Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Oberlin College/Environment and Revolution in the Middle East (Spring 2015)/Course description

This experiential class provides a foundation in the anthropology of environment. The class examines first how “environment” has become politically and socially meaningful in various countries of the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, second, how environmental ideologies produced in this process have broader political and economic effects in the region. Our inquiry pivots around three central questions: What gets defined as environmentalism and how is that definition created? What material effects are produced from defining environment in particular ways? How does the aesthetics of environmentalism obscure its political and economic effects? This course begins by establishing a foundation in key scholarship on environment and on the operation of power in the Middle East that will then be applied throughout the semester in class analysis of subsequent readings. Environmental anthropology of the Middle East is an emerging field. We will engage that field as it is formulated in real time in the digital blogosphere. In our analytic efforts, we will both draw upon digital Middle East environmental resources and formulate our own online body of scholarship by authoring Wikipedia entries on environmentalism in the Arab Islamic world. Through direct engagement with environmental leadership, students will gain first hand knowledge of the interplay of environment and politics and, in the process, they will sharpen the critical reasoning and writing skills necessary for both academic and applied research.

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