LACS 50.17 Land, Belonging, and Social Change in Latin America
This course examines the entanglements of society and nature in Latin America with respect to political economic processes that affect land use, its management, and its productive capacities in our present age of environmental degradation and heightened social conflict. Debates around multispecies thinking, the nature/culture divide, and environmental affect figure prominently in the interlinked and interdisciplinary discussions dealing with the curating, imagining, and use of environment in the hemispheric Americas. By thinking through the environment, we approach a different way of examining the history of Latin America, interrogating how we imagine Latin American nature as both object and site of our collective environmental imaginations. Topics include the politics of sustainability, green capitalism, indigenous land struggles, contemporary theories of nature, ecotourism, and select case studies at the intersection of ecology, conservation, and security.
Instructor
Cuellar