Barnard College Barnard College
Sustainability & Climate Action

Academics

Students in Jody Sperling's class, Compositions, dance on campus Coursework 

Across disciplines, Barnard's coursework incorporates the natural world and climate change into its teaching and research. These courses allow students to explore and grapple with our human interactions with the natural world from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the hard sciences to the fine arts.

Students majoring in Environmental Science, Biology, Urban Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, and History can all pursue concentrations or tracks that touch on climate, sustainability, and human interaction with the environment. Departments ranging from Economics to Theatre offer additional coursework.

In 2020-2021, the Anthropology Department launched a new Political Ecology track, designed for students who wish to pursue studies in fields relevant to environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability. The major track is grounded in strong theoretical and methodological training in sociocultural anthropology.

2020-21 also marked the inaugural year of Barnard’s new Environmental Humanities minor, offered by the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies. EHMC will bring together students in both the humanities and STEM to collectively focus on the ways in which issues surrounding environmentalism, global warming, land- and water-rights activism, and non-human rights intersect with race, ethnicity, gender, and class. EHMC is open to all Barnard students. Please email Professor Severin Fowles with questions.

Fall 2023 Course Listings

Browse our full list of Fall 2023 courses related to environment and sustainability. Here are a few highlights. 

  • AFRS BC3516 -  Africana Studies: Environmental Humanities in the Global South | Taught by Professor Yvette Christiansë, this interdisciplinary course studies how individuals and communities in the Global South attempt to understand the “sense of an ending” that underlies all warnings about the climate crisis. This course examines how people in the Global South communicate their relation to the historical and changing environment, while focusing on specific places in the Indian Ocean, sub-Saharan Africa, and diasporic African communities.

  • SOCI BC3922 - Sociology: Race, Nation, and American Food Culture | Taught by Professor Gillian Gualtieri, this course uses theories of race, ethnicity, and nation to ask questions about boundaries, categories, and distinctions about the American food systems. It asks questions like: How are race, ethnicity, and nationality shaped by patterns of migration? How are cultural products, like cuisine, markets of broader systems of inequality? How do these systems of inequality affect access to food, what we eat, the workplace, and racialized bodies?

  • ARCH UN2530 - Architecture: Life Beyond Emergency: Domesticities of Displacement, Inhabitations of Migration | Taught by Professor Anooradha Siddiqim, this course explores the intersection of constructed environments, spatial practices, displacement, colonialism, and humanitarianism in the postcolonial world. The course critically examines the politics and poetics of architecture in partitions, borders, and camps, and investigates the connected histories and theories of humanitarianism and colonialism. Through studying forms such as refugee camps in relation to colonial institutions, students are invited to interrogate normalized discourses and spaces in order to imagine and analyze emergency environments as human constructions that have been resisted, endured, and transcended in various contexts worldwide.

  • HRTS BC3850 - Human Rights: Human Rights & Public Health | Taught by Professor Widney Brown, this course introduces students to the field of health and human rights. It examines how to advocate for and implement public health strategies using a human rights framework. It takes note of current international and domestic debates about the utility of a human rights-based approach to health, discusses methods and ethics of health-related human rights research, and examines case studies of human rights investigations to explore the role of human rights analysis in promoting public health.

In the spring of 2020 and 2021, the Center for Engaged Pedagogy hosted two workshop series on the development of new coursework and support for existing coursework centered on the environment, sustainability, and/or climate change. These sessions were attended by 70+ participants across multiple academic departments, including Biology, History, English, and Environmental Science. 

Research 

Barnard's faculty research crosses similar disciplinary boundaries, engaging with scientific and cultural concepts of nature and the environment within a wide range of fields. Here are some highlights: 

  • Professor of Environmental Science, Martin Stute, focuses his research on water resources, carbon sequestration, and the social and economic impacts of climate change. He is currently involved in a project determining the greenhouse gas footprint of NYC. 
  • Professor of Professional Practice in Architecture, Kadambari Baxi, uses architectural visualizations to examine toxic emission flows and climate justice. She is displaying these multimedia projects in a variety of exhibitions. 
  • Students on the Diana rooftop, doing research Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Orlando Bentancor, teaches on the emergence of capitalism in sixteenth century Latin America, specifically looking at the relationship between the commodification of nature and the transformation of indigenous peoples into workers. His book, The Matter of Empire, examines conceptions of metal resources in early colonial mining. 
  • Paige West, the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, looks at the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the intersections between indigenous epistemic practices and conservation science, the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption. 
  • Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Marisa Solomon looks at the durability of racism and its many material forms: toxicity’s movement through soil and bodies, the placement of landfills, waste infrastructure, and the technocratic planning and management of Black life and death. Her work focuses on how Black improvisation with waste’s form and meaning upend environmental thinking — including the raced, classed, and gendered stewards to whom the earth supposedly belongs.
  • Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Jonathan Snow, researches the cellular stress responses of honeybees, a species crucial to our agricultural systems. 
  • Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Theatre, Sandra Goldmark, teaches design and focuses her research on circular economy solutions to overconsumption and waste. She is the founder of the social enterprise, Fixup, which employs theatre artisans to repair household items, re-envisioning repair as a part of a sustainable circular economy. She also serves as Barnard's first Director of Sustainability and Climate Action. 

Through the Provost's Office, faculty have access to external funding opportunities to support and develop their research. Learn more about the research being done at Barnard, as well as opportunities for student research. 

Alumnae, Careers, and Internship Opportunities 

Barnard's engagement with climate action does not end at the borders of our campus. Barnard alumnae move on to internships and careers in these fields. Our career development office, Beyond Barnard, helps direct students towards opportunities, build their resumes, and prepare for interviews. Here are a couple of alumnae who have found success in this field: 

  • Annie Leonard, Barnard '86, is the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA, and creator of the book/animated film, The Story of Stuff. 
  • Rhea Suh, Barnard '92, is the former president of the National Resources Defense Council. She was awarded the Barnard Medal of Distinction in 2018.
  • Sue Chiang, Barnard '93, works as Pollution Prevention Director at the Center for Environmental Health, where she leads work on market incentives for companies to manufacture products safe for public health. 
  • Tsechu Dolma, Barnard '14, founded the Mountain Resiliency Project to address the poverty and food insecurity prevalent in mountain communities. They are working to create stronger communities from within to combat the already apparent impacts of climate change.
  • Maddie Taylor, Barnard '17, is the National Director of Sprout up. She was a founding member of the NYC chapter as a student