Environment and Social Exclusion

This elective course focusses on questions of social exclusion and social justice in environment, with a particular emphasis on race, caste and class. The concept of social exclusion as an analytical framework has become increasingly relevant for an understanding of the notions of environmental inequality, conflicts, rights and justice. The course will capture the social exclusion structures and processes which restrict the access of certain social groups to environmental resources and entitlements. It will explain the different forms of social disadvantage – in village and community, in land and water, in space and commons, in wilderness and conservation – that persist, in multiple variants and with different intensity, across societies and nations. It will locate the agency to groups that either guard their domain of privilege or challenge the system of social inequalities and segmentation. Thus, understanding social exclusion as a condition/outcome as well as a dynamic process, the course will also examine some environmental justice movements. The course will also be contextually and temporally embedded. In the north, for example, along with African-Americans, Latino and indigenous people, the focus has been the changing nature of social exclusion in environment. Accordingly, the relevant focus groups are the new social groups, including the immigrants and ethnic groups. By contrast, in the Indian context, the problem is one of the persistent, multiple exclusion of certain social groups like Dalit affecting their basic environmental access and rights.