Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Specialized graduate course offering on a topic related to the current research of school faculty or visiting professor.

COURSE DETAILS:

Parks and parks systems are a microcosm of our societies and histories. They embody struggles over land use and citizenship in modernity and colonization. From crowded tourist destinations to so-called “pristine” ecosystems, National Parks and Protected Areas, Tribal Parks, Regional Parks, Provincial Parks, World Heritage Sites, and Urban Parks demonstrate shifting ideas about the value and meaning of nature. They are among the first locations for the implementation of surveillance technology and are profoundly impacted, historically and currently, by visual media. They also reflect competing ideas about the coexistence of human cultures in natural settings and the social relations and expertise involved in the management of these special spaces. In some cases they are the site of new experiments in land tenure, co-management, recognition and use of “traditional knowledge.”

This course will be of interest to students of environmental communication, theoretical approaches to nature in the “anthropocene,” colonial and post-colonial societies, Indigenous governance and knowledge, place-based cultural policies, social media, and media representations of the environment and environmental issues.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

The course will begin with an orientation to the history of parks systems in modernity and to emerging research and initiatives. It will continue with case studies based in the instructor’s current research and in the research and interests of participating students. These topics include:

• social media and parks: “anarchy and ruin”?
• reconciliation with Indigenous peoples: the Colonial Audit of Stanley Park
• eviction, racialization, and citizenship in the history, design and management of parks

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: