CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Deranged Authority: Culture, Power, and Climate Change
SHUM 4625/6625 (also ANTHR 4025/7025) Fall. 4 credits. J. Carlson.
This seminar asks what kinds of authority—and specifically environmental authority—inhere in our time of present “derangement.” ...
Deranged Authority: Culture, Power, and Climate Change
SHUM 4625/6625 (also ANTHR 4025/7025) Fall. 4 credits. J. Carlson.
Writing on the eve of the US general election in 2016, Amitav Ghosh’s Great Derangement suggests that the world’s collective failure to meet the challenges of climate change stems from an ongoing crisis of culture and, more fundamentally, of the imagination...
In this context, what are the cultural dynamics through which widely publicized, scientific evidence of climate catastrophe falls flat, failing to catalyze social and political reform? ...
How do environmental advocates come to believe specific actions are necessary to save the world?
How can climate justice efforts better integrate local forms of knowledge and expertise? Additionally, how does climate denialism become something that people vote for? ...
Course readings will explore authorizing processes and expertise with regard to climate change and the environment in a variety of settings, including climate research, popular environmentalist texts, and industry campaigns aimed at obfuscating evidence of ecological collapse.
We will also engage ethnographies of local and indigenous “ecoauthority” to become familiar with models for ecological resiliency that do not conform to scientific or “expert” discourses of climate remediation...
Considering ecoauthority as a deeply situated, aesthetic phenomenon negotiated in everyday life, how might each of us speak to those who engage the environment by other means than we do, and through other moods?
Jennifer Carlson is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the energy humanities
