Aims

This module approaches the climate crisis as a social issue. We live on a planet that has been and continues to be fundamentally altered by human activities. While it is tempting to think of the climate crisis as a primarily environmental or scientific issue, or a matter for policies and people in power to address, the climate emergency is in fact thoroughly social and embedded in our everyday lives. The crisis is rooted in longstanding systems of extraction and social injustice, and it is built on ecological exploitation and structures of oppression. Unequal effects and experiences of the crisis are shaped by existing global and local social arrangements, institutions and power dynamics, and might only be managed through social action and collective changes.

As we face up to an ‘existential threat of climate catastrophe’ (IPCC 2022), sociological approaches can help us to critically examine our complicities and learn to live in these times. Sociology provides us with concepts, material and techniques to describe, detail and counter the structures, discourses, practices and relationships that contribute to eco-social breakdown. The climate crisis also demands new ways of knowing and relating to the social. Sociology is learning to pay due attention to the ‘much more than human’ worlds that make up our collective lives. Extending our sociological imaginations in generous ways that redefine what we think of as the ‘social’ might in turn facilitate more sustainable, just, and climate-responsible ways of living.

If you already know a lot about climate change, you’ll learn about how sociology speaks directly to the current moment with critical insights into the origins and impacts of the crisis as well as how we might meaningfully effect change. If the topic is new to you, the module will be an opportunity to examine this pressing issue while developing your sociological skills and knowledge.

Aims

1.       For students to gain a critical exposure to a range of contemporary climate-related debates and the range of ways in which we can conceptualise the climate crisis and theorise its social, economic, political and cultural causes.
2.       For students to gain an overview of different ways of facing up to or living in climate crisis, and the ability to sociologically assess/analyse these interventions including a sensitive understanding of the diverse and unequal ways in which different societies are experiencing, registering and attending to climate crisis.
3.       For students to have experiential learning opportunities that allow them to apply their learning on the module to ‘real world’ scenarios.
4.       For students to have the opportunity to develop research, graduate and employability skills through inquiry and analysis of specific topics, issues or problems relating to climate crisis.
5.       For students to develop critical, theoretically informed approaches to understanding, exploring, and reporting on climate topics, issues or problems.
6.       Equipping students with the capability to confidently articulate the ways in which their university experience has enabled them to develop personally and professionally.

Outline Of Syllabus

The module will take students through social approaches to climate and linked environmental challenges. We will explore how different societies experience and attend to eco-social crises, focusing on different kinds of climate effects, climate knowledges (and denials), and climate affects and emotional responses. We will examine a range of explanations of the current emergency and its risks and injustices, exploring theories from sociology, anthropology, political studies, science studies and human geography.

Focusing on lived socio-political and more-than-human realities, we will examine some climate case studies. Examples might include fast fashion; digital technology; travel and transport; food and agriculture; biodiversity loss; domestic heating/cooling; fertility and reproduction. We will also explore alternatives in the face of climate crisis: how knowledges from the global South, creative and cultural imaginaries, global and local policies, and different kinds of activist praxis offer ways of thinking about and instituting better society-nature relationships. Every year the module will also include some of the following: contributions from guest speakers; experiential learning for example a walking tour; engagement with a relevant audio-visual text, exhibition or event.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Each week students will be introduced to key knowledge and theories about climate experiences, understandings and alternatives through lectures and independent readings. Regular two-hour workshops will foster engagement from the outset with applying knowledge to concrete questions, examples and cases. Workshops will include reflections on lectures and readings as well as exercises (for example ‘show and tell’, in-class case research, preparing a list of questions to interrogate an issue).

In some weeks workshops will include guest speakers working on climate solutions. The 3-hour walking tour is designed as experiential learning which will bridge questions of causes and experiences of the climate crisis in the context of Newcastle’s industrial history and contemporary cultural and social life. Alternatively, a film or tv screening OR exhibition or event attendance of equivalent length will explore global dimensions of the climate crisis as they are represented in fiction, documentary, art, or heritage contexts. Online assignment briefings will support students to explore assessment requirements.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

In Assignment 1, the learning journal, students will map their journey through sociological understandings of the climate crisis to generate an original focus and develop independent analysis. They will be encouraged to produce iterative reflections as they engage with material linked to taught sessions on experiences, explanations and cases. The conclusion of the learning journal will suggest the direction to be taken in Assignment 2, the presentation and associated text/document.

Assignment 2 will focus on attempts to make changes in relation to climate crisis through public policies, political resistance and collective action and social action including in employment contexts. The combination of these two elements will give students an opportunity to explore existing knowledge and apply contemporary research; engage critically with theory; and orient their learning on the module towards deploying sociological understanding to consider creative and positive approaches to effective interventions in the climate crisis.