IHC website (www.ihc.ucsb.edu) for current listings

Political Science

POL S 161: US Minority Politics

A comparative study of recent literature on the historical and contemporary political experiences of the four major racial and ethnic minority groups (Blacks/African Americans, American Indians, Latinos/Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans) and their interactions with the dominant racial group (non-Hispanic white Americans) in the U.S.

POLI SCI 175, Politics of the Environment

Analysis of environmental policy issues and their treatment in the political process. Discussion of the interplay of substantive issues, ideology, institutions, and private groups in the development, management, protection, and preservation of natural resources and the natural environment.

POLI SCI 177, Comparative Environmental Politics 

Course is structured around the major issues in environmental politics, for example: global warming, nuclear waste, deforestation, and chemical pollution. The roles of economics, technology and social organization are each considered as explanatory variables for understanding environmental problems.

POL S 196: Senior Seminar on Nuclear War and International Society

Religious Studies

RG ST 128C, The Sacred Geography of the Ancient Mediterranean World 

A survey of religious sites in paganism, early Christianity, ancient Judaism, and early Islam. After general introduction to the sites, theoretical approaches to sacred space and ritual, and research methods for archaeological materials, students produce research papers and oral presentations on individual sites.

RG ST 128D, The Transformation of the Late Antique City 

Examines the transition of eastern Mediterranean society from the pagan Roman empire to Christian late antiquity and the early Islamic period, with a special focus on the reuse of civic space, monumental programs, and ritual practices.

RG ST 156EE, Environmental Ethics 

Environmental Ethics probes questions of duty and policy regarding human impact on the natural world. Topics such as climate change, sustainable economics, population explosion, and the standing of non-human animals are examined from various perspectives.

RGST185: Food, Religion, and Culture in the Middle East

Explores the significance of foods in the religious and cultural life of Middle Eastern peoples. Focuses on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim feasting, fasting, and dietary rules. Includes culinary traditions of Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Israeli ethnic groups, and related topics.

RG ST 193, Religion and Ecology in the Americas 

An overview of the growing field of religion and ecology in the Americas. Focus on spiritual traditions and landbased knowledge indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.

Sociology

SOC 105E, Environmental Sociology 

Traces the history of environmentalism and applies social science theories, concepts, and methods to analyze critical contemporary environmental issues and societal responses to them.

SOC 118CW, Consumption, Waste, and the Environment

Examines the link between consumption, waste, and the environment. Integrates environmental concerns with larger cultural questions about the role that consumption, as a way of life, has come to occupy in our contemporary societies.

SOC 126, Urban Society

Problems of the city, (e.g., congestion, homelessness, violence) are examined in light of larger economic and social forces which structure urban life. Through use of slides depicting urban settings, causes and consequences of different ways urban settlements have been organized are considered.

SOC 126U, Sociology of the Urban Underclass

This course examines conservative, liberal, and radical perspectives on class, poverty, and race, and will allow a critical assessment of the social and political implications of the growing congruity between urban poverty and race.

SOC 130SG: Sociology of Globalization

Introduction to the sociological study of globalization. Survey of principal theories and debates in globalization studies with a focus on economic, political, and cultural transnational processes, gender/race/class and globalization, transnational social movements, and local-global linkages.

SOC 134A: Activism

Explores the phenomenon and experience of activism – the effort by ordinary people to make deep social change – both in the United States and on a global level, with an emphasis on recent and current events.

SOC 134CJ, Climate Justice

Overview of the climate change problem and exploration of the meanings of the term “climate justice” as used by scholars and social movement activists to imagine and create a sustainable, equitable, democratic world for future generations.

SOC 134EC, Earth in Crisis

Explores the causes and consequences of climate change on a global scale, covering the state of the science in layman’s terms, the current and future social impacts of climate change, the global negotiations process, and climate justice activism.

SOC 134G, Green Movements and Green Parties

Examines how environmental organizations and green political parties are shaping policy formulation on environmental issues in different developed and developing countries, with a focus on the US experience.

SOC 185DG: Theories of Globalization and Development

Analyzes major trends in development and globalization thinking/policy. Discusses theories in political economy through modernization theory, dependency, alternative development, neoliberalism, human development and post- development. Addresses ongoing debates on globalization, and the rise of Asia and emerging societies.

Theatre and Dance

THDANCE 151D, Environmental Choreography

A process-oriented study of scoring, designing, and performing dance works in natural landscapes.

Writing Program

WRIT 105S, Writing About Sustainability

Analysis and practice of various forms of writing that address sustainability in interdisciplinary contexts. Students will research, write, and reflect on concepts and practices of sustainability, examining the role of words and images in communicating sustainability ideas to diverse audiences.

WRIT 105SW, Science Writing for the Public 

Focus on analyzing, practicing, and applying strategies for communicating scientific concepts, research projects, and findings with non-specialist audiences. Students will employ both traditional and new media forms of communicating scientific knowledge.

WRIT 107EP: Writing for Environmental Professions 

Analysis and practice of professional writing in addressing environmental topics such as water management, carbon neutrality, or sustainability. Attention to research methods, audience analysis, document design, conciseness, collaboration, and editing strategies.

WRIT 109ES, Writing for Environmental Studies 

Analysis and practice of various forms of academic and professional writing for and in the disciplines.