Christian Schmid: Catalogue data in Spring Semester 2023 |
| Name | Prof. Christian Schmid |
| Address | Lehre Architektur ETH Zürich, HIL E 64.2 Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5 8093 Zürich SWITZERLAND |
| schmid@arch.ethz.ch | |
| Department | Architecture |
| Relationship | Adjunct Professor |
| Number | Title | ECTS | Hours | Lecturers | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 052-0704-00L | Sociology II  | 2 credits | 2V | C. Schmid, I. Apostol, N. Bathla, J. E. Duyne Barenstein, A. Hertzog-Fraser | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | Sociology II presents current perspectives and methods in urban studies. Part I introduces the right to the city and hybrid urban space, with a focus on neighbourhood life (Ileana Apostol); part II discusses housing as a social and cultural practice (Jennifer Duyne); part III presents postcolonial perspectives in urban studies (Nitin Bathla and Alice Hertzog-Fraser). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | This lecture series seeks to enable students to better understand architecture and the production of built environment in its social context. It provides an introduction into the great variety of contemporary urbanization processes across the world. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | Sociology II focuses on current perspectives of analysis in urban studies, presenting theoretical frames of reference with the help of concrete case studies. First, the right to the city perspective will be introduced in the context of the hybrid (physical and digital) condition of space, with particular focus on urbanity and the quality of life in the neighborhood (lecturer: Ileana Apostol). In the second part, the global housing challenges and housing solutions will be discussed (lecturer: Jennifer Duyne). The third part of the course will explore postcolonial perspectives in urban studies. The first two lectures of the third part will present a survey of postcolonial urban theory and discuss spatial polarisation and everyday life in the extended urban region of Delhi (lecturer: Nitin Bathla). The following two lectures of the third part will consider the role of Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, otherwise known as the Manchester school in colonial Africa and explore contemporary debates on neo-colonialism surrounding Chinese urbanisation in Africa today (lecturer: Alice Hertzog). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | No script - Information available at the following link: http://www.soziologie.arch.ethz.ch/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | Various texts, in addition to the lecture will be provided. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 052-0724-23L | Sociology: The Agrarian Question: From Colonialism to Urban Agriculture | 2 credits | 2S | C. Schmid, N. Bathla | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | With 21st century extended urbanisation, architecture and spatial practice is increasingly confronted with agriculture and the agrarian question. This course attempts a systematic engagement with urbanisation and the agrarian questions in its many facets - from the classic question of land enclosure, colonialism, and primitive accumulation, to the ongoing debates on urban agriculture and greening. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | Through this course, the seminar participants are expected to develop a critical understanding of the agrarian question, its political economy, and urbanisation in the agrarian territories. The participants are thus expected to actively engage in presenting, discussing, and debating the recommended literature for the seminar. Furthermore, the participants are encouraged to identify alternatives and imagine the possibilities for architectural and urban practice in the agrarian territories. In summary, the seminar aims to accomplish the following: - Allow the seminar participants to gain a critical understanding of the concepts, ideas, and debates around the agrarian question, agrarian ecology, and extended urbanisation. - Strengthen the ability of the seminar participants to read, present, and debate academic texts. - Develop ideas for architectural and urban practice in agrarian territories. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | The introductory sessions will bring urbanisation and the agrarian question in a world historical perspective through exploring land settlement under colonialism, and the various revolutions and counter-revolutions that emerged in its wake in the global countryside. A further set of sessions will explore the question of food through discussing food sovereignty, food regimes, urban farming, and the future of food. A central facet of the seminar will be the question of land and labour, which will be discussed through the themes of global depesentisation, migration, land enclosure, and primitive accumulation. Lastly, the seminar will explore the contemporary entanglements between the agrarian question and urbanisation through considering global supply chains, carbon forestry, and urbanism in agrarian territories. Each of the thematic session will include two to three recommended readings, podcasts or lectures. The course participants will prepare short presentations based on these readings in groups of two followed by a moderated discussion. Sessions: 23.02 Urbanisation and the agrarian question in the 21st century What is agrarian question and how is it relevant under 21st century urbanisation. 02.03 Colonial wastelands, settlement, and improvement This session will explore the colonial project of settling wastelands for agriculture in order to turn them productive and revenue generating. It will explore the infrastructures and ecological violence colonial wasteland settlement entailed. 09.03 Global countryside - revolution and counter-revolution This session will explore how the global countryside subject to immense social and ecological violence, also emerges as a hotbed of radical politics and revolutions and how counterrevolutions have attempted to disrupt and co-opt these revolutions. 16.03 Food and the agrarian question: food sovereignty, hunger, and the future of food This session will explore the concept of agroecology which has been proposed as a solution to the intersectional food, climate, and biodiversity crisis. The session will explore and evaluate the diversity of paradigms that have emerged under the umbrella agroecology. Lecture by Joanna Jacobi 30.03 Plantationocene - operationalisation, circulation and the global supply chains This session will explore the 'plantationocene', which centres the role played by extractive and enclosed monocrop plantations in planetary change. It is not only the plantation that is the pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures, but increasingly circulation and supply chain capitalism that is integral to the plantationocene. 06.04 Utopias and Agrarian Urbanisms This session explores concepts of landscape urbanism that have been applied to the study of agrarian territories as hybrid or in-between, and surveys the long-legacy utopias of agrarian urbanism. 20.04 Land enclosure, fallows, and human-non-human conflict This session surveys how agrarian land has been subjected to intense forms of enclosure historically and under 21st century urbanisation. It further explores how these enclosures often result in human-non-human conflict. 27.04 Labour, gender, and migration This session explores the links between urbanisation and intense depesentisation in the global countryside, and the historic and ongoing suppression of wages of women and migrants workers that has upheld this condition. Lecture by Gianna Ledermann 04.05 Energy and green-grabbing This session explores how agrarian land and commons are being subjected to greening programs and carbon credit schemes with implications for subsistence, and land ownership. 11.05 What is "urban" about urban agriculture This session explores the rise of the urban agriculture paradigm as a sustainable alternative for localising food production and urban metabolism and urban agriculture’s inherent contradictions and limitations. 25.05 Concluding Discussion | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | A seminar reader will be provided to the participants at the start of the semester. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | 23.02 1. Ecological crises and the agrarian question in world-historical perspective JW Moore, 2008 2. Surveying the agrarian question (parts 1 & 2): current debates and beyond. AH Akram-Lodhi, C Kay, 2010 The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century ft. A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi Introduction to Political Economy. Noaman G. Ali 02.03 1. Improvement, in Wasteland: A history. Vittoria Di Palma, 2014. 2. Living in a Fluid Landscape, in Dreaming of dry land: environmental transformation in colonial Mexico City. Vera S. Candiani, 2014. 3. Infrastructures of "Legitimate Violence": The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder. Hollyamber Kennedy, 2019 09.03 1. Mexico, in Peasant wars of the twentieth century. Eric R Wolf, 1999. p. 1-48. 2. The Long Green Revolution. Raj Patel, 2013 3. Agriculture and Food Systems of the 20th Century, in Sustainable agriculture and food security in an era of oil scarcity: lessons from Cuba. Julia Wright, 2012. 16.03 1. "Without feminism, there is no Agroecology." Global Network for the Right to Food. Right to Food and Nutrition Watch: Women’s Power in Food Struggles. 2019. 2. Lenora Ditzler, and Driessen Clemens. "Automating Agroecology: How to Design a Farming Robot Without a Monocultural Mindset?.", 2022: 1-31. 3. What does feminism have to do with the food you eat? Agroecology Now! Podcast 2022 4. Vandana Shiva on the agroecology solution for climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and hunger. Mongabay Podcast. 2022 30.03 1. Barua, Maan. "Plantationocene: a vegetal geography." 2022. 1-17. 2. Towards an agrarian question of circulation: Walmart's expansion in Chile and the agrarian political economy of supply chain capitalism. M Arboleda, 2020. 3. The Horizontal Factory: The Operationalisation of the US Corn and Soy Belt. Nikos Katsikis, in Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles. Eds. Christian Schmid & Milica Topalovic – 2023 forthcoming. 06.04 1. From Theory to Resistance: Landscape Urbanism in Europe, Kelly Shannon, in The landscape urbanism reader. Charles Waldheim, 2006. 2. The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis TG McGee, Implosions/Explosions, 2015. p. 121-137 3. Agriculture and Urbanism, in Taking the Country’s Side. Agriculture and Architecture. Sébastien Marot, 2019. p. 45-74 20.04 1. Urbs in rure: Historical enclosure and the extended urbanization of the countryside. Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago. In Implosions/explosions (pp. 232-259). 2. The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India. M Levien - The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2012. 3. "Bio-geo-graphy: Landscape, dwelling, and the political ecology of human-elephant relations." Maan Barua, 2014. 915-934. 27.04 1. Women, work, and wages in historical perspective, in Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England: gender, work and wages. Nicola Verdon, 2002. 2. The global reserve army of labor and the new imperialism. JB Foster, RW McChesney, RJ Jonna. (2011), 63(6), 1. 3. Giulia Laganà and Tina Davis migrant farm workers in Europe in Slave Free Today Podcast 04.05 1. "Wind parks in post-crisis Greece: Neoliberalisation vis-à-vis green grabbing." Zoi Christina Siamanta, 2019. 274-303. 2. Pye, Oliver. 2019. 'Commodifying Sustainability: Development, Nature and Politics in the Palm Oil Industry'. 11.05 1. Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions. N McClintock, 2014 2. New York City’s Urban Agriculture System, in Beyond the kale: Urban agriculture and social justice activism in New York City. Reynolds, Kristin, and Nevin Cohen, 2016. 3. City and Country, in Sitopia: How can food save the world. Carolyn Steel, 2020 Nathan McClintock on Urban Agriculture and gentrification by Heritage Radio Network | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 064-0018-23L | Research Methods in Landscape and Urban Studies: Writing Urban Landscapes of the Anthropocene  | 3 credits | 2K | F. Persyn, T. Avermaete, T. Galí-Izard, H. Klumpner, C. Schmid | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | This course addresses the specificity of writing about the urban, landscape, and territory in the Anthropocene. The seminar surveys key writings, ideas, and figures in the Anthropocene debate in conversation with critiques from environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | Anthropocene has emerged as a contested yet transdisciplinary term to describe the planetary condition under climate change and environmental catastrophe. While being attendant to its critiques, the Anthropocene discourse provides researchers from critical landscape and urban research to engage with a diversity of fields such as earth sciences, art, environmental humanities, agrarian, literary, and cultural studies. This course addresses the specificity of writing about the urban, landscape, and territory in the Anthropocene. The seminar surveys key writings, ideas, and figures in the Anthropocene debate in conversation with critiques from environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. A number of invited guests working at the forefronts of Anthropocene research will bring seminar participants into their research and writing process. Additionally, the seminar will offer a number of hands-on critical writing and peer-review sessions to help the seminar participants develop and work with the allegories of the Anthropocene. Typically, the seminar sessions will alternate between inputs by invited guests, reading and discussion sessions, tutorials, and peer-review. The invited guests will provide a behind-the-scenes look into their writing process, including how they structure their arguments, organise their sources and materials, and find inspiration in their writing process. During the first half of the tutorial sessions, the seminar participants will discuss and debate a requisite reading followed by a writing tutorial and feedback session based on the texts. The seminar participants can choose to present the work developed during the seminar at the LUS Doctoral Crits organised at the end of the semester. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | The seminar would be organised the following sessions and will culminate with LUS Doctoral Crits organised at the end of the semester: 24.02 Introduction – Writing in the Anthropocene - Nitin Bathla 03.03 Botanical City - Sandra Jasper 10.03 Histories of Settlement workshop - Hollyamber Kennedy & Anooradha Siddiqi 17.03 Landscapes in deep time: Nuclear Waste and the Swiss Alps - Rony Emmenegger 31.03 Landscapes of the empire - Hollyamber Kennedy 21.04 Territories of Swiss Colonialism - Denise Bertschi 28.04 A guided walk through the multispecies landscape of Zurich- Flurina Gardin 05.05 Geological Filmmaking - Laura Coppens 12.05 Landscapes of fossil capitalism - Giulia Scotto 19.05 LUS Doctoral Crits | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | Voie, Christian Hummelsund. "Nature writing in the Anthropocene." In Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication, pp. 199-210. Routledge, 2019. Boes, Tobias, and Kate Marshall. "Writing the AnthropoceneAn Introduction." the minnesota review 2014, no. 83 (2014): 60-72. Gandy, Matthew, and Sandra Jasper, eds. The botanical city. Jovis Berlin, 2020. Kennedy, Hollyamber. "Infrastructures of “legitimate violence”: The Prussian Settlement Commission, internal colonization, and the migrant remainder." Grey Room 76 (2019): 58-97. Emmenegger, Rony. "Deep Time Horizons: Vincent Ialenti’s Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press." Anthropocenes–Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 2, no. 1 (2021). Grommen, Ciel, Denise Bertschi, Tali Serruya, Karim Bel Kacem, Carol Joo Lee, Yeji Lee, and Seyoung Yoon. "Territories of Assembly." In Artsonje Art Centre, Seoul. 2014. Litvintseva, S., 2018. Geological Filmmaking: Seeing Geology Through Film and Film Through Geology. Transformations. Scotto, Giulia. "Between Visible and Invisible: ENI and the Building of the African Petroleumscape." In Oil Spaces, pp. 84-108. Routledge, 2021. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | The seminar is jointly organized by the coordinator of the Doctoral Programme in Landscape and Urban Studies, and the I-LUS faculty. The seminar is open to all researchers working at the urban landscape and territorial scale regardless of where they might be in their research provided they are in the process of developing a work of academic writing such as research plan, an article, or a design manifesto. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 078-0303-00L | Urban Theory Seminar: The Agrarian Question: From Colonialism to Urban Agriculture | 2 credits | 2G | C. Schmid, N. Bathla | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | With 21st century extended urbanisation, architecture and spatial practice is increasingly confronted with agriculture and the agrarian question. This course attempts a systematic engagement with urbanisation and the agrarian questions in its many facets - from the classic question of land enclosure, colonialism, and primitive accumulation, to the ongoing debates on urban agriculture and greening. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | Through this course, the seminar participants are expected to develop a critical understanding of the agrarian question, its political economy, and urbanisation in the agrarian territories. The participants are thus expected to actively engage in presenting, discussing, and debating the recommended literature for the seminar. Furthermore, the participants are encouraged to identify alternatives and imagine the possibilities for architectural and urban practice in the agrarian territories. In summary, the seminar aims to accomplish the following: - Allow the seminar participants to gain a critical understanding of the concepts, ideas, and debates around the agrarian question, agrarian ecology, and extended urbanisation. - Strengthen the ability of the seminar participants to read, present, and debate academic texts. - Develop ideas for architectural and urban practice in agrarian territories. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | The introductory sessions will bring urbanisation and the agrarian question in a world historical perspective through exploring land settlement under colonialism, and the various revolutions and counter-revolutions that emerged in its wake in the global countryside. A further set of sessions will explore the question of food through discussing food sovereignty, food regimes, urban farming, and the future of food. A central facet of the seminar will be the question of land and labour, which will be discussed through the themes of global depesentisation, migration, land enclosure, and primitive accumulation. Lastly, the seminar will explore the contemporary entanglements between the agrarian question and urbanisation through considering global supply chains, carbon forestry, and urbanism in agrarian territories. Each of the thematic session will include two to three recommended readings, podcasts or lectures. The course participants will prepare short presentations based on these readings in groups of two followed by a moderated discussion. Sessions: 23.02 Urbanisation and the agrarian question in the 21st century What is agrarian question and how is it relevant under 21st century urbanisation. 02.03 Colonial wastelands, settlement, and improvement This session will explore the colonial project of settling wastelands for agriculture in order to turn them productive and revenue generating. It will explore the infrastructures and ecological violence colonial wasteland settlement entailed. 09.03 Global countryside - revolution and counter-revolution This session will explore how the global countryside subject to immense social and ecological violence, also emerges as a hotbed of radical politics and revolutions and how counterrevolutions have attempted to disrupt and co-opt these revolutions. 16.03 Food and the agrarian question: food sovereignty, hunger, and the future of food This session will explore the concept of agroecology which has been proposed as a solution to the intersectional food, climate, and biodiversity crisis. The session will explore and evaluate the diversity of paradigms that have emerged under the umbrella agroecology. Lecture by Joanna Jacobi 30.03 Plantationocene - operationalisation, circulation and the global supply chains This session will explore the 'plantationocene', which centres the role played by extractive and enclosed monocrop plantations in planetary change. It is not only the plantation that is the pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures, but increasingly circulation and supply chain capitalism that is integral to the plantationocene. 06.04 Utopias and Agrarian Urbanisms This session explores concepts of landscape urbanism that have been applied to the study of agrarian territories as hybrid or in-between, and surveys the long-legacy utopias of agrarian urbanism. 20.04 Land enclosure, fallows, and human-non-human conflict This session surveys how agrarian land has been subjected to intense forms of enclosure historically and under 21st century urbanisation. It further explores how these enclosures often result in human-non-human conflict. 27.04 Labour, gender, and migration This session explores the links between urbanisation and intense depesentisation in the global countryside, and the historic and ongoing suppression of wages of women and migrants workers that has upheld this condition. Lecture by Gianna Ledermann 04.05 Energy and green-grabbing This session explores how agrarian land and commons are being subjected to greening programs and carbon credit schemes with implications for subsistence, and land ownership. 11.05 What is "urban" about urban agriculture This session explores the rise of the urban agriculture paradigm as a sustainable alternative for localising food production and urban metabolism and urban agriculture’s inherent contradictions and limitations. 25.05 Concluding Discussion | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | A seminar reader will be provided to the participants at the start of the semester. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | 23.02 1. Ecological crises and the agrarian question in world-historical perspective JW Moore, 2008 2. Surveying the agrarian question (parts 1 & 2): current debates and beyond. AH Akram-Lodhi, C Kay, 2010 The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century ft. A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi Introduction to Political Economy. Noaman G. Ali 02.03 1. Improvement, in Wasteland: A history. Vittoria Di Palma, 2014. 2. Living in a Fluid Landscape, in Dreaming of dry land: environmental transformation in colonial Mexico City. Vera S. Candiani, 2014. 3. Infrastructures of "Legitimate Violence": The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder. Hollyamber Kennedy, 2019 09.03 1. Mexico, in Peasant wars of the twentieth century. Eric R Wolf, 1999. p. 1-48. 2. The Long Green Revolution. Raj Patel, 2013 3. Agriculture and Food Systems of the 20th Century, in Sustainable agriculture and food security in an era of oil scarcity: lessons from Cuba. Julia Wright, 2012. 16.03 1. "Without feminism, there is no Agroecology." Global Network for the Right to Food. Right to Food and Nutrition Watch: Women’s Power in Food Struggles. 2019. 2. Lenora Ditzler, and Driessen Clemens. "Automating Agroecology: How to Design a Farming Robot Without a Monocultural Mindset?.", 2022: 1-31. 3. What does feminism have to do with the food you eat? Agroecology Now! Podcast 2022 4. Vandana Shiva on the agroecology solution for climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and hunger. Mongabay Podcast. 2022 30.03 1. Barua, Maan. "Plantationocene: a vegetal geography." 2022. 1-17. 2. Towards an agrarian question of circulation: Walmart's expansion in Chile and the agrarian political economy of supply chain capitalism. M Arboleda, 2020. 3. The Horizontal Factory: The Operationalisation of the US Corn and Soy Belt. Nikos Katsikis, in Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles. Eds. Christian Schmid & Milica Topalovic – 2023 forthcoming. 06.04 1. From Theory to Resistance: Landscape Urbanism in Europe, Kelly Shannon, in The landscape urbanism reader. Charles Waldheim, 2006. 2. The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis TG McGee, Implosions/Explosions, 2015. p. 121-137 3. Agriculture and Urbanism, in Taking the Country’s Side. Agriculture and Architecture. Sébastien Marot, 2019. p. 45-74 20.04 1. Urbs in rure: Historical enclosure and the extended urbanization of the countryside. Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago. In Implosions/explosions (pp. 232-259). 2. The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India. M Levien - The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2012. 3. "Bio-geo-graphy: Landscape, dwelling, and the political ecology of human-elephant relations." Maan Barua, 2014. 915-934. 27.04 1. Women, work, and wages in historical perspective, in Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England: gender, work and wages. Nicola Verdon, 2002. 2. The global reserve army of labor and the new imperialism. JB Foster, RW McChesney, RJ Jonna. (2011), 63(6), 1. 3. Giulia Laganà and Tina Davis migrant farm workers in Europe in Slave Free Today Podcast 04.05 1. "Wind parks in post-crisis Greece: Neoliberalisation vis-à-vis green grabbing." Zoi Christina Siamanta, 2019. 274-303. 2. Pye, Oliver. 2019. 'Commodifying Sustainability: Development, Nature and Politics in the Palm Oil Industry'. 11.05 1. Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions. N McClintock, 2014 2. New York City’s Urban Agriculture System, in Beyond the kale: Urban agriculture and social justice activism in New York City. Reynolds, Kristin, and Nevin Cohen, 2016. 3. City and Country, in Sitopia: How can food save the world. Carolyn Steel, 2020 Nathan McClintock on Urban Agriculture and gentrification by Heritage Radio Network | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | This course will be conducted in English. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 078-0304-00L | Critical Writing | 2 credits | 2G | M. Topalovic, C. Schmid | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | Writing about the urban, landscape, and territory in the Anthropocene–a contested yet transdisciplinary term to describe the planetary condition under climate change and environmental catastrophe. Researchers from critical landscape and urban research engaging in the diverse fields of earth sciences, art, environmental humanities, agrarian, literary, and cultural studies provide insights. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | The seminar surveys key writings, ideas, and figures in the Anthropocene debate in conversation with critiques from environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. A number of invited guests working at the forefronts of Anthropocene research will bring seminar participants into their research and writing process. Additionally, the seminar will offer a number of hands-on critical writing and peer-review sessions to help the seminar participants develop and work with the allegories of the Anthropocene. The objective is to offer a pedagogical framework within which students learn to discuss their urban and territorial design work in relation to the theoretical writings studied in the accompanying Urban Theory Seminar, and inspitred by methods discussed in this seminar. The resulting texts should articulate the project’s broader theoretical, disciplinary, geographic, and sociocultural context as well as the specific design contribution. Students gain both theoretical and practical experience in writing, critical reflection and peer-reviewing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | Programme: 24.02 Introduction – Writing in the Anthropocene Nitin Bathla 03.03 Botanical City, Sandra Jasper 10.03 Histories of Settlement workshop, Hollyamber Kennedy & Anooradha Siddiqi 17.03 Landscapes in deep time: Nuclear Waste and the Swiss Alps, Rony Emmenegger 31.03 Landscapes of the empire, Hollyamber Kennedy 21.04 Territories of Swiss Colonialism, Denise Bertschi 28.04 A guided walk through the multispecies landscape of Zurich, Flurina Gardin 05.05 Geological Filmmaking, Laura Coppens 12.05 Landscapes of fossil capitalism, Giulia Scotto 19.05 LUS Doctoral Crits In addition, three dedicated sessions are offered to focus on preparing the MAS project texts for digital publishing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | Access to an extensive literature list is provided at the beginning of the semester. Participants are asked to familiarise themselves with the selected texts before each session. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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