Climate change is an urgent and multifaceted challenge facing all of society.
Harvard faculty teach an expanding array of courses examining the many dimensions of this shared challenge. Explore courses in climate and sustainability ranging from economics and English to public health and climate science.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
THE SALATA INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY
With 59 sites, Italy holds the record for the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, serving as a living laboratory for understanding the politics of cultural preservation. This course introduces students to the concept of heritage in its varied forms - tangible and intangible, ancient and contemporary, natural and man-made, permanent and ephemeral, visible and invisible.
.If Butler's visionary perspective on today's political and ecological crises is to be fully appreciated, it must be understood through the lens of her identity as a Black woman coming of age during the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements, and her engagement with Black religious expressions—particularly African traditional religions, Black Christian traditions, and Black new religious movements—all of which profoundly influenced either Butler’s personal life or her characters.The course will primarily focus on Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, various essays and interviews, as well secondary articles.
Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems. These systems have integrated comparisons to past results and quantified how “certain” we can be about various aspects of the future -- processes that were, in many cases, inconceivable at one point in the past.
What was twentieth-century fascism, and what might it mean to call something “fascist” today? This seminar explores historical, theoretical, and sociological approaches to the study of fascism and far-right movements. It begins with an introduction to longstanding debates over the meaning of the term.
This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history.
Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
In this seminar we discuss justice and beneficence near and far, as formulated in views of how benefits and burdens should be distributed within the borders of a just society, and as further brought to bear concerning sharing and stewardship to benefit and prevent harm to peoples and generations distant from us in space and time.
The world’s economic and political order reels under mounting challenges that predate the Covid pandemic, and have deepened in its aftermath: climate change, authoritarian populism, global financial fragility, a slowdown in economic growth and productivity, the aggravation of inequality, the risks of AI, the rise of middle powers and geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, and the stalling in global poverty reduction.
Given the urgent need to shift societies away from carbon-based energy, how can such transitions occur so as not to reproduce existing injustices? Answering this question requires an interdisciplinary approach. Texts from historians and anthropologists will provide insight into how societies across time and space have made large-scale energy transitions.
Throughout centuries, Indigenous communities have developed knowledge systems and practices that allow them to foster meaningful connections with natural environments and the earth
With the deepening of political divisions on societal challenges, policymakers must navigate increasingly tense environments to engage in constructive dialogues across political fault lines. They must be equipped with relevant personal competences interpersonal abilities to maintain productive relationships with difficult counterparts as they search for realistic compromises on programmatic options.
