KOS4550EHS – Topics in Environmental Humanities (Honours Certificate in Environmental Humanities and Sciences)
Course description
Schedule, syllabus and examination date
Course content
Relating to environments with the aid of digital media has become so familiar that we barely notice it, whether we’re checking our weather apps, planting trees with internet browsers, or exploring neighborhoods using augmented reality games like Pokémon Go. On a more professional scale, our knowledge of the ocean, the atmosphere, and the planet is undergirded by a vast digital infrastructure for monitoring, mapping, sounding, seeing, sensing, remembering, modeling and projecting ecological processes into the future. Understanding how computers think – or process information – and how computational thinking has been understood culturally, is key to understanding modern notions of environments.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to think that these methods of knowledge production are merely concerned with the environment, and not with us. Humanity is just as much a variable factored into the vast machine of planetary mediation. Consequently, the timelines of climate change and mitigation that guide the politics of the 21st century, require the contentious translation of history and society into machine-readable indicators of ongoing trends.
In this course we set out to understand and question these acts of translation, or datafication. To do so, we will trace the connections between digital culture and climate change all the way back to their shared origins in the postwar period where we will look at the parallel rise of cybernetic thought, ecological systems theory, and computation. Moving chronologically through the material, we will then explore how digital methods and mediations emerged from scientific and professional circuits into the public sphere as tools of climate science communication, and as objects of art and entertainment. To focus our discussions we will take a closer look at these environmental data objects – climate models, simulations, and visualizations, environmental videogames, apps, and new media art. In examining them we will develop new literacies that respond to digital media’s special modalities: for instance its interactivity, and its role as a technology of time.
Students will walk away from the course with a better understanding of practices of climate simulation and environmental modeling and their repercussions for environmental politics, as well as insight into the way these tools and methods feed into forms of cultural expression and entertainment.
Learning outcome
This course will
- introduce students to the history of climate modeling, which is important to understand how climate policies are made today in response to the IPCC’s assessments.
- familiarize students with key strands of postwar thought, such as cybernetics and systems theory, and explain their role in shaping the concept of the environment.
- improve understanding of the way computation and simulation operate in science and politics today, and interrogate its cultural ramifications.
- introduce students to various different kinds of digital media objects, from videogames to new media art, and data visualizations.
- improve digital media literacy by exposing students to scholarship on procedurality, social networks, and media theory that is concerned with the aesthetics and epistemology of simulation.
Admission
Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.
If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.
Overlapping courses
5 credits overlap with KOS4550 – Topics in Environmental Humanities
Teaching
This course will be taught through weekly 2 hour sessions combining lectures and seminars. Attendance at half of the sessions is mandatory, as well as submission of a paper proposal around the middle of the term. The language of instruction is English.
Compulsory activity
- Term paper proposal
- Attendance to at least half of the seminars
Examination
The course is evaluated through a term paper relating to the course theme and materials, 1500 words of length for the 5 ECTS course.
Submit assignments in Inspera
You submit your assignment in the digital examination system Inspera. Read about how to submit assignments in Inspera.
Use of sources and citation
You should familiarize yourself with the rules that apply to the use of sources and citations. If you violate the rules, you may be suspected of cheating/attempted cheating.
Language of examination
The examination text is given in English.You may submit your response in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English.
Grading scale
Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail. Read more about the grading system.
Explanations and appeals
Resit an examination
Special examination arrangements
Application form, deadline and requirements for special examination arrangements.