Environmental Anthropology is a thematic concentration that investigates how human societies create and change geologies and climates up to a planetary scale, and the ways that anthropologists have questioned the division between cultures and nature. Students may choose to study topics from contemporary society to the impact of environmental change over long spans of time. Students have the opportunity to do original fieldwork, engage in research with the collections of the Penn Museum and the resources of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and study abroad.
This course explores the concepts of stress and resilience including the underlying psychophysiologic mechanisms that regulate them and the impacts they have in our current world. Shaped by evolutionary forces, human psychophysiologic, emotional, behavioral, and social performance continuously adapts to intrinsic and extrinsic stressors. The traditional topics are supplemented with current stress-related research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and current climate disasters. These core topics and processes are discussed in the broader context of (mental) health and understanding of the etiology of stress-related psychopathologies, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Contemporary findings from research studies conducted in laboratory (e.g., neuroimaging), occupational and extreme (e.g., spaceflight), and clinical (e.g., mental health clinic) environments are discussed in the context of history, systems, and research paradigms used to study the psychobiology of stress. Theoretical concepts and research findings are evaluated relative to their utility in developing prevention and mitigation strategies for stress-related psychopathologies, and translational implementation in clinical treatments. This course may feature expert guest lecturers (occupational health experts, and NASA and Antarctic researchers) and practical application of state-of-the-art experimental methodologies used in psychophysiologic research on stress and resilience.
This course thinks with and from Latin America to consider the environmental and ecological conflicts and politics of cuidado (care) emerging across the hemisphere in times of climate crisis and deepening socio-environmental injustice. Latin American thinkers and practitioners have provided innovative conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing, organizing, and acting in defense of territory and life. In this course, we will consider how legacies of colonialism and (neo)extractivism are not only an ongoing curse of the Americas, but also a a condition of possibility for feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological proposals, such as degrowth, buen vivir, cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), rights of nature, ontological politics, and participatory action research, among other ways of knowing, being, and doing. What can we learn from engagement with the historic and contemporary socioenvironmental challenges occurring across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Americas? How are diverse urban and rural communities, technoscientific actors, researchers, and ancestral knowers understanding and responding to the region’s emerging climate and environmental scenarios? What are the possibilities for dialogue, exchange, and problem solving between such diverse actors and their multiple ways of knowing and being that span millennial, colonial, and modernizing temporalities? Throughout the course, we will interrogate and reflect on these questions from the situated perspectives of Latin America and its many territorial realities, ecological relations, and social worlds.
Water wars, deforestation, climate change. Amidst many uncertain crises, in this course we will explore the emergent relationship between people and the environment in different parts of the world. How do people access the resources they need to live? How, when and for whom does ‘nature’ come to matter? Why does it matter? And what analytical tools we might use to think, mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change? Drawing together classical anthropological texts and some of the emergent debates in the field of climate studies and environmental justice, in this class we focus on the social-ecological processes through which different groups of humans imagine, produce and inhabit anthropogenic environments.