Political Ecology and Technoscience

About this programme

Choose semester and course offering to see current information and more about the course, such as course syllabus, study period, and application information. Please note: all information from the Course syllabus is available on this page in an accessible format. The course explores the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, with a particular focus on its historical dimension and the role of technology and science. For example, AI and digitalization, climate models, and carbon capture are studied in their relation to ecology and politics. Political ecology is a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of socio-ecological systems, focusing on conflicts, power relations, and the unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits today and in the future. The field aims to situate debates about environmental problems in their political context, and thereby contrasts with apolitical ecologies that seek to understand environmental issues by exclusively studying universal drivers as solely related to, for example, population growth or biophysical factors. The course aims to develop the student's ability to use key concepts and tools used by political ecologists to analyze questions about how technology and science create different climate and environmental futures with different implications for justice and distribution of responsibility. Unlike other sciences, political ecology does not rely on experimentation, modeling, or quantitative analysis; instead, this course is based on theoretical concepts documented through case studies, which combine qualita