SHUM 4625/6625 Deranged Authority: Culture, Power, and Climate Change
(also ANTHR 4025/7025)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
J. Carlson.
M: 2:30 – 4:25 p.m.
Writing on the eve of the US general election in 2016, Amitav Ghosh’s Great Derangement suggests that the world’s collective failure to meet the challenges of climate change stems from an ongoing crisis of culture and, more fundamentally, of the imagination. While the majority of US citizens agree that global warming is real, for example, this knowledge has not moved them to alter their consumer practices, nor to agitate for increased environmental protections on a broad scale. Meanwhile, climate denialism is on the rise, as are reactionary, rightwing politics in the United States, UK, and Germany. In this context, what are the cultural dynamics through which widely publicized, scientific evidence of climate catastrophe falls flat, failing to catalyze social and political reform? Conversely, how does climate denialism become something that people embrace, even and especially with the awareness that climate change is real? All of these questions point to the ongoing importance of authority for legitimating knowledge and moving social change, as well as the ways in which authority is negotiated amid political fragmentation, widening inequality, and the proliferation of digital public spheres.
http://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/fall-2018-courses
