Taught By:
Laura Landolt
Associate Professor
Political Science Department
Oakland University
Read profile here.
Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I am a cofounder and member of the steering committee of the Campus Alliance on Sustainability and the Environment, which includes faculty, staff and students. I also incorporate attention to environmental politics into all of the classes I teach, and two years ago I created and now regularly teach a crosslisted course on Global Environmental Governance. Finally, I have a long-term research interest in Middle East and North African human rights and women's rights NGOs at the domestic and international levels, and I'm currently shifting my research over to examine how domestic and transnational NGOs advance environmental rights as human rights. I notice that another colleague of mine, Jo Reger, has been accepted as a participant in the upcoming institute, and she and I share a common interest in social movements.
Course Description:
ENV 3540/PS 3730: Global Environmental Governance (I'm happy to share the syllabus!) first examines and explains long-term and ongoing failures of international negotiations to create meaningful common policy to address climate change. It then considers alternatives to international negotiations, particularly women's and indigenous domestic and transnational responses to environmental injustice. Finally, the course considers how conservative nationalistic elite/racist/patriarchal responses to climate change in multiple countries undermines democracy and exacerbates human rights abuses (particularly of migrants and immigrants, but also of citizens as well). I also assign multiple chapters from Sarah Jaquette Ray's "A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety", and the entirety of Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future"--which envisions major shifts in popular support for climate change mitigation and adaptation only after major cases of direct action. The course thus concludes with Andreas Malm's book, "Fighting in a World on Fire". Many of the students who take this class are initially apolitical Environmental Science and Sustainability majors, as well as PS and IR students who are interested in human rights activism. At the end of the course, they all report a major change in their understanding of domestic, regional, and international environmental politics, and an increased sense of urgency to participate in social action. I would really like to incorporate such a component into the course.
