Raymond Williams famously said that nature may be the most complex word in the English language. Any full history of the uses of the term nature, he added, would be a history of a large part of human thought. This course unpacks some of these complexities of nature, situates nature and nature-society relations in the historical contexts, and engages with alternative imaginaries of nature, the relevance of which has never been greater.
The themes for this course will include, among others:
- Political economy of nature
- Production of nature
- Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the problematic of modernity
- Multispecies entanglement
- Neoliberalism, nature, and the geographies of violence
- Justice, nature, and the questions difference, and
- Nature in an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world.
This course will expose students to a range of theoretical perspectives on nature and nature-society dialectics, while grounding their understanding in real-world examples, drawn particularly from the Global South.
mitul.baruah@ashoka.edu.in