Linking Departments
Community & Environmental Sociology
CHE-Related Courses
While the CHE Methods Seminar is the only course the center offers, there are many courses offered across the UW-Madison campus that fit CHE's interdisciplinary goals. On this page you'll find courses recommended by CHE Faculty Members and Graduate Associates for anyone interested in approaching environmental issues with an interdisciplinary lens. These courses can also be used to complete a CHE Certificate with the approval of a CHE advisor. Please check the UW-Madison catalog timetable for more information.
Current Courses
Fall 2010
Historical Ecology FWE 375/875/Botany 575
Historical ecology is a rapidly growing area of ecology. The role of history in shaping the structure and functioning of ecosystems has become increasingly apparent to ecologists over the past decade or more. The legacy of past events--natural and anthropogenic--can reverberate through ecosystems for hundreds to thousands of years. These legacies often become drivers of ecosystem functioning otherwise hidden from a static view of landscapes in the present. We recognize that pervasive changes mean that the past cannot be a blueprint for the future. But reconstructing these historical patterns, processes, and legacy effects can be key to understanding how present conditions came about, how ecosystems function, and how management and restoration decisions might influence future conditions. To reconstruct past conditions and uncover these hidden ecosystem drivers, ecologists are increasingly making use of various kinds of historical data sources, from pollen and tree rings to old land survey records, written accounts, cadastral maps, historical aerial photographs and maps; even oral interviews. We will take a broad perspective on historical ecology and include a range of research that examines the changes in and interactions among ecosystem patterns and processes through time: the history of an ecosystem. Such changes may or may not include direct anthropogenic effects, but the human-scale historical period does not limit our view. We welcome upper level undergrads and graduate students from a broad range of disciplines, including biological, physical, social, and natural sciences, the humanities, resource management and conservation. We will explore topics in an interactive format of reading and discussion with some guiding lectures.
Recent Offerings
Summer 2010
Field School in American Vernacular Architecture UW-Madison & Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee) Art History 600 – Summer 2010 (June 14 – July 9)
Anna Andrzejewski
This course gives students an immersion experience in the field recording of historic buildings and an opportunity to learn how to write history literally “from the ground up.” Students will receive training in site documentation (including photographs and measured drawings) and primary source research. They will create site reports on historic buildings that will become part of the historical record of southwestern Wisconsin. This research will also be put towards a conference to be held in the region in 2012, hosting national members of the VAF (Vernacular Architecture Forum). The Summer 2010 course's focus is on the cultural landscape of Mineral Point, in rural southwestern Wisconsin's Iowa County.
For more information, please read the full course description and contact Prof. Anna Andrzejewski.
Spring 2010
Environmental Studies 900, CHE Seminar on Historical and Cultural Methods in Environmental Research, 3 credits
Tuesdays from 5:30-8:00 pm in 202 Bradley Memorial
William Cronon
The CHE Methods Seminar is being offered for the first time. The seminar has five goals:
- It surveys key analytical tools and interpretive methods for researching and understanding environmental change in its complex cultural and historical contexts.
- It introduces graduate students to faculty members and fellow students from departments and programs across campus who study past environmental change from cultural and historical points of view.
- It offers an intellectual forum for discussing the respective contributions of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to our understanding of past, present, and future environmental change.
- It explores the many challenges and opportunities associated with working across disciplinary boundaries to understand environmental, cultural, and historical change.
- Finally, as a practical matter, it fulfills a core requirement of the CHE Certificate, which grad students can earn on its own or use to fulfill the minor requirement for their PhDs.
The CHE Methods Seminar is intended primarily for graduate students completing the CHE Certificate and those who are associated with CHE.
Fall 2009
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Gregg Mitman and Judith Helfand
Wednesdays 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Gregg Mitman and Judith Helfand
Spring 2009
Wednesdays, 6 to 8:30 pm, 5106 Social Science Building
Sissel Schroeder
In this course, students are introduced to the variety of Native American cultures in Wisconsin. We will cover twelve thousand years of accommodations to diverse natural and social environments, starting with the initial peopling of Wisconsin and ending with the earliest Euroamerican exploration of the state.
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:30-10:45 am, 7105 Helen C. White Hall
Lynn Keller
The significant place occupied by English language poetry in the field of "environmental literature" is insured by the Romantic nature lyric, and most environmental criticism concerning poetry has focused on "nature poetry" in the Romantic tradition. Course readings will begin with some selections from Wordsworth and with recent American work in that vein, so that we can analyze assumptions about nature, wilderness, urban environments, and environmentalism that are bound up with conventions of the personal lyric, the pastoral, the sublime. Most of the course, however, will be devoted to exploring more experimental U.S. writing of recent decades, some of it urban in focus, and investigating whether today's alternative poetics encode or support alternative understandings of nature and the wild, or of possibly different approaches to the environmental problems we face. Readings will include ecocritical theory as well as poetry and literary criticism.
Wednesdays, 2 to 5 pm, 104 Russell Laboratories
Nancy Langston
This seminar will explore the shared history of people and forests around the world, paying special attention to the ways historical approaches can help us understand current environmental conflicts. We will examine how and why forests have changed over time, how different peoples have used or abused the forest, how societies have struggled to establish policies governing forests, and how perceptions of forests have changed. Topics for discussion will include:
- How and why have forests changed? How have those changes affected different groups of people with different access to power?
- Who has historically had access to forests? Who has been denied access, and why? How did access change with the development of forest industries, state forestry programs, and environmental protections?
- Whose meanings of the forest have defined the use of the forests?
- How have societal conflicts shaped the ways scientific research has been translated into forest policy? What have been the effects on the forests and people?
For more information about the course, visit the course website.
Wednesdays, 9 to 11:30 am, 7130 Social Science Building
Lynn K. Nyhart
This graduate seminar focuses on the following questions: How did European and American scientists and social theorists make meaning of the distribution of living things – plants, animals, and people – across the face of the earth from about 1750 to the aftermath of World War II? And how do we situate their scientific theorizing in relation to imperial ambition and conquest, human migration, and the human-driven redistribution of organisms across the globe? Topics will range from debates over geographical determinism in the Enlightenment to twentieth-century debates over the roles of isolation and migration in evolution, and from analyses of bird distribution to ideas about human migration and the rise of civilization. Our task will be to understand the intellectual history involved here in relation to the political, social, and environmental histories in which it was embedded. While the course covers two centuries, emphasis will be laid on time periods and topics of most interest to seminar participants, who will be expected to write a research paper.
All CHE-Related Courses Offered at UW-Madison
Agroecology 702: The Multifunctionality of Agriculture
Agroecology 710: Seminar in Agroecology.
Agroecology 720: Agroecology Field Study.
Anthropology 319: Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific
Anthropology 330: Anthropology of the United States
Anthropology 354: Archaeology of Wisconsin
Anthropology 355: Archaeology of Eastern North America
Anthropology 365: Medical Anthropology
Anthropology 909: Research Methods and Research Design in Cultural Anthropology
Art History 457: History of American Vernacular Architecture and Landscapes
Botany 950: Detecting human effects on natural systems: Baselines, indicators and conservation goals
Community and Environmental Sociology 541: Environmental Stewardship and Social Justice
Community and Environmental Sociology 650: Sociology of Agriculture
Community and Environmental Sociology 754: Qualitative Methods for Sociologists
Community and Environmental Sociology 945: Seminar in the Sociology of Agriculture
Community and Environmental Sociology 948: Seminar in Environmental Sociology
English 868: Environmental Literature and Theory in a Global Context
Environmental Studies 402/Hist Sci 350: Green Screen: Environmental Film in History and Action
Forest and Wildlife Ecology 565: Principles of Landscape Ecology
Forest and Wildlife Ecology/Environmental Studies/History 452: World Forest History
Geography 338: Biogeography: An Ecosystems Approach (Official Title: Vegetation: Stability and Change
Geography 344: The American West (taught by Joe Mason)
Geography 370: Introduction to Cartography
Geology 722: Paleoecology
Geology 723: Pollen Morphology
History 902: Research Seminar: American History: "North American Regions, Landscapes, and Peoples
History of Science 339/639: Technology and its Critics since WWII
History of Science/Environmental Studies 353: History of Ecology
History of Science/Medical History & Bioethics/Environmental Studies 513: Environment and Health in Global Perspective
History of Science/Medical History & Bioethics/Environmental Studies 919: Ecology and Disease in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
History/Geography/Environmental Studies 460: American Environmental History
History/Geography/Environmental Studies 932: Environmental History
History/Geography/Environmental Studies 965: History of the American West
International Studies 603: Global AIDS: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Landscape Architecture 677: Cultural Resource Preservation and Landscape History
Landscape Architecture 710: Theories of Landscape Change
Law 831: Modern American Legal History
Law 845: Water Rights Law
Law 848: Environmental Law and Institutions
Law 988: Special Topics in Environmental Law: Environmental Justice
Life Sciences Communication 444: Native American Environmental Issues and the Media
Philosophy 441: Environmental Ethics
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