Anna Zalik is Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto.
At the undergraduate level, her course Global Environmental Politics encourages students to make connections between their own consumption practices and local and global structures of production and inequality.
Courses taught:
1) Development and Global Inequalities begins with a consideration of how social welfare interventions/poor relief and the rise of the modern European state were informed by colonization, racism and sexism as key socio-economic processes in the rise of global capitalism. It then turns to the materialization of applied ‘development studies’ in the post World War II period, including the relationship between 20th century global and bilateral aid institutions and and the creation of a professional field of international development planning .
2) Global Environmental Politics examines the transnational power relations shaping the commodification and commercialization of natural resources. The first half of the course engages social theoretical approaches to global environmental regulation offered via Marxist political economy/geography and post-structural and anti=colonial approaches to nature-society relations. The second half of the course considers the politics of regulation (understood broadly to incorporate both formal policy and social resistance to capitalist exploitation) surrounding key resources: forests, food, water, oil, biodiversity and carbon/the atmosphere.
3) Extraction and its Discontents (also offered to 4th-year undergraduates).
Sample syllabi are hyper-linked above.
