MA Ecology, Culture & Society

Amidst runaway climate change, mass extinction, and radical ecological transformations, we're 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. In so doing, it will provide students with key critical, analytical and transferable skills with which to understand, analyse and respond to contemporary global socio-ecological challenges.

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 will introduce you 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 decolonisation 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.