Module: SOC6106-20 Culture, Risk and Environmental Justice

Level: 6

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor: Rosemary McKechnie

Module Tutor Contact Details: R.McKechnie@bathspa.ac.uk

1. Brief description and aims of module: 

This module explores a range of issues confronting people around the world at the beginning of the twenty first century. Globalisation has become part of everyday experience and is changing our everyday life. New transport and communications technologies have made it possible for resources, products, ideas and people to move more freely over boundaries. We can see increasing mobility has intensified interdependency in the world and the potential to act together on the basis of this in relation to, for example, the hole in the ozone layer. However, other issues show that co-operation is not always easy to accomplish. Environmental issues and climate change in particular encapsulate the paradoxes of globalisation. While globalising processes have increased wealth and well-being in many regions of the world, this at the same time increases the environmental impacts of consumption and energy needs. These impacts are often at a distance from the populations who are benefitting from globalising processes and often impact on vulnerable populations marginalised from the benefits global mobility can bring.  Globalisation opens up many possibilities for some individuals today, allowing them to consume a wide variety of products, to travel, visit other cultures and gain knowledge about the natural world. However, the impacts of environmental issues highlights material and cultural inequalities too and the real difficulties involved in seeing, understanding and communicating about the environmental risks that threaten us all.

These difficult issues are increasingly in the public eye, as well as on political agendas, and there are some signs that international co-operation might be possible. There is consensus that global social and environmental issues need to be addressed but there are no simple solutions. Our awareness of environmental issues are shaped by many kinds of influence, information from experts, increasingly ‘scary stories’ in the media, and activists who make environmental and social issues visible, and give us alternative solutions and strategies. The module will look at how we can understand and engage with these different frames and the complex processes they are making visible to us.

2. Outline syllabus: 

The curriculum will be drawn from topics which may include:

• Social and cultural constructions of nature and the environment

• Climate change and contestation: negotiating mitigation and adaption to the localised consequences of global mobility

• Trust and public understanding of science

• Mediated environments and new visibilities

• Cultures of Environmentalism

• Grassroots and local/global struggles for Environmental Justice Active Consumers, thoughtful Consumption

• Seeing is believing: is sustainable tourism possible?

• Sustainable futures, co-operation and cosmopolitan governance

• Everyday mobilities: the widespread impacts of living in a global world

• Risk Society: are the new risks we face changing the world?

• Environmental racism and justice: who is facing the worst impacts of the environmental impacts produced by a globalising world and why?

 3. Teaching and learning activities: 

This module will be taught through a combination of lectures and seminars and a one-day field trip.

Lectures will provide an introduction to each topic and seminars will offer an opportunity for a more in-depth exploration of topics through discussions, debates, informal presentations, media clips, film screenings and other interactive, student-led activities. Essential weekly readings will be set, which will directly feed into seminar activities.

There will be particular emphasis on activist, NGO and documentary material that makes visible many of the less visible impacts of environmental impacts in the world today. Additional guest discussions with activists and experts are designed to encourage critical engagement with different cultural framings of environmental issues and climate change in particular.

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: CW

• Description: Case Study of a local Environmental  Issue (2,500 words)

• % Weighting: 50

Assessment Item 2:

• Assessment Type: CW

• Description: Essay (2,500 words)

• % Weighting: 50