CULTST 3001 - Cultural Environments: Method & Epistemic Crisis

Nature has often been considered the opposite of culture. This capstone course surveys the history of this opposition and considers the implications of analytical approaches that reinterpret or challenge this assumed tension. Students explore a series of moments in which decisive interventions, under particular historical conditions, reoriented understandings of the presumed binaries nature / culture, and nature / nurture. How were specific disciplinary vocabularies reoriented, and to what effect? What new critical orthodoxies developed, and how have they, in turn, come to be disrupted? Examples might include: structuralist cultural analysis, the rise of poststructuralism, gender studies and queer theory, the rise of affect studies, the descriptive turn, decolonial activism and the turn to indigenous knowledge systems, artificial intelligence, quantum entanglement, and the anthropocene. In light of recent and ongoing crises—the rise of populist politics, global pandemic, and the climate emergency—the course concludes by encouraging speculation about the future of a range of disciplines as a result of ongoing developments in how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are understood in light of epistemic change.