Sustainable Futures

This course is designed to equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the complex challenges of climate adaptation in a rapidly changing world. Students will expand their understanding and capacity to interpret key topics through critical reading of both academic and grey literature. The course emphasizes active learning through various formats, including the use of relevant research and analytical methods applied to case studies. This approach enables students to hone their skills in applying knowledge and solving problems in integrated, responsible, professional, investigative, expressive, and reflective ways.

The course focuses on policy frameworks, governance structures, and stakeholder engagement, exploring strategies to manage climate risks and enhance resilience in communities and ecosystems. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will learn to assess vulnerabilities, design adaptive measures, and implement sustainable solutions aligned with global and local governance systems. The course covers a range of topics, including climate change and hazards, climate adaptation perspectives, governance frameworks and institutions, policy development and implementation, stakeholder engagement and public participation, and financial mechanisms and economic instruments.

Prepare to engage critically with real-world case studies and to develop innovative approaches to climate adaptation governance.

From the moment of our births, or possible even before, we are assigned a label of 'boy' or 'girl', and our assigned genders permeate every aspect of our lives from thereon in, from the clothes that we wear, the toys that we play with, the behaviours that are deemed 'appropriate'. Although increasingly the deterministic and dualistic model of gender is coming under scrutiny, gender continues to permeate most –if not all –of our interactions in the public and private spheres. Gender and sexuality always intersect with other social power systems –including but not limited to race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, ability, nationality, etc. –that nobody experiences gender in precisely the same way as anyone else. Further, as gender informs all of the ways in which our bodies move through and interact with our spaces, it must be understood as being central to the discussions regarding the most pressing issues of our times, including climate and sustainability.

You do not need to have a background in either Geography or Gender Studies to succeed in this class. We will be learning about core geography concepts, such as space and place, alongside different theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality, such as embodiedness and intersectionality. The course is broadly dividing along three intersecting themes: Gender and physical geographies, gender and cultural geographies, and gender and digital geographies.

In particular, the course will address the Sustainable Development Goals, Good Health & Well-Being (#3), Gender Equality (#5), Reduced Inequalities (#10), Sustainable Cities & Community (#11) and Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions (#16).

The course Research Design is designed to guide the students in the initial phase of their research project, leading to a project proposal. The course will equip the students with two main sets of skills: 1) review the literature formulating a meaningful rationale for their research leading to an appropriately formulated research question(s); 2) choose the right methodology to answer the research question and obtain a tailored training in order to concretely apply it during the field work for their thesis. The final output is a research proposal.

Nature based solutions (NBS), are ways of working with natural systems to protect, sustainably manage and restore ecosystems for water, climate change, biodiversity and livelihoods. In this course, you will gain an understanding of the concept, types and applications of NBS with the aim of providing frameworks and skills for its application in the context of transformative change.

In this course, we examine the human experience of migration through ethnographic research -- that is, through descriptions of the cultural and social dimensions of people's lives as understood through immersive, in situ fieldwork. We approach migration not simply as movement across or within borders, but as a social process that reshapes families, labor, states, and infrastructures, always in response to specific cultural contexts. The course asks how migration is experienced and governed, how it is enabled and restricted, and how it becomes morally and politically contested in different settings. Students engage with classic and contemporary ethnographic writing about migration alongside theoretical works and journalistic accounts. The course meets twice per week for eight weeks. Starting in the third week, we begin a structure in which the first class introduces key concepts, methods, and ethical questions through readings that combine anthropological theory with journalism and current events. The second class of each week is then devoted to reading and discussing ethnographic monographs, including student-led group presentations of books that the rest of the students have not read. These presentations explore each book's arguments, tensions, ethics, methodological choices, and relationships to the rest of the course readings.