Graduate Courses

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

ANTH 234: Advanced Evolutionary Psychology

Interdepartmental research practicum in evolutionary psychology, biology, and anthropology for students and faculty planning or working on evolutionary research projects. Focus on experimental design, cross-cultural methods, organism design theory, new adaptationist hypotheses, and the criteria for testing them.

ANTH 241, Contemporary Topics in Biological Anthropology

Read and discuss professional literature in biological anthropology and related fields: evolutionary and life history theory, human biology, paleoanthropology, biomedical science and primatology. Course keeps students abreast of key developments in the field.

ANTH 250JP, Ethnology in Agriculture, Farm Labor and Rural Communities

Topics will vary. A discussion of general problems in anthropology.

ANTH 252, Environmental Anthropology

ANTH 257, Human Behavioral Ecology Theory and Method

Focuses on foraging, mate choice, parenting, life history, time use, cooperation, and culture by examining key articles, thereby providing an overview of the major theoretical issues, methods, and data in human evolutionary ecology.

ANTH 266FP, Small-Scale Food Production

Practical application of biological, ecological, social, and economic principles of small-scale food production. Includes each student cultivating a garden plot; field trips to local farms and gardens.

C LIT 252, Aesthetics

Readings range from german aesthetic philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Schiller, F.W. Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzche) to postmodernist response to the “death of art,” and deal not only with attitude, taste, and quality, but their recent transformations into scanning, estragement, shock, etc.

ECON 260A, Natural Resources

Capital theory and welfare economics applied to the primarily dynamic questions concerning the uses of nonrenewable resources such as minerals, the use of renewable resources such as fisheries and forests, and the preservation of species and natural environments.

ECON 260B, Environmental Economics

The primarily static theory of externalities and their correction. Covers basic theory of public bads and externalities, regulation theory related to environmental problems and applications, the valuation of environmental goods, transboundary pollution, and international trade and the environment.

ECON 260C, Collective Action and Open Access

Collective action problems addressing open access losses, including uncertainty, heterogeneous parties and information costs. Covers timing and nature of regulation and the assignment of property rights. Empirical topics include; water, air pollution, oil and gas extraction, and climate change.

ECON 265, Environmental and Natural Resource Economics: Collective Action and Open Access

Collective action problems addressing open access losses, including uncertainty, heterogeneous parties, and information costs. Covers timing and nature of regulation and the assignment of property rights. Empirical topics include water, fisheries, air pollution, oil and gas extraction, and global warming.

ECON 594ER. Special Topics in Economics – Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

This workshop is intended to help PhD students seeking to develop dissertation topics or advance their dissertation research on environmental topics.

EARTH 205, Earth’s Climate

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.

ENGL 231, Studies in Renaissance Literature: Reading the Renaissance, Greenly

ENGL 231, Studies in Renaissance Literature: Milton and Ecology

In addition to providing a introduction to Milton’s poetry and prose, as well as covering most of the 17th-century works on the First Qualifying Exam for Renaissance, this course (not surprisingly) approaches Milton’s major works ecocritically.

ENGL 232, Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Nature and Value in Eighteenth Century British Culture

Is there an early modern history of environmentalism? What did “nature” mean in the 18th century, and how was it valued? How did people conceive of non-human agency in the early modern period? Who could “speak for” natural entities, and how? Questions like these — ethical, historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political — will be explored in a variety of genres by Swift, Pope, Darwin, Leapor, Collier, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Goethe, among others.

ENGL 232: Ecocriticism

Old and new values associated with natural entities and systems, with human and non-human others, sometimes overlapped and sometimes collided in the long eighteenth century (1650-1800). Our readings and discussions will examine how these differing values were laminated across and throughout Anglophone literature and culture. The early modern texts we’ll be reading together raise issues that also resonate in the 21st century — from colonial biopiracy to domestic pet-making, from contested wasteland ‘reclamation’ to the English Garden aesthetic, from local debates over rights of common and enclosure to plantation-slavery management models, from anthropocentrist ‘natural capital’ to imagined scenarios of entanglement and strange agencies that decenter ‘value’ altogether. Genres include prose fictions, travel narratives, long poems, natural histories, with secondary reading in recent ecocriticism and ecophilosophy.

ENGL 232, Studies in Restoration and 18th Century Literature: Writing Early Modern Nature

ENGL 233, Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romantic Landscape

This course concentrates on the writings of the Wordsworth circle and the paintings and watercolors of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. The course also includes a unit on late 20th-century “land artists,” particularly the “new romantic” nature installations of Andy Goldsworthy and performance or sculptural “walks” of Richard Long. A final unit is devoted to “Alternative Approaches to Landscape (Biocultural, Ecocritical, Technological, and Media)” in order to foreground experimental understandings of the concept of landscape—including anthropological, evolutionary-psychological, ecocritical, geographical, and technological hypotheses.

ENGL 233, Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Darwin and the Victorian Novel

This is a course on the impact of Darwin’s version of evolutionary theory on the fiction of the later nineteenth century. The impact was as rich and various as it was profound, raising fundamental questions about who we are as a species, how special we are, why we “do good,” why we fall in love, what freedom we have, what cosmological narrative (if any) we inhabit, and what control we have over our lives and the course of history.

ENGL 233, Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Darwin’s Culture

This course will read Victorian literature from a Darwinian perspective. We will read Darwin himself, then consider the culture from which Darwin emerged, reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Then we will consider the impact of evolutionary theory on religion, medicine and political reform, and theories of class and inheritance. And, because we are still in “Darwin’s culture,” we will begin and end with post-modern fiction about Victorian science.

ENGL 233: Introduction to the Medical Humanities

ENGL 234, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature: Utopia and Ecology

This course explores the relationships between ecological and utopian thought, beginning with two classical utopias, Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, before considering how nineteenth century writers imaginatively experiment with the “well nigh utopian dignity” of indigenous peoples, islands, and vegetarians. We will also consider early twentieth century utopian visions of scientific ecologists engineering a new ecological and social order, and finally, we will consider utopia at this time of climate change.

ENGL 234 Studies in Twentieth Century Literature: Time, Space, and Ecology

In this course, we will explore the ways in which writers, filmmakers, and theorists imagine and negotiate time and space as they try to gain critical grips on this moment of ecological and social upheaval. Specific topics that we will look at will include: time, space, and the other; national communities; global scale and the common; the future, loss and the past; deep time and cataclysmic, irregular time; narratives of progress; and utopian imagination. Given our concern for ecology, we will also pay attention to how inhuman and nonhuman forces appear and disappear in the measures of time and space provided by these materials.

ENGL 234, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature: Soma, Energy, Modernism

ENGL 234, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature: Utopia and the Environment

In this seminar, we will look at the following utopian preoccupations throughout the course: the making of cross-cultural, transnational, and multi species communities and friendships; reconciling ecology and economy; utopia, the state, and empire; vegetarianism; utopias of (or against) science and technology; utopian islands and indigenous peoples; environmental and social engineering, as well as considering the meanings, possibilities, and workings of utopia.

ENGL 235, American Romanticism and Environmental Imagination

This course has multiple goals and will span a broad period from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Our first intellectual venture will be to arrive at a flexible but historically grounded definition of US/American Romanticism; we will use this concept as a means of exploring the interplay of environmental values and representations in North American literatures and political rhetoric. In the process of analyzing how Romanticism has impacted environmental representation and politics, we will initiate a critique of the preservationist and ecocritical movements.

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Animal Matters: Animality, Materiality, Technology

The seminar will question what role philosophy has played in establishing a sacrificial economy that allows for the non-criminal putting to death of the animal. We shall then open a counter-tradition that situates the suffering of animals within the contemporary thinking of the ethics of absolute otherness. What is the relation between animal life and bare life? And in what sense is the category of “animal rights” always implicated in a discursive violence that founds the very category of human rights?

ENGL 236 Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Animal Theory

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Animality and Materiality in Contemporary Theory

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Landscape and the Social Imaginary: Romantic Landscape and Cyberspace

This course attends to the specificity of Romantic landscape in the so-called British “long 18th century” or “great century.” This course will focus on exploring several complex instances of landscape imagination in digital media-ranging from textual to immersive environments-within an intellectual context that spans from Romanticism to postmodernity. The wager of the course is that we can learn something about the use of landscape as a major form of the social imaginary if we juxtapose Romantic poets and artists “walking” through nature and contemporary poets and artists “browsing” or “navigating” through networks.

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Indigenous Literatures and Environmental Politics

In this course, we will consider the genealogies, possibilities and predicaments of writing about indigenous peoples in ecology. In this course, we will try to negotiate the problem of too easily embracing and speaking about indigenous approaches in ecology with the problem of too easily dismissing indigenous struggles in ecology as romantic, colonial constructions.

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Textuality and New Media Ecologies, 1600-2000

This course will study “new media texts” (texts and reading practices responsive to new media ecologies) with attention both to larger cultural/theoretical issues and a succession of specific case studies from the Early Modern to contemporary periods. The framework portion of the course will study the historical transitions and interfaces between orality, writing, print, images, and, most recently, digital new media.

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: 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. The second half of the course will consider works from modern ecocritics (beginning in the 1960s and ’70s with Lynn White Jr., Leo Marx, Carolyn Merchant, Keith Thomas, and Raymond Williams, and ending with the ongoing explosion of interest in the field in the 21st century) with an eye to directly applying this theory to the reading of texts.

ENGL 236, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Science Studies and the Cultures of Environmentalism

In this seminar, we will chart how strong metaphors from science and technology studies are transforming environmental thought. Course readings focus on the theoretical contributions of science and technology studies from the 1970s to the present. Course projects consider how these theories enable critical and artistic response to environmental crises, in particular global climate change, environmental illness, and genetic engineering.

ENGL 265HS, Seminar in Special Topics: Sea Change

This seminar will focus on the topic of marine environmental history, broadly conceived. This includes ecological, cultural, and contemporary history, as well as the use of historical knowledge in current ocean politics, policy, and management.

ENGL 274ABC, American Cultures and Global Contexts: Global Ecologies

We will read a series of critical, theoretical, and fictional texts addressing ecological alternatives to global capitalism, global resource exploitation (including the exploitation of laborers denied human rights and standing as human), the discourses of global warming and problems of imagining/representing the biosphere in literature and film as well as politics and science.

ENGL 594FE, American Cultures Center Colloquium: Food Futures

This colloquium will investigate the recent past and will speculate on the future horizons of food studies: an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that offers exciting possibilities for cultural studies generally and for environmental criticism specifically. Our goal will be to understand the methods and materials that have defined this field during the past several years and here we will focus on the work of leading food scholars in Sociology, Anthropology, and American Studies. We will also consider how class and consumption, late capitalism, and environmental justice may inform new scholarship in the field, and will work collaboratively to imagine future lines of inquiry for the field.

ENV S 257, 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. Graduate students also write a grant proposal.

ESM 201, Ecology of Managed Ecosystems

Principles of individual ecology, population ecology, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology. Emphasis on applications (conservation, resources management, ecological effects of pollution and habitat fragmentation, etc.).

ESM 202, Environmental Biogeochemistry

Biogeochemical processes as applied to the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land and inland water, and applications to environmental issues such as eutrophication, toxic pollution, carbon sequestration and acidification.

ESM 204, Economics of Environmental Management

Environmental regulation (incentives, command, and control), asymmetric information (cost revelation and auditing), regulatory incidence, dynamics and discounting, exhaustible and renewable resources, valuation, environmental macroeconomics, trade and the environment, and comparative regulatory analysis.

ESM 207, Environmental Law and Policy

Basic elements of the legal system as it specifically relates to environmental issues. Study of the different stages and different institutions involved in environmental policy making.

ESM 210, Business and the Environment

Introduces students to business objectives and structure and discusses new business models and tools that incorporate principles of environmental management and corporate performance. It highlights corporate strategies that deliver value to shareholders while responding to environmental concerns.

ESM 211, Applied Population Ecology

Examination of the application of population ecology to conservation of rare species and management of harvested populations. Topics include population regulation, population viability analysis, fisheries management, metapopulation dynamics, and population monitoring.

ESM 215, Landscape Ecology

Relationship between spatial patterns in landscape structure (physical, biological, and cultural) and ecological processes. Role of ecosystem pattern in mass and energy transfers, disturbance regimes, species’ persistence, and applications of remote sensing and GIS for landscape characterization and modeling.

ESM 225, Water Policy

Explores key water policy issues in the context of science, technology, and the practical management of water systems. It focuses on the nexus of science, economics, law, and social and political factors play in the policy process.

ESM 226, Groundwater Management

Examines the principles and tools for groundwater management and stewardship of groundwater resources in the US and includes examples drawn from global groundwater management challenges.

ESM 229, Economics & Policy of Climate Change

This course will explore the economic impacts of climate change, design of optimal climate mitigation policies, and existing constraints on implementation of such policies. Emphasis on developing intuition on climate policy issues and familiarity with relevant analytical and statistical tools.

ESM 230, Strategic Planning for Non-Profit Ventures

This course is about strategic planning issues unique to non-profits. Provides an entrepreneurial perspective for charitable organizations, non-government organizations, social ventures and not-for-profit organizations. Topics include stakeholder analysis, the mission statement, strategic objectives and goals, board development, fiscal management and fundraising.

ESM 238, Climate Change Agreements and Politics

The seminar will provide students with a basic introduction to climate change politics and policy, combining an international relations and comparative politics approach. It will trace the evolution of the complex international climate change agreement signed by countries in 1992 (UNFCCC) and discuss the difficult collective action problem related to agreeing on a comprehensive global climate agreement by December 2015. The second part of the course will explore national climate and energy policy approaches of key countries, with an objective to learn lessons from experiences with different public policy instruments and emission reduction projects.

ESM 241, Environmental Politics and Policy

The politics of environmental policymaking from agenda formation to the stages of implementation, assessment, and reforms. Emphasis on national and state level policymaking in the U.S. coupled with a consideration of interactions across levels of social organization and comparisons across socio-political systems.

ESM 242, Natural Resource Economics and Policy

Economic principles and policy issues in the use of exhaustible and renewable resources including fossil fuels, water, minerals, fisheries, forests, and biodiversity. Management of resource markets on a regional or international scale.

ESM 243, Environmental Policy Analysis

Developing and analyzing environmental policies involves balancing social, political, and economic considerations. Course covers this process, including problem identification, formation of alternative policy response, and methods of analyzing and selecting the most appropriate policy response, and effective communications of results to clients/policymakers.

ESM 248, Environmental Institutions: Rights, Rules, and Decision-making Systems

Comparative study of management systems or regimes addressing natural resource and environmental concerns and operating at scales ranging from local to global. Topics include characterization of individual regimes and factors affecting the formation, evolution, and effectiveness of these institutional arrangements.

ESM 257, Coastal Marine Policy & Management

Conceptual approaches and analytical tools used in marine ecosystem management, marine biodiversity protection, and integrative watershed planning. Review of relevant international, federal and state marine policies and programs.

ESM 260, Applied Marine Ecology

The application of ecological principles and methods to environmental problems in marine ecosystems. Emphasis is placed on design and execution of field sampling and experiments to access biological impacts of antheiopogenic disturbances and restoration activities. Concepts illustrated with case studies.

ESM 269, Survey Design and Environmental Public Opinion

Issues of survey design, including sampling, questionnaire design, data collection and data processing. Students will design and field an original survey, analyze the survey data and report the results.

ESM 275, Principles and Practice of Environmental Planning

Principles, concepts, and techniques of environmental planning at the state, regional, and local government levels, with emphasis on emerging trends in addressing environmental problems. Green plans, sustainable communities, coastal planning, agricultural land preservation, smart development, new urbanism, and mitigation monitoring.

ESM 276, Ethical Decision-Making for the Environment

Ethical and legal issues surrounding environmental decision-making by individuals and in organizations. Environmental challenges facing public, non-profit and for-profit organizations. Analysis of behavior according to ethical standards; examination of opportunities for corporate social responsibility and initiatives; application of ethical frameworks to decision-making.

ESM 280, Organizations and Environmental Leadership

Individuals play an important role in leading organizations toward environmental sustainability and implementing cross-sector initiatives. Getting results in today’s complex world requires collectively influencing peers, managers and executives at a variety of organizational levels to bridge the gap between the values they hold and the conditions they face. Course participants learn about their own behaviors and build skills to more effectively influence environmental decision making within groups, organizations, networks and society. The course explores, theory, practice and skill-building.

ESM 281, Corporate Environmental Management

Prepares students to use creatively conceptual tools and management strategies to improve the environmental performance of firms. Corporate, societal, and political barriers to implementing these innovative strategies will be analyzed and methods for overcoming these constraints discussed.

ESM 283, Environmental Negotiation

Strategic negotiations take place daily. Their successful outcome depends on the competence of the negotiators. Using environmental case studies and negotiation exercises, course participants will gain a hands-on understanding of the negotiation process and how they can influence it.

ESM 294, Advanced Special Topics in Environmental Law

Advanced, special topics in environmental law.

ESM 294-1W- Land Use Law

While land use regulations in the United States date back more than a century, over the past few decades, land use laws made on the federal, state and local levels have made land use law and planning complex and challenging. The impacts of land use law are profound and shape the neighborhoods around us. It also has profound environmental consequences: land use law often decides the fate of open space available for recreation or wildlife habitat, the extent that urban runoff occurs, and the ways in which air pollution is concentrated. Further, land use law has broad implications across the economy.

ESM 294-1S, Natural Resources Law & Policy

This course examines the law and policy of how we use nature’s resources– from forests and fisheries to biodiversity and parks. We pay special attention to the historical and political origins of our competing ideas of why nature matters and what we should do with it, from economically productive use and outdoor recreation to preserving the natural world for its own sake. We also consider the complicated interplay of science and law.

ESM 296, Advanced Special Topics in Environmental Management

Advanced, special topics in environmental management.

ESM 296-1W, Organizational Behavior

This course will focus on organizational behavior and theory so that students can better understand the organizational contexts of the workplace and other institutions in society. Students will learn about group dynamics and how to become more effective group members. The course will help students understand how to predict, and respond to behavior of people in real world organizations. Through group interactions, students also will gain insights about their own strengths and weaknesses as leaders/managers. Students will learn how to lead environmental change in the organizations where they will work, and hone communication and persuasion skills necessary for their success.

ESM 296-3W, Environmental Leadership

Getting results in today’s complex world requires collectively influencing and motivating peers, managers and executives at a variety of organizational levels to take action in a world full of risk and complexity. This course will help class participants to refine their skills and become more effective communicators, motivators and creative problem solvers. Course topics will include presentation and communication techniques, framing skills, motivation and persuasion tools, leading without authority, network governance and negotiation skills.

ESM 296-5W, LAFF Intensive Course: The Use of Property Rights in Fisheries: Experiences and Recent Developments in Latin America

In this short course, we will review the theory and practice of the use of property rights to manage fisheries in developing countries, with a special emphasis in Latin America. The course will review the theoretical foundations of the use of property rights, in particular in the context of developing countries, such as the importance of illegal and unreported fishing and the use of taxes to fund management activities. We will look at some examples using simulations to show the effects of these topics on quota markets.

ESM 296-1S, Equity in the Managed Environment

This course aims to explore diverse dimensions of equity issues in resource management through a series of guest speakers, reading key literature, and in depth discussion of the topics. We will address a range of topics the draw from economics, political science, natural resources, and social sciences.

ESM 297, Advanced Special Topics in Environmental Policy

Advanced, special topics in environmental policy.

ESM 297-1S, Environmental Persuasion

Advanced, special topics in environmental policy.

ESM 297-2S, Global Environmental Politics

Advanced, special topics in environmental policy.

ESM 436, Legal Issues in Environmental Problem Solving

Workshop to expose students to a range of technical and business writing.

ESM 437, Writing Skills for Environmental Professionals

This course enables participants to refine their writing skills for effectiveness in professional and academic settings. Graduate students will enhance awareness of various strategies, techniques, and genres such as memos, status reports, emails, and proposals–to ensure effective communication. Topics will include the importance of thesis, audience, tone, organization and development, document design, appropriate source citation with integrated quotations, and effective collaborative writing.

ESM 438, Presentation Skills for Environmental Professionals

In this intensive course, students will study, prepare and practice presentation skills with a focus on project defenses, presenting posters and research, and presentations for job interviews. Lectures will focus on clearly and effectively communicating quantitative and qualitative information to specific audiences. Emphases will be on visual presentation (e.g. slide formatting, clear presentation of quantitative information, etc.) and verbal communication (pacing, clarity, volume, tone, etc.), which students will hone during practice presentations and mock question/answer sessions in weekly discussions. Students will have multiple opportunities to practice and receive feedback on presentations for group projects, defenses, professional conferences, and job interviews.

ESM 440, Strategic Environmental Communication

Successful environmental communication is not just about getting the facts right. Before tackling an issue, it’s critical to consider the intended audiences and their values and attitudes–and to use effective storytelling to reach them. To learn to message effectively, students will study the theory behind persuasion and decision-making, including how reason, emotion, and social influence work, and practice writing for a diversity of audiences, including the general public, policymakers, and funders. Students will also learn how to develop compelling stories from good ideas, using conflict, drama, and character, and gain an understanding of the complex media environment in which their messages compete for attention.

ESM 441, Introduction to Environmental Media Production

This hands-on course is designed to give students the core skills needed to conceptualize, capture, edit, and deliver short-form environmental documentaries. The basic tools of filmmaking — cinematography, lighting, sound, and editing — are covered.

ESM 442, Grassroots Organizing, Outreach, & Campaigning

Reviews the role and effectiveness of grassroots environmental efforts on local, statewide, and national scales. Students will explore organizing strategies and tactics based on various theories of change, addressing topics such as community outreach and collaboration, policy campaigning and more.

ESM 444, Writing about the Environment for the Public

Explores written genres for scientists to educate and influence public audiences. Students will analyze and practice message/story development with emphasis on interviewing, analyzing and framing environmental issues in news. Students will complete course with media-ready work.

ESM 445, Social Media and the Environment

Students will learn about and use different social media tools to engage and activate social networks to generate environmental awareness and action.

ESM 449, Environmental Communication Practicum

This capstone course will give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge and communication skills in a practical setting. Working in teams with diverse skills, students will develop and implement their own information campaign in association with an environmental firm, organization, local or regional government, or other institution. Students may choose to use the environmental issue(s) explored in their Group Project or Eco-Entrepreneurship Project, or another topic. Basic elements of the legal system as it specifically relates to environmental issues. Study of the different stages and different institutions involved in environmental policy making.

FILM ST 242MG, Media and Geography

This course considers the efficacy and implications of space/place/media as a complex topic and set of spatial research tools for the humanities.

FAMST 261EI, Special Topics in Film and/or Media Globalization: Energy Justice: Infrastructures

This seminar, part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective, explores the social and environmental costs of energy infrastructures. We study oil, hydro, and solar projects, and how they are mediated, resisted, and re-imagined.

FR 154G: Post-Colonial Cultures

Study of fiction from the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Maghreb. Born of the conflict between and hybridization of widely differing cultural traditions, this course provides insights into the vibrancy of contemporary post-colonial societies, the ongoing legacy of colonialism, and the meaning of multiculturalism. In English.

GEOG 202A, Remote Sensing and Environmental Optics

Principles of radiation emission; radiative transfer equation and some solution methods; surface interactions; instrumentation; applications to remote sensing and energy budgets in atmosphere, ocean, and other media.

GEOG 208, Water Resource Systems Analysis

Quantitative methods (operations research, applied mathematics and statistics, numerical simulation) are used to analyze and synthesize complex water resources systems. Topics include economic analysis, hydropower, flood control, groundwater management, and reservoirs.

GEOG 211A, Transportation Planning & Modeling

Issues, problems, technologies, policies, plans, and the transportation-environment relationship. Transportation systems simulation, data collection, and model building. Applications in planning, design, and operations. Lab: Critically examine transportation plans and programs and explore travel surveys.

GEOG 229, Environmental Perception and Cognition

Theories and methods related to acquiring, representing, and analyzing knowledge of complex large-scale environments.

GEOG 230, Behavioral Geography

Survey of behavioral approaches in a variety of areas of geography.

GEOG 231, Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Science

Theory and research on cognitive issues in geographic information science. Perception, memory, reasoning, communication, human factors in digital worlds.

GEOG 241B, Population, Development, and the Environment

Exploration of global and regional patterns of demographic change especially as they relate to significant economic development or environmental issues. Course readings are selected to provide a broad overview of current research frontiers in addition to classic readings.

GEOG 244, Society and Hazards

Reviews of the contribution of human geography to the study of hazard risk, vulnerability, mitigation and adaptation. Classic and new theoretical and empirical literature is explored, emphasizing the connection between development processes, social equity and hazard vulnerability.

GEOG 253, Global Warming: Causes and Consequences

Physical processes involved in global warming: carbon dioxide increase and uptake; role of clouds, oceans and biosphere; consequences: sea level changes, hydrological cycle intensification, etc. Climate modeling and predictions.

GEOG 277, Spatial Environmental Modeling

Seminar covering topics in spatial environmental modeling. Integrates techniques such as remote sensing and GIS into the modeling of spatial processes. Topics include biogeochemical cycles, hydrology, species distribution and habitat disturbance.

GLOBL 221, Global Political Economy, Sustainable Development, and Environment

Critical examination of the political and economic aspects of globalization, focusing on the prospects and challenges of an economic development that is both socially equitable and environmentally sustainable. This specialization gateway course is required of all first year students.

GLOBL 271, Global Environmental Law and Policy

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.

HIST 208A, Research Seminar in Environmental History

A two-quarter graduate research seminar in environmental history.

HIST 208B, Research Seminar in Environmental History

A two-quarter graduate research seminar in environmental history.

HIST 255A, Ecological Imperialism: Science, Nature, and Conquest in Latin America

Analyzes the environmental impact of the conquest and how the process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the ecological landscape. In addition, it looks at how the royal botanical expeditions helped shape our definition of the region.

HIST 293, Space, Culture, Power

Exploration of the cultural production of built environments; spatiality and public culture; spaces of memory; historical landscapes; spatial theory; geographical and temporal focus vary.

HIST 295, Workshop in Environmental History

Writing workshop, professionalization seminar, and guest lecture series for graduate students working in area of environmental history. Meets monthly throughout the academic year, and includes occasional campus events and field trips.

POL S 232, Politics of Economic Development

An exploration of the difference between economic growth and economic development. Why do some countries develop faster than others? The course will reflect on the political factors that impact a state’s economic development, including order and violence, historical and contemporary institutions, collective action, culture, ethnic diversity, rural-urban linkages, international trade and foreign aid.

POL S 292, Governance for Sustainable Development

Examination of the demand for governance in conjunction with efforts to achieve environmental, economic, and social goals. Special attention to alternative approaches to the supply of governance at the global level as well as to interact between governance systems addressing distinct issues.

POL S 293, Environmental Institutions: Rights, Rules, and Decision-making Systems

POL S 294, Environmental Politics and Policy

This seminar focuses on development of the environmental movement in American politics and the resulting institutional responses. Environmental policy making and implementation is examined in light of relevant theories. Emergence of an environmental ethic in American politics is considered.

POL S 295, Psychology, Environment, and Public Policy

An interdisciplinary seminar focusing on research at the intersection of political science, psychology, and public policy as it pertains to environmental issues. The expectation is that students who enroll, especially those who expect to qualify in Environmental Politics, will take not only this course, but also related courses at Bren and other departments to fully experience the value of interdisciplinary learning.

SOC 265CJ, Climate Justice

SOC 265EC, 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.