currently offered
Consumerism & Sustainability, SUMA PS5525 (Spring 2022, 2023)
Columbia University, School of Professional Studies, The Earth Institute
Sustainability Management (graduate)
Course description:
In our current global political economic context, extractive resource consumption 1) drives environmental degradation and climate change and 2) shapes our livelihoods, wellbeing, daily comforts, and cultural practices. In the face of this incompatibility, many call for the need for transformative changes across economies, institutions, and cultures. This graduate level course course aims to provide a broad overview of the many ways through which scholars theorize consumerism and sustainability and practitioners work toward change on the ground. Together we review popular models of consumer behavior, explore the links between individual behavior and collective action, and examine how professionals across a diverse sample of sectors and industries integrate sustainability into their work. More importantly, this course encourages students to think critically about consumerism and sustainability in the context of their own fields and interests. While in class lectures, discussions, and activities provide a high-level overview of many complex and challenging issues, students individually delve deeper into material that they find intellectually stimulating through final projects. We unpack challenges along the way in a supportive environment, brainstorming creative solutions and learning from each other.
past courses
Population, Resources, & the Environment, 11:374:269 (Spring 2021)
Rutgers University, School of Environmental & Biological Sciences
Department of Human Ecology (undergraduate)
Course description:
As devising solutions to climate change grows increasingly urgent, understand prominent debates that connect world population, natural resources, and environmental issues. This class will develop student
proficiency using online data sources and tools including the Census Bureau and Population Reference Bureau to investigate population trends and projections. We will identify the major phases of demographic change throughout human history and link these changes to key environmental indicators (like land use change and greenhouse gas emissions). Throughout the course, students will engage in group discussion to deconstruct debates and theories about the relationship of population to environmental issues and the links between resource consumption and economic growth. As a class and individually, students will brainstorm creative economic and policy solutions to tackle these pressing issues.
Please feel free to email me for full syllabi
Grifola frondosa (hen of the woods), Autumn Hill Reservation, Princeton, New Jersey. October 2020
holly caggiano 