Global Arc

The term "just transition" has proliferated among climate policy makers, activists, and others from local to international scales to unite actors with labor, social justice, and renewable energy priorities. This course traces the historical origins and contested uses of just transition frameworks, exploring debates and common ground among labor, policy, environmental justice, ecosocialist, and decolonial perspectives. Emphasis is on the U.S. context with points of connection to global systems and movements.

This seminar explores climate stories to ask how they can lead to meaningful action. Organized in three parts, the class encourages participants to document their climate stories; investigates micronarratives, documentary films, and one novel (of your choice); and leads to the development of a set of stories documenting climate impacts in the Princeton community. Working in tandem with the project My Climate Story, the course may include one afternoon field trip to NPR studios in Philadelphia. Between climate communications and climate arts, this seminar creates publicly engaged work.

This course immerses students in diverse forms of storytelling about climate change in a US context - from photojournalism and data visualization to podcasting, documentary film, and the longform essay. Informed by these models, students work in teams on a semester-long collaborative project to develop an original climate story focused on a specific place, person, or community. Teams are formed based on student interests and experience.

The climate crisis is an issue for which the past is paramount. From past efforts to entrench fossil fuels to the historical inequalities that have shaped which communities are most vulnerable to climate disasters, the past looms large in the present and future. This class explores the history of global warming in three parts. The first part, Crisis, focuses on its causes and controversies. The second, Energy and Mitigation, explores past experiences with low-carbon energy and other mitigation strategies. The third part, Extreme Weather and Adaptation, covers past experiences with the extreme weather at the frontlines of the crisis.

Students will learn basic concepts related to climate and how it controls different components of the global water budget. Emphasis will be placed on dominant large scale climate modes (e.g., El Niño-Southern Oscillation). The role of major types of storms (e.g., tropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers) as flood agents will be addressed. Climate change, its possible causes and the interaction with the living world will be discussed. Statistical methods to examine the relation between climate and hydrologic variables will be introduced. Basic computer coding and math skills are required.

How do technologies, infrastructures, and large-scale environmental interventions tangle with social, political, and ethical concerns? This course considers infrastructures like dams, canals, pipelines, power facilities, and others, in the process of creating new environments, also create new ideas of power, governance, and political economy. We think globally with the history of large-scale environmental infrastructures, from colonial landscape interventions to actual and proposed plants for generating green power, to explore how environmental technologies interact with societies across time and space.

For centuries, energy infrastructure has been located in coastal communities where traditional livelihoods on the water persist. This seminar explores how these communities and other communities experiencing energy injustices offer extreme cases of ¿living oil,¿: indebted to the fossil fuels which also imperil them. Case studies explore coal, oil, and gas histories and cultures, including emergent alliances of energy justice advocates. We pay close attention to insights of residents, and activities and assignments offer opportunities to develop embodied learning practices and to explore research methods to amplify community voices.

In a world where society and nature are deeply intertwined, identifying causal relationships between humans and their environment is key to solving sustainability challenges. This course first introduces the fundamentals of "causal thinking," including causal diagrams. Drawing on case studies of social-environmental systems, students then learn the intuition, critical assumptions, and relative merits of alternative statistical methods for causal inference. Emphasis is on a conceptual understanding of the different tools. The course culminates in a project proposal that discusses a potential empirical analysis of a chosen sustainability issue.

Climate change has historically been studied as a global collective action problem. However, it can also be understood as the aggregate result of actions by countries, cities, businesses and individuals, that increase or decrease emissions and resilience to climate impacts. This course explores what this shift in perspective implies for national and local politics and policy around climate change. Learning outcomes include: Alternative framings of the climate crisis and implications for climate politics; perspectives of developing countries on climate change; and debates around climate governance, adaptation, industrial policy, and finance.

This course examines how artificial intelligence (AI) can address global challenges outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through case studies and analyses, hands-on activities, and project-based learning, students will analyze AI applications in health, education, climate resilience, and governance. The course emphasizes ethics and interdisciplinary collaboration, fostering skills in design thinking, prototyping, and impact evaluation. Students will work with real-world data, develop AI-driven solutions, and reflect on the societal implications of technology.