PHNEX-ULEC SPRING '25

Week 16

May 14

Exit Interviews

If you have scheduled an exit interview with me or any of the teaching team, you can arrange to meet us in the usual place, or on campus during class time this final week. If you have not arranged an interview, no worries: enjoy your summer!

Where to go from here:

Whether it is the books yet to be added to the syllabus (see image below), the Ghibli films or other anime we did not screen, or the topics in the videos at the bottom of the page, you have many ways to keep up and augment your Post-Human Nuclear Experience.

From our discussion on 4/30 on our Post-Human descendants: Books not yet on the syllabus. These could be great additional reading!

Courses of interest:

Note: some courses may be Graduate Level Courses, please consult your advisor for how to attend or audit.

Japanese Intro 1 | Course Catalog | The New SchoolThis is the first course of a two-part sequence which introduces the fundamentals of speaking, listening, reading and writing in Japanese. It is designed for students with no prior training in the target language. Students acquire elementary grammar, build vocabulary, and practice basic conversations. While enhancing their communicative skills, students acquire knowledge of the Japanese-speaking world. The course utilizes a multimedia textbook program, including an electronic workbook with audio, video, chapter exercises, and activities. Students are required to purchase this multimedia textbook in order to take the course.

Conversational Japanese | Course Catalog | The New SchoolThis is an intermediate conversation undergraduate course conducted entirely in Japanese designed to reinforce and extend the student's communicative skills in Japanese, and to deepen cultural knowledge. A variety of texts will be discussed, including, news articles, video clips, ads, films and more. Students are expected to participate actively in a wide range of interactive, small- and large-group activities, including conversations, film reviews, group discussions and presentations. Prerequisite: intermediate proficiency is required.d.

Gendered Ecologies | Course Catalog | The New SchoolWhat connects the depredation of nature to gendered violence and social plundering? What links the dominant governance and corporate policy and management frameworks to gendered environmental destruction and violence against women land defenders and environmental activists? What actions are being taken by grassroots groups against these violences and transgressions? How can we build sustainable alternatives centered on depatriarchalization and based on freedom and liberation? How can we imagine and materialize alternative futures that challenge hegemonic structures of oppression? In this seminar, we draw on gendered and feminist political ecologies, anti-patriarchal decolonizing theory, Indigenous feminisms, ecofeminsm, queer ecologies, black studies, environmental humanities, memory studies, diasporic thought, and critical science and technology studies to deploy a critical gendered approach to environmental politics/policy and sustainable socioecological transformations. We will examine what connects gender coded experiences of human and non-human precarity, premature death, marginalization, and forced displacement to hegemonic governance frameworks of policy and corporate management practices. We will critically examine and challenge how gender is factored and 'mainstreamed' into state, intergovernmental and corporate apparatuses, discourses and policy frameworks around issues like environment, climate, development and the rights of women and marginalized populations. We pay particular attention to alternatives to gendered violence and patriarchy built on responses from below, and their radical imaginations and embodiments of counterhegemonic gendered ecologies. This class is an online seminar. We will have a discussion-based class with small breakout rooms, presentations, the creation of a class blog, guest speakers, discussions on texts, public policies, social movements, and case studies.

Urban Ecosystems | Course Catalog | The New SchoolFor centuries, people viewed cities as apart from nature, the province solely of human artifice. However, it is increasingly clear that cities and urbanizing regions are deeply entangled with the ecosystems in which they are embedded, from the scale of microorganisms to the planetary reach of urban-generated pollution. This course examines the nature of cities--that is, the ecologies that shape them and their effect on those ecologies. We will survey the key concepts co-occurring in all ecosystems including population, community, metabolism, systems, feedback, climate, and geography. We will also examine major themes and processes shaping the relationship of cities to their environments, such as biodiversity, habitat conversion, climate change, heat island effect, pollution and other externalities. In this context, understanding how biological organisms interact with each other and their environment in an urbanizing world is crucial to understanding how the natural world works, how ecology in cities is different or similar to non-urban systems, and how to bring cities into closer alignment with goals of sustainability, resilience, and repair.

Planetary Health Strategies | Course Catalog | The New SchoolThis course uses a solutions-based approach to adThis course uses a solutions-based approach to address global environmental change and challenges to human health. Through text, artworks, and multimedia we focus on specific planetary health crises and strategies using Causal Loop Diagrams and Root Cause Analysis to identify variables, reveal unintended consequences, and explore system redesign and interventions to promote wellness, equity and ecological integrity. Case Study Topics may include: flu-related to agricultural practices; schistosomiasis related to water systems and urban planning; malaria related to deforestation and pesticide use; and cholera related to sea temperature and fertilizer runoff. This course counts as an approved Elective course or an Intermediate Level course for Interdisciplinary Science Majors/Minors. This course also counts towards the Elective for the Natural Sciences Subject area for Environmental Studies majors and minors, as well as an Elective for the Urban Studies, Food Studies, Global Studies and Journalism and Design majors and minors.

Chemistry of the Environment | Course Catalog | The New SchoolChemistry, while being responsible for many environmental challenges, also contributes to our understanding of these issues towards identifying policies and solutions that address them. In this introductory course, chemical principles will be discussed through the following contexts (i) access to safe drinking water, (ii) why do fossil fuels drive our economies, and (iii) polymers, plastics, and "green" alternatives. The course demonstrates why a chemical understanding is necessary to investigate these environmental and social challenges. At the same time, the course aims to illustrate the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, connecting the science to other disciplines towards identifying socially just policies and solutions that protect planetary health. The final project explores the intersection of chemistry with other fields in identifying socially just policies and solutions to address the global challenge in access to safe drinking water. This course is a required Foundation course for the Interdisciplinary Science major and satisfies the Foundation requirement for the Interdisciplinary Science minor. The course satisfies the Natural Sciences subject area for the Environmental Studies major and serves as an elective for Food Studies.

Ecologies of Empire | Course Catalog | The New SchoolTaking as its starting point an understanding of capitalism as significantly more than an economic system but, rather, as a world re-making force, what Jason Moore has described as “capitalism as world ecology,” this course inquires into the relationship between imperial formations and environmental change from the 16th century to the present. Taking a global perspective, and drawing on a variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches, we will explore a range of topics, such as: the relationship between credit and peasant production in the Indian and Egyptian countrysides; the transition from transhumant pastoralism to industrial cattle production in Eastern Africa; the ecological consequences of the imposition of regimes of private property in the United States; the globally uneven labor regimes governing extractive industries, among others. We will query the impact of these transformations for human and extra-human life, and enquire as to what the implications are for our collective present.

Grammars of Time | Course Catalog | The New SchoolThis is a seminar about one of the seemingly most banal and quotidian concepts with which we live, and the most ambiguous, abstract, and precise concepts: time. In the fields of knowledge production from history, anthropology, philosophy, geology, literature, and physics, to name a few are contests over what we know about it, what we can know and what that knowing tells us about the disparate worlds -the imaginary and material, in which we live. Our task in this seminar is more limited: to ask about the social and environmental ecologies in which people experience and talk about time, on the relations of power that are instantiated and maintained through specific fabrications and frames of time. Temporality is a key to the distribution of inequalities. We talk about “losing time,” “wasting time,” “doing time,” “being on time,” “saving time. ” We refer repeatedly to concepts that don’t use the word time but invoke it nonetheless as the frame of concern: anticipation, waiting, gift-giving, expectation, hope, boredom, procrastination, leisure, urgency, are distributed differently in our social and political environments, tethered to social location in particular ways. Do we shape time or does time shape us? We’ll look at what the concept, “temporalities” offers, so pervasive in current social inquiry. People live in different temporalities, multiple temporalities and conflicting ones; the world is divided among those who must adhere to specific protocols of time and timing and those who can disregard them...but sometimes they too may not. This seminar is an exploration of the modalities and the grammars (the required rubrics of tense) that mandate that time is considered in one way and not another. Philosophically, sociologically, and with respect to social history, how time is allocated, distributed, understood is a diagnostic of the worlds we live in and the pressures upon us to adhere to, refuse, and reshape what we see as its requirements and demands. Open to m.a. and ph.d students in any field from TNS and other consortium universities.

Also apropos of our final discussion

File this under: are we the aliens we are looking for/ have we found them yet/it's never aliens!

Let's let Sabina Have the last word on AI for now

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