London is a global financial capital, a center of environmental health research and policy, and a site where the consequences of climate change are distributed in radically uneven ways. This course will bring students to sites across the city where practitioners and community groups are working to understand and confront environmental problems, from air pollution to biodiversity to natural disaster, and it will also orient students to the city’s rich ethnic and racial diversity—as well as its struggles with racism and exclusion.

The course builds on a critical approach to urban nature, born out of the cross-currents of anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, public health, global governance, and social epidemiology. A critical approach asks how structures of power and inequality, from colonialism to racial capitalism, both limit access to nature and resources around the world and enable certain kinds of solutions to environmental problems to become favored. This course challenges students to understand the urgency of problems of planetary change and uneven development in a city that is often portrayed as a nerve center of colonial and financial power. In a moment where climate change is making the limits of science and policy even more apparent, this course presents an opportunity for students and a collaborative faculty team to reimagine urban climate justice. 

Students will spend spring break in London, visiting critical sites following weeks of preparation prior as part of their spring course. They will read and discuss relevant scholarly works related to these issues. Based on those independent project students design focused on the history, ecology, and landscape of a particular neighborhood of the city, they will conduct their field work abroad and present results upon return. 

Travel Dates:

March 29 - April 6, 2025

This program is embedded as part of the spring course titled London’s Transforming Urban Environment. Limited to 15 students. Students will receive one grade for the full course in spring semester, and travel is REQUIRED as part of this program:

• ANTHR 3430: London’s Transforming Urban Environment
  (Spring 2025, Required Travel: Spring Break 2025)

Faculty

Cornell faculty will be preparing students throughout the semester for travel abroad to engage with colleagues and professionals in London as part of their program-based research. 

Alex Nading, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences

*Some program information questions in 'Application Preview' below may not be applicable to this program. Course background will be asked if relevant to that particular short-term program.