ENVS 041SR. StuRn: Critical Environmental Geographies of Race and Class

Much of the history of colonization, and white supremacist racism has manifested an American landscape where geographic location is often the premier determinant of the material status of ones life. Namely, the life expectancy of Swarthmore Borough residents is over 12 years the life expectancy of Chester, PA residents– two spaces separated by a mere 3 miles. This course recognizes this life expectancy to be one particular measure of how space defines one’s proximity, accessibility, experience, and legitimacy to the resources they need to thrive. In recognizing this difference and the injustices it perpetuates, it becomes our onus and accountability, as privileged Swarthmore students, to leverage our capacities to move our resources, money, and power to help augment ongoing initiatives and to learn from the ways that Chester residents are shaping the kind of reality they wish to see. . The course will originate from a macro-level consideration of the history of space and its intersections with politics, to provide a crucial understanding of the underlying themes of the built environment. Secondarily, the reading of how these theories penetrate the citizen, the self, and the consciousness will offer an important transition to confronting and examining how these theories manifest in issues at the regional, local, interpersonal, and individual levels. Case studies of Tri-State Area (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) will allow the course to activate themselves alongside the stakeholders within these phenomena, namely Black, and Indigenous community members engaging in organized resistance. Ultimately, the course will center with a focus on Swarthmore and Chester, and course students will become designers, artists, scholars, activists, and more, to leverage their course experience to contribute their collaborative visions for a more spatially just Swarthmore-Chester continuum. Student work will understand, process, synthesize, and contribute a direct impact, as all student work will be rooted in meeting the demonstrated needs of Chester Residents for Quality Living (CRCQL), Campus Coalition Concerning Chester (C-4), and other community based groups. As this course is led by students in the Project Pericles, C-4 Chester Road Collaborative, course students will be active members, and expected to direct their individual creative and academic growth in a shared community of students and residents.

1 credit.
Eligible for ESCH
Catalog chapter: Environmental Studies
Department website: Environmental Studies

Access the class schedule to search for sections.