SOC 250 CC: CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

What is climate change? What does climate mean to different social actors, both now and in the past? How are people responding to the problem of climate change, and what are the consequences of their actions? This course investigates the answers to these and related questions, with the intention of deepening students’ understanding of the relationships between climate and societies. Anthropogenic global climate change is often conceived of as the scientific issue of our time given the cataclysmic anticipated effects of living in a warming world. Yet viewing climate change as only an issue for the natural sciences occludes understanding critical dimensions of the problem, including but not limited to its human-driven causes, the dramatically uneven nature of its effects, and the myriad ways in which social groups respond. The goal of this course is for students to develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of the causes and uneven consequences of this problem, as well as to investigate and compare a wide array of social responses to the problem. Understanding the dynamic, complex, and highly consequential problem of climate change requires insights to be drawn from across fields.