GEOG145 HM - Feeling Natural?

Credit(s): 3

Instructor(s): Seitz

Description: A 2021 poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association found that two in three American adults described feeling anxious about the impact of climate change on life on Earth. Contemporary environmental politics are nothing if not emotional. But psychoanalysis and affect theory also gently remind us that emotions - particularly emotions that arise in the face of socially induced catastrophe - are in many respects trained and historical rather than simply “natural.” At stake in this course is not dismissal of legitimate contemporary feelings of climate anxiety and grief, but a turn to psychoanalysis and affect theory to think structurally and historically about how those feelings come to be, and about the complex relationships between feeling differently and prospects for environmental justice.

HSA Course Area(s): Geography
HSA Writing Intensive: No