MA Ecology, Culture & Society

Amidst runaway climate change, mass extinction, and radical ecological transformations, we are living through profoundly unsettling times. What conceptual resources and proposals does classical and contemporary social theory offer us to think through these changing climates? This module will introduce students to key contemporary debates and theoretical interventions in the broad fields of environmental humanities and socio-ecological studies. Drawing on key authors and debates in philosophy, environmental history, literary studies, animal studies, social and cultural theory, and postcolonial and indigenous studies, the module will critically appraise key theoretical concepts and debates on questions of global climate change, the “Anthropocene”, extinction, environmental justice, more-than-human politics, and decolonial and indigenous practices. It will do so by considering the scientific evidence on climate change and other events of ecological devastation, and by developing an expanded understanding of “ecology” that connects our changing climates to wider issues of culture, politics, society and technology. Asking how we can develop new modes of thought that can address and transform our changing climates, this module will explore what theories, concepts, and perspectives we may need to begin the task of thinking ecologically today.

How can ecological perspectives be developed without an understanding of animals, and of the forces that shape animal-human relations? In recent decades, significant work in Animal Studies (in the social sciences and humanities) and in the animal sciences (for example in biology, psychology, neuroscience and ethology) have fundamentally transformed conceptions of animals. Researchers have illustrated that language, tool use, the inheritance of culture, etc. are no longer legitimate markers of a human/animal divide and, moreover, are investigating topics from which animals have traditionally been excluded: animal cognition, rationality, awareness of time and of death, emotions, intentionality, justice. These developments demand a reassessment of how evolutionary, ecological, social, and individual relations between humans and animals are conceived of in philosophy and science, and how they are shared, ethically and politically, in practice. What are their implications for understandings of domestication? Of animal political subjectivity? Of animal labour? Is it even possible, today, to think in terms of 'species’? And what finally are the practical consequences for social science research with (or indeed excluding) animals? The module draws on a wide disciplinary range of emerging theoretical and methodological work on animals. Together, this scholarship takes debates about humans and animals far beyond any preoccupation with the effects of humans on animals.

In what ways is ecology entangled with cultural and cosmological differences? How might we cultivate arts of living and dying well with others on an ecologically troubled planet? This module introduces students to key questions, perspectives and debates on the relationships between ecology, philosophy and cultural difference: it asks what it means to ecologise our modes of thought, and to pluralise our ecological imaginations, in ways that may teach us something about how to live and die well with others in changing climates. Weaving together philosophy, ecological humanities, cultural anthropology, animal studies, social and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies, the module will critically appraise key theoretical debates on questions of global climate change, cultural and religious difference, ecological pluralism, more-than-human politics, and the decolonization of environmental thought. It will do so by exploring a range of conceptual issues and situated case-studies from across the Global South and North that challenge our most basic assumptions, question our values, and raise profound philosophical and ecological questions about the relations between humans and other-than-humans, knowledge and faith, concepts and stories, nature and culture, as well as living and dying. Asking how other collectives can transform our own ecologies of thinking and living, this module will explore what concepts, stories, and sensibilities we may need to foster plural ways of inhabiting the Earth today.

This series of workshops accompanies students' placement in an organisation or grassroots activist network. We will discuss students' diaries in the context of broader debates about ecology on the one hand, and about professional practice, organizations and activism on the other hand. A placement in an organization whose work can be related to ecological issues or practical involvement in a grassroots campaign is an entry requirement of this module.

In this course, you will be expected to build on your understanding of media and materials in terms of sociological research projects by addressing a particular research theme. You will respond to a theme to create a visual, sensory or experimental object or media.

The course asks you to think about the appropriateness of different kinds of visual and sensory materials when addressing sociological questions, conducting research projects, and presenting their outcomes. It combines lectures and seminars with presentation and feedback workshops at which each student is expected to present their work-in-progress. The course has a practice-based outcome, and will finish with an exhibition/public event at which student work will be shown.

Convener: Michael Guggenheim

In nearly every century over the last millennium, London has been a crucial node within the networks of commerce and cultural exchange that spanned the world. In the 21st century , London remains a site of intense activity, sat atop innumerable junctions of capital, migration, culture and commodities. As such London presents the ideal focal point for developing an understanding of the pressing questions facing cities today and into the future. However, while it is important to understand the long history of London’s place within global networks of power and exchange, it is also impossible to ignore the extent to which, in recent years, forces that shape the contemporary city are visibly shifting. That is, the roads that meet at the city’s junction are arriving from new destinations, carrying new opportunities and risks for the city and precipitating new developments.  Accordingly, this course seeks to understand how London is being re-made amidst the re-wiring of global circuitry.

Focusing on specific examples – drawn from the Centre for Urban and Community Research’s activity across London – the module illuminates the impact of new technologies, markets, mutations in governing ideologies, novel patterns of mobility and new technologies of surveillance on the city and its inhabitants. Beyond understanding how these developments impact on London the module aims to develop an understanding of London through its relatedness to other urban locations, situating London’s connectedness to elsewhere as integral to the ways in which the city is being re-made.

Module Convener: Alex Rhys-Taylor

This course is intended to take a selective route through 20th and 21st century philosophical reflections on politics & philosophies of difference. Indeed, it seeks to locate contemporary debates as part of a longer discussion.

Each year certain key themes are pursued. In 2016-7 we will explore questions of politics and difference through the entangled themes of radical pluralism, relationality, divergence, multiplicity, and becoming.

The course has been designed to critically review the continuing relevance of questions raised by our key thinkers by pairing them with other contemporary writers who either explicitly speak to that thinker or who share the key thinker’s attentions or philosophical imaginary in some way. So each week we will have two set readings, and students are encouraged to read both if possible. In this way it will be possible for students to follow a more overtly theoretical route through the course, or follow a route that stays closer to theoretical controversies as they are played out in contemporary sites or issues.

Some of the philosophers and writers covered this year include: William James, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Edouard Glissant, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Clarice Lispector, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Catherine Keller, among others. Relevant journals include: Public Culture, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Cultural Studies, Cultural Criticism, Cultural Anthropology, Critique, Diacritics, Feminist Theory, Feminist Issues, New Formations, Signs, Theory, Culture & Society, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Positions, Angelaki.

Module convenor: Martin Savransky

A student-centred collaborative learning environment in involved with The Centre for Feminist Research and the Methods Lab will deliver an interactive method of learning and exchange led by specialists in the field to understand as well as enact feminist research methods. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary approach this module emphasises multi-methods. Taught by feminist researchers sessions consist of lectures, field visits, small group work and peer feedback sessions. Ethnography, new maps, walks, film, experiments, interviews, audio, documents, narrative, architectural encounters and exhibitions will all feature across the period of exchange. A series of case studies, from specialists in the field, will offer students the opportunity to explore the developments of feminist methods, within an inter-disciplinary critical and practice-based approach.

From Ferguson to Gaza, from the local to the global, this module proposes that we are faced with the necessity to revisit the canonical texts of postcolonial theory in order to make sense of our contemporary world. The aim of the module is to introduce you to a selection of these founding texts, and to consider the manner in which the spectre of colonialism persists in our present, both in our material reality and as a ‘spectropoetics’ that haunts the unconscious.

In this sense, you will read classic postcolonial texts of the twentieth century together with contemporary academic, activist and artistic interventions and countersignatures. Close, first-hand reading of texts is emphasised and you are required to probe the whole spectrum of postcolonial thinking—from literary theory, politics, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, race and gender studies to philosophy, art, anthropology and history—and as such interrogate the production and circulation of knowledge from diverse positionalities. We seek to problematize the very notion of post-coloniality, understood not as a temporal marker but more as a style of thought—as a problem, a question and an option, an ‘epistemic and political project’.

We begin the module from the present, with a questioning of the links and divergences between postcolonial theory and current decolonial thinking (in particular where this concerns struggles across today’s global south), in order to invest our readings of canonical postcolonial texts with a sense of urgency and to set out a disciplinary framework.

Weekly topics are organised conceptually and across geographical and temporal boundaries through the themes such as the following, each of which re-inflects the next: objectivity; recognition; representation; ecology; relation; translation; ambivalence, appropriation; repair and reconciliation.

This module aims to provide students with the theoretical tools necessary for understanding postcolonial transformations in today’s Global South. The political imperative behind Postcolonial Studies – which emerged as an academic discipline in the 1980s – was metropolitan multiculturalism. Multiculturalism emerged as a key agenda of progressive politics – responding largely to mobilizations around race, diaspora and the politics of gender. Grounded in certain notions of representation, discourse and text, it enabled the theorist to mount an attack on the ethico-political enterprise of post-Enlightenment humanism on behalf of those who were excluded from its universalist schema. The module seeks to familiarise students with both analytical tools and activist models developed over the last few decades to comprehend, analyse and intervene in these transformations.

Media, both old and new, are fast changing not just the way we perceive the world but also the way we experience our being-in-world and our interventions into the world. In view of this, elements of the module are concerned with studying the cultural aspects of globalization, including ‘the politics of aesthetics’, ‘sensible politics’ and the visual cultures of non-governmental activism. Globalization has also seen to a remapping of cultural and artistic fields, and the emergence of new cultural and commodity imaginaries. The globalization of art has resulted in the culture of spectacular biennales and new practices of curating. Museums and collections have become major tools for educating and disciplining populations.

Drawing from the tools provided during the ‘Postcolonial Theory’ module, and supplementing these with the ‘thinking and doing’ that has arisen from the ‘decolonial turn’, the module approaches many of the weekly topics through the framework of ‘decoloniality’ and what Boaventura de Sousa Santos et al have named ‘epistemologies of the South’. In addition to this, a key component of the module is the new socio-political theory developed after the end of the Cold War, which aims to understand the decline of the nation-state and the enhanced power of supranational institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. This requires a critical examination of a range of agendas, namely: Global Civil Society and Governance, Human Rights, Non-Governmental Organisations, Sovereignty, New Social Movements, (Intellectual) Property Rights, Environmentalism, Biopiracy, the Commons, Social Capital, etc. The module seeks to ground these concepts in political/cultural theory rather than treating them as ad-hoc ideas. Students are encouraged to draw from the critical theory tradition of cultural theory and to question the normative claims of liberal theory in the age of neoliberal globalization.

The critique of capitalism has been an important horizon for research and theory in cultural studies since its inception. Beginning with an introduction to this (anti-)disciplinary history, this module introduces and engages with past and contemporary critical approaches to the imbrication of capitalism and culture in cultural studies, cultural theory and philosophy.

We will consider the evolution of cultural studies from its early focus on the role of capitalism in shaping class relations and class culture, through its integration of such critiques into a still-expanding range of areas of concern, including issues around gender, race, sexuality, (post)colonialism, posthumanism and ecology. We will engage with key theoretical concepts and paradigms that have been developed in order to better understand the cultural dimension and functioning of capital, such as commodity fetishism, ‘capitalism-as-religion’, gift-exchange, theories of debt, parasitism, neoliberalism, information capitalism, and post-natural ecology.

We will ask how contemporary global phenomena such as the rise of digital networking, climate change and financial crisis may be transforming the relationship between capitalism and culture, and critically examine currently circulating claims that capitalism is giving way to ‘postcapitalism’.

This course explores a series of key contemporary issues of environment and development. We start by examining what it means to say we are living in the age of the ‘Anthropocene’. We then examine different perspectives for thinking about the environment in political economy terms of who wins, who loses, how and why. We then take this historical and conceptual grounding to the world, exploring the environmental politics of a range of key issues energy, climate change, energy food, water, waste and the uneven impacts of global environmental decay.

This module considers some of the most important topics in contemporary development studies, including: 

• Is development another name for “modernity”? 
• What are the differing (and sometimes opposing) definitions of development? 
• Development and the politics of knowledge 
• The developmental state 
• Development and global civil society: NGOs, celebrities and the power of philanthropy 
• Sustainability and democracy 
• Entrepreneurs from below 
• Ecological concerns 
• Gender questions 
• Post development and de-growth 

This module aims to raise questions about whether the concepts and categories through which we usually study the ’international' or ’global' are adequate to the task. It critically examines categories of the social sciences and humanities that are usually simply presupposed and ’applied', and which, despite their Western or European origins, are assumed to be ’universal'. It does this by closely examining some of the most important theoretical writings of the post-WWII period, focusing upon books and debates which had repercussions far beyond their immediate disciplinary boundaries, including books by Kuhn, MacIntyre, Foucault, Said, and others.

Students explore the claim(s) that far from being objective and universal, our knowledge is shaped by culture, history and politics. In seminars we ask, can different ’conceptual schemes', ’paradigms' or ’traditions' be compared to see which one is better, or are they incommensurable? Do theories and explanations triumph over rival theories because they are ’better'- or for other reasons? Does knowledge serve to unmask power, or is it always caught up with and complicit with power?

This module requires students not simply to advance their knowledge of politics, but to explore the politics of knowledge, and to do so, in particular, by enquiring into whether the categories and concepts of the social sciences are genuinely  international and universal, or merely modern/Western and parochial.

This module revolves around contemporary debates in the anthropology of social movements. It considers the contribution of ethnographic approaches to activism and protest to the theorisation of politics, collective action and social change. The anti-globalisation movement, #occupy, the anti-corruption movement in India, the anti-foreclosures movement in Spain (PAH), the Landless Workers' Movement, right-wing extremism, feminist reproductive health activists, independent-living activism, queer movements and the Indigenous Environmental Network are some of the examples that the module will explore. Rather than 'explaining away' these movements, the pedagogical orientation of the module is based on learning from them, i.e. devising ways of conceptualising their practice, methods and transformative power. The module will also consider, as a transversal issue, the question of 'engaged' or 'militant' research - and more broadly the relationship between the production of academic and activist knowledges.

The assessment is constructed around student projects that will present, in a multimedia portfolio format, the result of research conducted about/with social movements.

While taking this module, you'll concentrate on planned change in the 20th century with special emphasis on the post World War II era, after the rise of the so-called Development Industry. We will cover the history of development and aid through various approaches to development, and will explore the discourses which have informed approaches to policy. Following this you will look at implementation and the history of anthropological involvement, including anthropological critiques. Finally, there will be an in-depth analysis of the development implications (both in terms of international agency or national government policy implications as well as projects on the ground) of selected global trends. Possible selected trends might be HIV/AIDs or Structural Adjustment Policies.

In the era in which human activity, particularly fossil-fuel use and its effects, has become the main determinant in shaping the environment – an era which has been labelled the ‘Anthropocene’ – a growing body of literary work has emerged that seeks to explore the inextricability of social and natural damage and devastation.

This module considers the engagement of contemporary American fiction with a range of environmental crises, from climate change to pollution to ecological collapse. Generally speaking, the module asks what cognitive, interpretive and aesthetic resources are offered by the contemporary American novel in understanding such crises and catastrophes and in what ways has fiction evolved and adapted to capture this subject matter.

More particularly, the module asks how fiction might generate affective and politically transformative forms of public knowledge in the face of widespread dissociation of the consequences of a fossil-fuelled modernity, and, relatedly, how fiction might understand the social causes of natural disasters; how literature can chart or remember the geopolitical histories of energy supply and resource capitalism – histories that might include war, terrorism and pollution – that are normally forgotten at the point of Western consumption; how literature can encompass both the global scale and local impact of climate change and environmental degradation, as well as forge a sense of (eco)cosmopolitan solidarity between variously affected societies; how narrative can adapt to the subject matter of the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, contamination and man-made ‘natural’ disasters, and to the precarious and at-risk subjectivities produced by such violence; what kind of politics and ethics arise from such representations and how might literature engage with questions of environmental justice; and, in terms of worse-case scenarios, how literature imagines apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios of a world of spent resources and barely sustainable life.

The Ocean as Archive explores several interdisciplinary approaches to reading the water. It starts by examining discourses on the "watery Anthropocene". Spurred by this crisis it considers other ways of reading the water: materially through oceanographic studies of watery depths and strata, and marine life therein; and temporally by considering the ocean as a speculative site, and as a space of residues. This module also explores alternate ways of reading this crisis: through non-western (Pacific Island, West African) maritime epistemologies and myths, through discourses on migration (both contemporary and historical), through the mobilisation of the image of water in critical theory, in literature, in music and in art.

The class examines the site of the ocean not with the aim to systematically plumb its depths so to speak, but rather sees the ocean as a laboratory with which to examine multiple and often contradictory approaches when taking to the sea. As a result, a key summative assignment is a creative journal, which is intended as a site to explore critical experimental approaches to interdisciplinary ways of knowing, which the crisis of the watery Anthropocene urgently demands.

The Ocean as Archive considers methods with which we can begin to understand what is at stake in articulating the visual cultures of the sea. These methods are practice-led and are aimed at students interested in exploring experimental methods in their critical work. Its thematics resonate with concerns raised by Geopolitics, Conceptual Ecologies, Conflicts and Negotiations, and Spatial Biopolitics in the MA Contemporary Art Theory offerings.