Curriculum
The program's curriculum encompasses three thematic areas.
- Ecological Dimensions
- Economic and Political Dimensions
- Socio-Cultural Dimensions: Race, Class, Gender and Place
Course Requirements for the Environment and Community
M.A. Program
- One three-unit proseminar, PSCI 683 Environment & Community Research, to be taken during the first semester in the program
- One three-unit research methods elective, chosen from an approved list, to be completed no later than the third semester
- 15 units of graduate seminars developed specifically for this program. Students take at least one seminar from each of the following three curriculum areas:
- Ecological Dimensions,
- Economic and Political Dimensions,
- Socio-Cultural Dimensions: Race, Class, Gender and Place
These three curriculum areas reflect a new, approved restructuring of the program. Seminars are developed by the advisory committee composed of program faculty and are listed within the home department of the instructor. Several new seminars are under preparation for these areas but could not be listed in this catalogue. - One-unit graduate colloquium for three semesters
- Two additional courses at the graduate or upper division undergraduate level from a list of elective options approved by the graduate coordinator
- Maximum of six units of master's thesis or master's project (typically based on an internship)
- Minimum of three units of field research or independent study
Total units required: 39
CORE E&C SEMINARS BY CURRICULUM AREAS:
Ecological Dimensions:
Economic and Political Dimensions:- Rights, Politics, and the Environment
- Globalism, Capitalism, and Environment
- Dispute Resolution
- Race, Class, Gender and the Politics of Environmental Security
Environment and Community Course Descriptions
Environment and Community Research
Required of every graduate student in the Environment and Community Program their first semester at HSU. Helps develop the skills necessary to become critical consumers and producers of knowledge. Establishes common frames of reference through exploration of a variety of approaches for understanding "environment" and "community." Develops a working understanding of the variety of research approaches and methods for investigating different aspects of environment-community interrelationships. Provides students the opportunity to identify the specific types of research methods most appropriate, given their own particular research interests and questions.
Ecosystems and Society
Examines how ecosystems function and how humans interact with other parts and processes of ecosystems. Emphasis will be on how humans have developed more or less sustainable relationships with their physical environment. Students will work on understanding their bio regions.
Rights, Politics, and the Environment
Focuses on the values that underlie social and political decisions regarding environmental concerns. Role of currently dominant ideas of liberalism and democracy in relation to these concerns. Philosophical basis for influential policy tools such as cost-benefit analysis. Exploration of "nature" as a social construction and of critical perspectives raised by feminists, socialists, conservatives, and communitarians.
Globalism, Capitalism, and Environment
This course explores the intersection of globalization, capitalism, and the environment, paying particular attention to the ways in which environmental problems are fundamentally grounded in social, economic, and political relations. Three broad themes unify our consideration of the course material: environmental governance occurs simultaneously at multiple levels, from the personal to the global; environmental governance is predicated on struggles over both substantive and symbolic goals; and struggles over knowledge and knowledge production are central to environmental governance.
Dispute Resolution
This course assumes a basic competence in advanced social science. It is a skills based course where we will read technical and case study materials for professional process providers. It covers beginning and intermediate level process design, facilitation, implementation and assessment. Communication skills, negotiation strategies, and decision-making models will be covered.
Race & Community Formation in Global Contexts
Explores the struggle of communities to resist race, and by extension gender and class, oppression by reclaiming commons, regenerating culture, and seeking intercultural dialogue. Critically examines how communities produce autonomous cultural landscapes and organization through a combination of rebellion and complicity. Engagement with Post Marxist, Post Colonial and indigenist methodologies, strategies and conceptual frameworks.
Environmental Justice
Focuses on the multiple ways in which people of color and workers in the United States experience and resist environmental racism, sexism, and injustice. Explores the ways in which people have organized and are organizing to articulate and realize a vision of environmental justice that includes social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
Community and Place
Explores the concept of "community" in U.S. and the experience and meaning of "sense of place." Case studies of community-building efforts, historic and contemporary efforts to "plan" community, and attempts to create human communities that sustain natural places. Several guest speakers.
Energy, Environment, and Society
This interdisciplinary graduate level course emphasizes technical, environmental, and
socio-economic dimensions of energy utilization in contemporary society. Covers technology and policy issues related to conventional and alternative energy resources.
Race, Class, Gender and the Politics of Environmental Security
This course explores the "securitization" of environmental degradation and thus, the processes by which particular environmental issues have become a focus of national security rhetoric and policy in the U.S.. The course examines Environmental Security through a primarily Intersectional Feminist theoretical and activist lens. The course explores a range of environmental security issue s including (but not limited to) resource scarcities, militarization, conflict, genetic engineering, the "youth bulge", immigration, population growth, climate change, desertification, and deforestation, as well as hunger and malnutrition.
Approved research methods elective courses include:
- Sociology 583 Quantitative Research Methods
- Sociology 584 Qualitative Research Methods
- Ethnic Studies 590 Theory & Methods in Ethnic Studies
- Ethnic Studies 680 Community Research Seminar
- Natural Resources Planning & Interpretation 480/Sociology 480 GIS for the Social Sciences
- Statistics 333 Intermediate Statistics