Instructor: Scott Kirsch, Assistant Professor of Geography

Saunders 301b ; 962-3874; kirsch@email.unc.edu

The Roman philosopher Cicero used the phrase second nature to describe the nature transformed through human activity, something set apart from a primordial, unmodified "first nature." Two thousand years later, even as scientists find precious few spaces--from our bounded "wilderness" areas to the polar ice caps to the upper atmosphere--that have not been transformed through social processes, post-structural perspectives have called into question whether "nature" can be, or has ever been, knowable outside of human activities, including the technical and scientific practices through which it has most forcefully been framed. This seminar in "second nature" takes these questions about the social transformation--or production--of nature as its starting point. Our special concern will be to explore the complex work of technoscience (or science and technology) in these processes, which tends to mediate both how we know nature and how we transform it.

The refashioning of nature is critical to the new geographies of social life that we create, and so it is important that we develop new theories and ideas, and synthesize some old ones, for investigating the social, political, and economic relations underlying these changes. This seminar will draw on three broad constellations of theory and research: Marxism and social theory; critical human geography, including especially work examining social productions of nature, space, scale, and landscape; and science studies. We will explore the work of authors including, but not limited to, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour, and Emily Martin. The final component of the seminar will raise questions about how these theories of technoscience, nature, and society can be made useful for research dealing with space, place, landscape, and environments (including urban environments), in contemporary as well as historical contexts.

The seminar will be organized around a series of weekly readings, with students leading most of the discussions. By analyzing particular texts, and examining the relationships among texts in a given week, as well as the relationships among different theories and ideas from week to week and section to section of the course, the main objective of the seminar will be to relate the ontological and epistemological problems posed by second nature to our own research problems. As such, in addition to informed participation, a term paper will be the primary course requirement.