ENVI 450
Senior Seminar: Environmental Ethnography Fall 2021
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

A key question orients this course: What can the embodied, place-based, and detailed approach of ethnographic study bring to our understandings of the environment? This upper-level seminar will explore this question through classroom discussions and a semester-length research project. Students will engage different styles of environmental ethnography while undertaking their own ethnographic projects involving the Williams College community and surrounding areas. Students will learn to work across different kinds of evidence as they draft fieldnotes, code fieldwork data, extrapolate key ideas from their fieldwork materials, and discover new ways of building environmental knowledge. Students will use these materials to collectively assemble an edited volume of ethnographic snapshots to be presented to the wider Environmental Studies community at Williams.