Masterstudiengang "Environment & Society"

Plants sustain life on earth in a variety of ways. In myriad forms, shapes, colors, and sizes they are a fundamental component of most landscapes and built environments, regardless of how much or how little these landscapes are impacted and shaped by human hands. However, despite plants’  fundamental roles for human survival on earth, they have often been overlooked or neglected. Today’s concerns about global warming, climate justice, as well as social and environmental justice more generally show that it is high time to reconsider plants’ manifold values and agencies. “Critical plant studies” and the “plant humanities” are two recently constituted fields pursuing this objective, assembling scholarship that draws attention to the importance of plants in human life worlds. In this course we will address what has been called “plant blindness” by studying plant histories and histories and stories that have centered plants; by exploring the strengths and weaknesses often associated with plants, and by shedding light on how politics have guided plant use for benign and malevolent purposes. Lectures, seminar discussions, field trips, and visits to special plant and book collections will shed light on plants’ uses and roles in our landscape, environmental, and cultural histories to enlighten the present and suggest future possibilities of thinking about and with plants. The course will be accompanied by readings in history and theory; you will work on a research paper or mixed-media project related to the course content that will be presented in class.

This class looks at the origins, the development and the multiple subfields of disaster studies from a humanities and social-science perspective. Emphasis will be laid upon when, how and why a scholarly interest in (natural) disasters arose, on key analytical terms such as vulnerability and resilience, and on the importance of categories like race, class, gender, and able-bodiedness. We will focus on disaster memory (and the lack thereof), on cultural representations of destructive events, and the economic dimension of catastrophes (risk, insurance, “disaster capitalism”). Finally, we will look at the intersections of climate change and disaster as evidenced for example in processes of displacement and migration. One guiding question of this seminar will be: “How natural are natural disasters?”

Image: Staff of the Disaster Research Center during a flood in Cincinnati, Ohio 1963 (Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware)