Courses

Witnessing Climate Change (ENGL 20760)

The Earth’s climate is changing faster than expected. Industrialization, fossil fuel use, consumption, and exploitation are radically transforming the planet we live on. In Witnessing Climate Change, we work to make sense of the science behind this planetary crisis and practice writing about it for the public. This is a large, writing-intensive, public-facing course that engages key contemporary issues and core ways of knowing from a values-oriented perspective, through large lectures and small group workshops. Readings include Jeff VanderMeer, Nukariik, Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, Wanda Coleman, J.M. Coetzee, and St. Francis, among others. Find out more at witnessingclimatechange.nd.edu.

Science, Theology, & Creation (THEO 20888)

This course investigates the Christian understanding of creation and how this doctrine relates to contemporary scientific issues. We will examine the development of the doctrine beginning with Scripture and the Creed and progressing through the early Church period into the Medieval and Scholastic era, focusing on the concepts of creation ex nihilo, creation continua, divine Providence, and divine action in the world. With the rise of the modern era, we will analyze the origin of and principles involved with the purported conflict between science and theology. We will bring the doctrine of creation into dialogue with three contemporary issues in the sciences: cosmology, evolution, and ecology. Integral to this course will be the relationship and response of humankind to God and to creation. This course will have a special appeal to students interested in the intersection of science and theology.

Sustainability @ ND/SMC/HCC and in the Holy Cross Charism (THEO 20672)

This course will address sustainability in the context of the local academic community and its institutions. In conversation with the recent papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home, this course will provide students with interdisciplinary opportunities to explore the challenges of sustainability and develop collaborative strategies for making our common campus homes more sustainable. Students will be invited to examine the course materials in conversation with the mission of the Congregation of Holy Cross through immersion at each of the campuses and encounters with professionals whose work impacts sustainability. Please note: In Fall 2022, this course will involve 20 hours of community-based learning with site placements in the local community.

Carbon Neutral Development (SUS 43611)

Knowledge about the relationship between built environment development and global and local challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, environmental impact, justice and health, is of key importance to move towards a sustainable and resilient future. This course takes a trans-disciplinary approach to understanding how to decarbonize the built environment. Linkages between and perspectives from engineering, architectural design, and social sciences are emphasized throughout the course. This course provides students with real-world problems to work with such as urbanization-related pollution in China and urban revitalization needs for the aging building stock in Germany. This course is composed of two modules: (1) Carbon neutral development at the urban scale is examined through three real case studies to explore the different development principles, design strategies and patterns. (2) Net zero building design and related environmental impact are examined through research literature and real case projects.

Introduction to Ecological Horticulture (BIOS 20204)

Globally, the agricultural sector is the largest cause of habitat loss, aquifer depletion, and greenhouse gas emissions. The need to transform agricultural systems to meet the needs of the world's growing population while addressing these ecological impacts is one of the 21st century's grand challenges. This course will include principles, concepts and practices of sustainable food production including biodiversity, soil quality, and nutrient, water, pest and disease management, while focusing on a production culture that is environmentally regenerative. Every class meeting will involve experiential learning that will build students' skills in growing healthy food in a way that protects and restores the earth. This class will also address the environmental and social consequences of industrial farming and public health impacts of quality food accessibility in communities.

Sustainable America (AMST 30105)

This CAD course looks back to 1850, when urban industrial America began, and looks forward to 2050, when Notre Dame promises to be carbon neutral, to critically engage competing visions of individual, communal, and ecological flourishing. It focuses on economic, racial, and environmental justice as students explore how US political culture, the discipline of American Studies, and Catholic social teaching have clashed and converged and Americans proposed varying solutions to poverty, racism, and environmental degradation. After an introduction to American Studies, we turn to visions of the good life in foundational US political documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, and Inaugural Addresses) and in Catholic tradition (scriptural passages, theological essays, and papal encyclicals, from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si'). Then the course's three main sections consider, in turn, economic equity, racial justice, and environmental restoration. Each section includes a "faith in action" case study and concludes with an "integrative essay" that puts Catholic social teaching into conversation with American Studies scholarship. In the final class session, Learning Groups present their synthesis of the course material, and, during the exam period, each student submits a final integrative essay that focuses on one of the issues—poverty, racism, or environmental degradation—and identifies what American Studies might learn from the Catholic Tradition and what the Catholic Tradition might learn from American Studies.

Race, Class, and Justice from The Field to the Table (AMST 30902)

Food access, equity and justice should be of great importance to everyone. Consistently there has been political, economic, geographic and flawed distribution supply chains within the domestic food system. This interdisciplinary course will utilize digital humanities tools and platforms for students to express their research interests. We will analyze the impact that human actions have on foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food in relation to race, equity and access, historically and currently. We will explore alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs /foodways, environmental justice and nature.

American Wilderness (AMST 30174)

How is a national park different from a national wilderness area, a city park, the lakes at Notre Dame, or your back yard? Why are some considered more wild than others, and why is wilderness such an attractive idea? Writers, historians, painters, photographers, and politicians have described American landscapes as wild to great effect, in concert with identities of gender, class, race, and nation. This class will explore how the idea of wilderness – and the places associated with that idea – have developed during the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine how wilderness has supported the growth of a national identity but largely failed to recognize the diversity of the American people. Course themes include: 1) developing the wilderness idea; 2) national parks and the problem of wilderness; 3) wilderness experience and politics; and 4) wilderness narratives. Readings will range from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Edward Abbey and Jon Krakauer, and there will be a strong visual culture component. For their final project students will choose a wild place of their own to interpret.

Our Global Environment (HIST 30998)

“No one under 30 has ever lived through a month of global temperatures below the 20th-century average.” Why bother with history if the future, because of climate change, will be nothing like the past? That’s the central question of this course. Scientists now tell us that the relatively benign epoch of human flourishing designed the “Holocene” is over. The change is so great and so rapid that some scientists have even proposed a new epoch called the “Anthropocene” to designate this irreversible rupture with the previous 11,700 year when human beings first discovered agriculture, created cities, and developed writing systems’ when most of what historians have called “history” occurred. To confront this dilemma, this course asks three questions: (1) What is the “Anthropocene” and what are scientists telling us about this epoch which began by most accounts in the mid-twentieth century with the Great Acceleration in economic activities and population growth? (2) What does history show us about how we arrived at this crisis? Historians have long been interested in political and economic questions about power, state structures, democracy, and development, but have they sufficiently considered the relationship between their own stories of modernity and the dilemmas we now face? (3) Were there political and economic formations in the past more conducive to environmentally sustainable communities and can historians now help by uncovering them? The readings combine scientific debates over the “Anthropocene” with historians’ work on sustainable communities from Victorian England and early modern Japan. We end by reading the famous novelist and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

Moby-Dick & 19th-Century America (HIST 30637)

“I but put that brow before you,” Herman Melville wrote in his 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, “read it if you can.” Melville was describing the brow of the mighty sperm whale, but his words apply equally to his mighty book. In this seminar, we can and will read Moby-Dick, Melville’s maddening masterpiece. We will read Moby-Dick as an invitation into its multiple historical contexts at the middle of the 19th-century American and wider worlds. We will explore the world of whaling and the age of sail, the ecological and imaginary expanses of the 19th-century ocean, the intellectual and literary culture of the “American Renaissance,” and a nation on a collision course with itself.

The Indigenous Southwest (HIST 32908)

This course introduces students to the diversity of cultures living in the American Southwest from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. Most of the course is devoted to learning about the complex cultural developments in the Mimbres Valley, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, and the Phoenix Basin. Class work and discussions will focus on important issues such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of villages, the transformation of ideological beliefs and political organization, the importance of migration, and the impact of warfare using information on environmental relationships, technology, and other aspects of material culture. Students will also learn about descendant populations living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Santa Clara, Acoma) and Tohono O'odham.

Sustainable Cities: Community Health and the Common Good (CSC 33958)

This one-credit, interdisciplinary course is an exploration of the question: What is the relationship between healthy, sustainable communities and the principle of the Common Good. Beginning with an introduction to basic principles of environmental justice, students will explore how the equitable and culturally appropriate distribution of environmental benefits and burdens serves the aim of community health and the common good. Reflective conversations and community visits will shape how students engage questions about the links between health disparities and disproportionate exposure to environmental pollution. Students will leave this course with a foundation of knowledge to address issues at the intersection of health, poverty, sustainability, and justice. Please note: This course satisfies the pre-requisite requirements for any of the Washington Policy Seminars.

Appalachia Seminar (CSC 33950)

The Appalachia Seminar is designed to introduce students to the cultural and social issues of the Appalachian region - its history, people, culture, challenges, and strengths - through study and experiential learning. The course also provides engagement with the people of Appalachia through a required week-long immersion. The Appalachia Seminar utilizes a Catholic Social Tradition (CST) framework to build skills around social analysis, critical thinking, and theological reflection. In this seminar, students examine the relationship between solidarity and service and consider how the Common Good is expressed in local communities across the region.

Plants, Society, Environment (STV 30325)

Plants have provided food, medicine, fuel, and raw materials for humans throughout our history. Concurrently, humans have modified the distribution, diversity and utility of plants for our benefit in ways that are often unsustainable. Many of the grand environmental and societal challenges of today and tomorrow involve our interactions with plants and the pivotal roles they play in our natural and modified environments. The goal of this course is to provide foundational knowledge about the biology and diversity of plants. This includes learning the basics of plant anatomy and physiology and the ecology and evolutionary history of plants. This knowledge is then utilized to discuss plants as sources of food, commercial products, medicines and toxins in the past, present and future of human society."

Community Health and the Common Good (STV 33958)

Solutions: Science, Politics, and Saving the Planet (POLS 40491)

Studying environmental politics can be a gloomy pursuit. There are a myriad of devastating problems and a seeming scarcity of scientific and technological fixes. Technical fixes aside, there is the even more problematic scarcity of political fixes. Political institutions often seem to obstruct rather than facilitate environmentally sound policies, and the mass public and political leaders often prioritize competing goals and policies. This course is designed to understand whether the pessimism is warranted and to search for the optimism: What are the best opportunities, scientific and political, for saving the planet? What can realistically be accomplished?

Coloniality and Climate Change (IIPS 50405)

Why is talking about climate change without reference to colonial pasts an incomplete conversation? Why is a forward-looking climate justice conversation incomplete unless it is also looking back? How does coloniality present today? How does the global south figure in writing on climate change? Can there be a role for the global south in the climate justice conversation that recognizes its vulnerability to climate change but goes beyond portraying it as always and only vulnerable, devastated and/or menacing? In this class we will begin with the premise that the answer is yes: not only is such a role possible, but it must actively be created if the climate justice conversation is to an inclusive one. Examining representations of climate refugees, extreme weather events, and imagined geographies of conflicts, and informed by scholarship on racialized constructions of ‘good' and ‘bad' migrants, in this class we will collectively work through the intersections between the political and ecological that today determine the movement of humans, capital, and knowledge. Our collective endeavor will be to: (i) understand writing on climate change with a focus on its implicit (yet predominant) threat and risk imaginaries; (ii) question the role of the global south in such writing; and (iii) craft a lexicon that is cognizant of colonial pasts and their continuity, and relates geographies, histories and politics in more equal ways.

The Commons: tangible, intangible and otherwise (ANTH 60300)

What could environmental anthropology offer to our current debates about climate change, degrowth, and sustainability? The debate on the “commons” has returned to the focus of socio-environmental politics and theorizing in recent debates of the climate crisis. From late 1960s debates about overpopulation and environmental degradation to the present debates about economic degrowth and climate change mitigation, the “commons” has figured as a constant topic of debate and a key symbol for political organizing. The idea of the “commons” of collective management led to its renewal with the discourse on the Internet as a force for positive social change with the circulation of intangible goods of information and knowledge. Most recently, we are back to square one in terms of our debate about the common in the “commons:” its urgency as an alternative for ecological collapse and corporate enclosures of intellectual property and natural resources. In this seminar, we will map out the field to discuss alternatives of the commons based on classic and contemporary references. Our goal will be to cover the literature and examine its contributions for addressing pressing issues of climate change and economic transformation. We welcome advanced undergraduates and graduate students working on climate change and sustainability issues to join the seminar.