SMNR: Climate Change

• Semester: Spring 2023
• Course ID: 397S
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 29805

Description

This seminar is designed to explore a selection of the accelerating issues and problems that the systemic challenges of climate change are bringing about in what many are calling the Age of the Anthropocene. Our efforts will be both normative and practical, as we  consider critiques of legal and other forms of address based on convention, tradition, and stationarity and as we explore emerging efforts in the public and private sectors to inspire and to generate new responses across institutions and fields.

     Topic coverage will include some of the most monumental of these challenges, within such spheres as the energy transition, food production, human migration, biodiversity, and the public health, but will also sample subjects responsive to management on a more local or regional scale, such as environmental justice, transport, wildfire management, and, possibly, sports. We’ll also consider a project in the very early stages of formation that’s being designed to develop newly participatory, democratic networks of governance.   

    The seminar’s methods will emphasize discussion, including team-led discussion; contributions to group learning based on the mix of disciplinary studies of our student members; and guest presentations by people with special expertise. For the writing component of the seminar: Students may write in one of two different formats. Each student will choose which to use:

                 Choice A: Each student will write a total of four brief discussion/reaction papers during the semester in response to each of four units of readings, plus a brief paper based on light research due at the end of the term on a topic of the student’s choice, subject to instructor approval, linked to climate change; or,

                Choice B: A  student may write a conventional research paper due at the end of the term on a subject of her or his choice, subject to instructor approval,  linked to climate change.

                 As to both choices: The final paper may be on a subject not covered during the term.

                 As to Choice B: Students may co-author a paper. And the instructor may offer some topic possibilities from which students can choose, if they’d like.

    The seminar intends to provide a gathering place for millennials to collect and form views and understandings concerning the existential risks that climate change poses to the lives of ordered opportunity that your generation expects to lead. It will attempt to provide some  valuable opportunities to respond.