Environmental Justice

Across the Globe, people rise up and protest against social inequities and environmental threats. They protest when confronted with environmental ‘bads’ such as polluted or degraded local environments. They protest when barred from accessing environmental ‘goods’ such as clean water, land for agriculture or grazing, or urban green spaces for recreation. They protest against environmental injustices associated with infrastructure development, industrial complexes, agribusinesses, and large corporations, which are seen to derive profit from activities that threaten the environments that underpin the livelihoods of current and future generations. These social movements can be grassroots groups and/or groups organized as non-governmental organizations, and often organize under the banner of ‘environmental justice’.

Alongside the growth of environmental justice movements, the academic field of environmental justice has also rapidly expanded. It is a highly interdisciplinary field that draws on theories and concepts from across the natural and social sciences and humanities, such as environmental science, moral and political philosophy, science studies, development studies, and critical human geography. Environmental justice academics seek to analyze: (i) the nature of the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens; (ii) how environmental phenomena are experienced in different ways by different social groups; (iii) how justice claims are enacted/mobilized in struggles over resources, in particular the strategies of the social movements that call for justice.

This course offers students of environmental science, food science, natural resources governance, geography, global development or similar fields the opportunity to learn how to understand, analyze, and engage in environmental justice conflicts and debates. Through an intensive three-week course, students will practice unraveling claims of environmental (in-)justice from a social science perspective that also incorporates elements of environmental history and environmental science. Students will also engage with theories on how social movements strategize and communicate their claims, and will get a chance to formulate their own strategy and methods for communicating such claims. Finally, students will be exposed to the realities of environmental justice advocacy groups that struggle to affect current environmental injustices. By the end of the course, students have acquired the skills to formulate critical questions and clear methodologies around environmental justice that will enable them to engage in diverse environmental justice conflicts and debates across diverse topics, scales, and contexts.