Syllabus This Advanced Research Seminar Will Take an Interdisciplinary Approach to Examine Specific Historical and Contemporary Cases of Apparent "Collapse"

Interdisciplinary Programmes

Academic year 2020-2021 PROFESSORS

Apocalypse Then and Now: Advanced Research Vinh-Kim Nguyen Seminar in Understanding Systemic Collapse and Susanna Bettina Hecht Adaptation Office hours

MINT171 - Autumn - 6 ECTS ASSISTANT

Tuesday 16h15 - 18h00 Hanna Josefine Berg

Course Description Office hours

The serious study of "collapse" -- as a shorthand for global interconnected systemic breakdown or failures precluding return to the previous norm or steady state -- has gradually gained traction in the past decade, despite earlier association with fringe groups both to the left and right of the political spectrum. The growing interest in examining "collapse" has until recently been largely driven by environmentalists concerned with the impact of global warming according to current trajectories, and the impossibility of changing trajectories without radical decarbonizing (such as that envisaged with the attainment of "peak oil") and consequently sharp, deep and destructuring economic contraction as well as by historians and social scientists concerned with understanding complex systems and also how "natural" disasters and conflicts can become amplified through layered shocks. Many of these studies have lacked historical detail, been at times simplistic and tended to be Eurocentric in their analyses. In addition to global warming, other possible triggers of global synchronous multi system failure include pandemics (such as the CoVID epidemic) and financial crises have triggered other forms of collapse that can be spring boards for large discussion of various types, and can serve as case studies for thinking our current instabilities.

Syllabus This advanced research seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to examine specific historical and contemporary cases of apparent "collapse". We are less interested in causes -- or their categorization -- than in identifying common features and pathways leading to the apparent

Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2 | CP 1672 - CH-1211 Genève 1 | +41 22 908 57 00 | graduateinstitute.ch

MAISON DE LA PAIX disappearance of stable structures and/or ways of living and looking at how systems reorganization themselves in the processes of resilience or recovery. We will start with historical case studies before moving to contemporary examples of partial or regional collapse. The current information on “collapse” in the past and how these unfold, and whether social systems recuperate or not remains an interesting question for rethinking resilience. We’ll be looking at these questions from a number of disciplines and epistemologies from the sciences, history, philosophy, and thinking about what they mean for us, and our societies now.

1) Course requirements: because we do not know to what degree the class will be on line or in person, please be prepared for on line participation. Because of the restrictions of travel some students may only be on line, Dr Hecht is likely to appear initially on line as well. 2) Each week please bring in an academic journal article or newspaper article on a current process (climate change, political issues, alternative actions, states of pandemic etc. You’ll report on this. 3) Class participation 4) Three 2 page essays over the course of the term over a particular set of reading themes. These are basically more or less mediations on the readings and a pedagogical device to get you to engage the readings and also class participation. 5) An open book midterm. 6) An open book final

Required Books: Mark Lynas (2020) Our Final Warning: 6 degrees of emergency. (or) (and) David Wallace-Wells (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after warming. New York, Crown Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens: (2020) How everything can collapse. London. Polity Press. Gillan Darcy Woods. (2017) Tambora. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

We’ll be selecting chapters readings from some of these works and these should be of broader interest in any case: (they’ll be on reserve) Walter Schedel: The Great Leveler, Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century. Princeton, Princeton University Press Robert Nixon (2013). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. David Quammen 2013. Spillover: Animal infection and the next Pandemic. New York, Norton. Jared Diamond (2005) Collapse. New York, Penguin P.McNany and N. Yoffee (2009) Questioning Collapse. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Week 1. Meet and greet and discuss the trajectory of the class. Part 1. Thinking about framing the questions narratives sciences and ethnographies Week 2. Questions of Narrative from the Humanities: Guest lecture, Carolyn Biltoft, International History; Acemoglu, D. & J. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown. Chapter 2 Biltoft, C. N. 2020. The anatomy of credulity and incredulity.

Week 3: Some scientific views of collapse: Malthus, species areas curves, punctuated equilibrium, feedback loops and systemic instabilities and the framings of complexity and resilience Lynas chapters 1-3; Ceballos, G., A. García & P. R. Ehrlich (2010) The sixth extinction crisis: Loss of animal populations and species. Journal of Cosmology, 8, 31.

Selections from Diamond;, Chapter 1, 4 from “Questioning Collapse”

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Gould, S. J. & N. Eldredge (1977) Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered. Paleobiology, 115-151.

Week 4 Medical framing of collapse Readings TBA Part II. Two historical case studies of climate and pandemics (Recovery and resilience?) and change Week 5. The first of our case studies the great dying in the Americas. This produced massive depopulation but also affected European climates and the emergence of the “liitle ice age”. In this case study we examine the natures of transformations, and forms of recovery/ resilience and the implications of teleconnections Dull, R. A., R. J. Nevle, W. I. Woods, D. K. Bird, S. Avnery & W. M. Denevan (2010) The Columbian encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt land use change, fire, and greenhouse forcing. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100, 755-771.

Hecht, S. B. (2006) Cultural survival in post-contact Amazonia. Geographical Review, 96, 499- 502. Koch, A., C. Brierley, M. M. Maslin & S. L. Lewis (2019) Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. Quaternary Science Reviews, 207, 13-36. Lovell, W. G. (1992) “Heavy shadows and black night”: disease and depopulation in colonial Spanish America. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82, 426-443. Lovell, W. G. (1996) A dark Obverse: Maya Survival in Guatemala 1520-1994. Geographical Review, 86, 398-407. Week 6 Tambora Chapters 1-4 How a volcanic winter disrupted the globe in 1815, produced among the most durable critique of Technology (Frankenstein) and triggered a swiss diaspora to South America, which became foundation for south American white settler colonialism and the emergnces of scientific racism in colonial policy. D Clavel and S Hecht 2020: Exiles in Paradise Tambora, Fugitive monarchies, and Swiss Diaspora and the shaping of racial ideologies in tropical settlement. Environmental History. In Press. Week 7 Take home exam: Reflecting on these big and teleconnected dynamics Resilience recovery and transformation Part III. The modern questions under conditions of accelerating climate change, Tropical land use change and modern forms of globalizations Week 8 Wallace Wells: Elements of Chaos and the Climate Kaleidoscopes Servigne and Stevens. How Every thing can Collapse. And the new disease profiles Commented [S1]: Week 9 Collapsing States, Collapsing climates and the middle east : Guest lecture Mahmoud Mahamadou Week 10 Ebola Readings TBA Week 11 Covid Reading TBA Week 12. Final summing up

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