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CS92PROD
Beyond Growth: Agrarian Visions
CHUM 388
Spring 2025
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: ENVS 388, COL 387

The era of endless growth has reached a point of crisis. In the face of climate catastrophe and widening inequality, of the proliferation of pointless work and spiraling burnout, it has become increasingly common to question the idea that human progress comprises ever-increasing levels of production and consumption. And yet in spite of a slew of attempts to transform the situation, from the Occupy movement to the recent mainstreaming of degrowth economics, it seems that things are only intensifying. How did we come to inhabit this world in which labor and economic growth are seen as ends in themselves? And how might we begin not just to refuse such understandings of labor and growth, but to imagine different forms that they might take? In this course we will confront these questions, exploring the relationship between labor, production, and human flourishing. We will begin by studying foundational articulations of this relationship from thinkers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, looking as well at the unique place that agricultural production, cultivation, has been understood to occupy therein. We will then turn to the agrarian realm as a particularly potent site from which to trouble and extend our conceptions of labor and growth, examining visions of spiritual labor, anticolonial resistance, and more-than-human entanglement in theoretical and literary texts from Leo Tolstoy, M.K. Gandhi, Mahasweta Devi, J.M. Coetzee, and others. Through our readings and discussions, we will learn to identify and critique the normative claims on which our current energy-intensive, exhaustion-inducting circumstances are based. At the same time, we will cultivate the skills required to seek out and imagine alternative forms of work, community, and the good life.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (CBST-MN)(CSCT)(ENVS-MN)(ENVS)
Past Enrollment Probability: 90% or above

Last Updated on DEC-06-2024
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