Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An exploration of our political, social, and economic systems, their ecological limitations, and related questions of inequality. It explores the histories, dynamics, logics, effects, and limitations of these systems. The evolution and effects of capitalism, specifically with respect to nonhuman natures, will be a focus.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course digs into the politics and production of capitalist natures: the forms and functions that nonhuman nature takes within capitalist social relations. By necessity, this also involves investigating colonial natures, racial capitalism, and capitalist structures like private property, the modern state, and law. What kinds of natures have these structures produced historically and in the present, and through what logics and processes? Are these structures inclined towards ecological emaciation? Who benefits from these changed ecologies and who bears the costs? Are there patterns along lines of race, class, gender, species and other socially constructed axes of difference?

To explore these questions, this year’s course focuses on extraction and the state. We empirically study the state’s role in extractive regimes globally and in a local context, specifically Treaty 8 territory in northeast BC, a hotspot of extractive development. We will engage in in-depth readings and seminar discussion of key texts that analytically help us explain why the state performs this role. These readings will also shed light on the relationship between abstracted difference (along lines of race, gender, species), political economic structures like capitalism and colonialism, and the more-than-human, or what Okanagan scholar Jeannette Armstrong calls “the world beyond the skin.”

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: