The Politics of Climate Change
STVC72 – The Politics of Climate Change (7.5 credits). Bachelor course in Political science. Autumn term.
Climate change has emerged as one of the defining issues for the 21st century. What started as a matter of scientific inquiry in the nineteenth century, and became a battleground for intergovernmental negotiations in the 1990s, is now written through the contemporary social and political world. The course moves away from studying climate change as a ‘single issue’ to instead approach it is as a ‘condition’ affecting the ways in which multiple economies and forms of social relations emerge.
This course explore the politics of climate change across a multiple set of sites ranging from the UN, the state and the city, to systems of infrastructure, social and cultural practices. This implies a closer engagement with issues such as public and private low carbon road-maps, urban designs for electric mobility, the low carbon home, the carbon conscious individual and the climate refugee. These sites are examined with the help of different conceptual and theoretical perspectives from various fields of political science, among them international relations, policy studies, comparative politics and critical social and political thought. Through fieldwork and methods of authentication the course helps the students to grasp how climate change rearticulate fundamental concerns of political science, such as power, democracy, authority, and social change.
Contact
Helen Fogelin
International coordinator – incoming students
Room: 234
Telephone: +46 (0)46-2228951
E-mail: helen [dot] fogelin [at] svet [dot] lu [dot] se