Module SOC2097 for 2021/2
- Overview
- Aims and Learning Outcomes
- Module Content
- Indicative Reading List
- Assessment
Undergraduate Module Descriptor
SOC2097: Environment and Society
This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.
Module Aims
This module explores how science, technology and society interact to determine what counts as an environmental problem. The aim of the module is to familiarize you with a wide range of environmental problems and methodologies to analyse them. An important focus will be the role of science and divergent understandings of nature in the analysis of environmental issues. You will learn how interdisciplinary approaches to controversies over environmental problems may complicate the debates and read popular media reports of environmental issues more critically. We will discuss the meanings, political uses, and abuses of uncertainties in science, the affirmations of risks and the relationships between environmental and social justice.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to: | |
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Module-Specific Skills | 1. demonstrate familiarity with different approaches to environmental problem and different roles of science. 2. discuss conflicting meanings of scientific evidence, social responsibility, uncertainty in science and politics, and critically assess the depiction of environmental problems in popular media and the relationship between social and environmental justice |
Discipline-Specific Skills | 3. demonstrate awareness and understanding of a range of social scientific, historical, and philosophical perspectives; 4. identify the core theoretical assumptions 5. apply a range of theoretical and interpretive perspectives to the task of sociological and anthropological analysis; 6. demonstrate appreciation of the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of different and competing social scientific, historical, and philosophical perspectives. |
Personal and Key Skills | 7. reflect on, and examine critically, taken-for-granted social, cultural and ethical assumptions, beliefs and values; 8. analyse, evaluate, and communicate, clearly and directly, a wide range of explanatory and interpretive theoretical perspectives; assess evidence, marshal facts and construct arguments |
Indicative Reading List
This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.
Yearley, Steven (2008), 'Nature and the Environment in Science and Technology Studies', in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Third Edition, eds. Edward J. Hackett, et al., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 921-47.
Jasanoff, Sheila (2005), Designs on Nature; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, Chapters 4&5.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society, London Sage
Gusterson, Hugh (2005), 'Decoding the Debate on 'Frankenfood'', in Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties, eds. Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subramaniam, and Charles Zerner, Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 109-33.
Latour, Bruno (2007), 'A Plea for Earthly Sciences', keynote lecture for the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association, East London, April 2007.
Smith, Neil (2005), 'There's No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster', in Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. SSRC Forum, New York, NY: Social Science Research Council.
Murphy, Michelle (2006), Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers; Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chapters 4 & 5.
Cronon, William (1995), 'The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon, New York: W.W. Norton and Co, pp. 69 - 90.
Helmreich, Stefan (2005), 'How Scientists Think; About ‘Natives,’ for Example: A Problem of Taxonomy among Biologists of Alien Species in Hawaii', The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11 (1), pp. 107-27
Thompson, Charis (2002), ‘When Elephants Stand for Competing Philosophies of Nature: Amboseli National Park’, in Complexities. John Law and Annemarie Mol, eds. (Duke UP), pp. 166-90.
Hinchliffe, Steve (2001), 'Indeterminacy In-Decisions: Science, Policy and Politics in the BSE Crisis', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26 (2), pp. 182-204.
Adam, Barbara (1998), 'Industrial Food for Thought', in Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment & Invisible Hazards, London: Routledge, pp. 127-62.