Associate Professor of Political Science, Administrative Faculty in Native American Studies Program
Spotlight on POLSCI 495: Undergraduate Seminar in Political Theory – Climate Justice: Colonialism, Carbon, and the Future
Growing up, Dr. David Temin was no stranger to “having conversations about politics around the kitchen table” as his mom “was always watching Sunday morning news shows.” Being immersed in those conversations at a young age prompted him to get involved in activism, eventually earning a B.A. in Political Science and French and later a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. Around the time of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, Dr. Temin was outraged and puzzled by “US foreign policy and domestic policy,” which stretched into a general curiosity about “what are the sources of inequality and injustice? What can make the world a more fair and equal place?”
The sources of power, political and intellectual histories, and the function of power differ greatly when we consider how countries like the United States have been built on the erasure of Indigenous peoples. Dr. Temin, as a Professor of Political Science and Native American Studies, makes the connection through a central theme of both: sovereignty. He mentions that “perspectives from Indigenous studies… fundamentally challenge how we, as political scientists, think about some of the core concepts in the discipline.” The foundations and functions of sovereignty for Indigenous communities challenge the idea of a “State” with power because “the authority is supposed to be democratically achieved, [but] itself is a result of these very coercive foundations,” referring to European colonialism and the creation of the United States. Using the historical context, Dr. Temin, as a political theorist, researches “questions of what ought to be [which] really shift what authorities you look to as natural and normal, what collective life and collective decision-making ought to be.”
POLSCI 495: Climate Justice will focus on “questions of power, justice, and equality,” especially in the context of “the systems that we have designed that make our lives possible in a modern society, which are dependent on fossil fuels.” While this will be the first semester that Dr. Temin is teaching this course, he hopes one of the main takeaways will be that “climate change and sustainability cannot be separated as a discrete independent issue from everything else.” One example of this takeaway is that low-lying islands in the Pacific such as Tuvalu are sinking right now, due to the effects of climate change caused by Western industrialization. He points out that it is not only the effects of industrialization that the Global South faces but that the means to get there were by “the systems of plantation labor, which was based on slavery” to extract fossil fuels, which caused massive soil exhaustion leading to the loss of biodiversity. However, after slavery was abolished, there were “questions of land ownership and distribution because access to land is really crucial for a lot of people around the world.” Dr. Temin hopes to use this approach of looking at political science with a wider lens of history, sources of power, and different perspectives to get students to think of sustainability as much more than just a set of technical solutions to climate change.
Dr. Temin is particularly looking forward to talking about whether the idea of “green capitalism can deliver sustainability for people in the West, but [for] around the world. Are the motives of basing everything on profit rather than social values capable of doing that.” To start this conversation, he will have students read work from Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist with Our World in Data. The arguments that Ritchie makes are often very explicit and technical, which Dr. Temin describes her points as “we have all the technical solutions, now we just have to implement them all.” While he does not necessarily agree on all accounts with Ritchie’s approach, he’s excited for the conversations to come from this, especially from the perspective of how and where power plays out in these technical solutions. In addition to Ritchie, readings for the course could include Adrienne Buller, Ashley Dawson, Thea Riofrancos, Nick Estes, Farhana Sultana, and others.
Dr. Temin is planning to make assignments pretty open-ended. He “hope[s] that students will want to tackle a number of issues, drawing on some of the big perspectives that they talk about in class.” Students will be able to write more theoretical political science papers or policy position papers on a topic of their choosing, whether it be conservation, energy, food systems, etc. These assignments will allow students to “think about how interconnected all of these questions are… who’s in the driver’s seat, whose perspectives are not recognized, who has power and who doesn’t, that really shapes the way you think about policy solutions.”
Dr. Temin’s advice for other educators in the sustainability space is to recognize that “history matters and whose history matters a lot.” Acknowledging that climate change is not a new issue that emerged in the 1990s or that the only problem related to climate change we have to solve is the “need to draw down on emissions.” Looking through an Indigenous perspective, “climate change has its roots in European colonialism, in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the decimation of Indigenous communities and their relationship to their land,” rather than the start of the Industrial Revolution. While the mitigation of climate hazards for the future is incredibly important, we have to first critically look at the historical context from a multitude of different perspectives. He “encourages[s] other educators to not make [history] a sidebar, but to make that front and center because it shapes everything else about the way we think about sustainability.”
For students interested in climate justice in the context of political theory, you can take POLSCI 495: Undergraduate Seminar in Political Theory – Climate Justice: Colonialism, Carbon, and the Future with Dr. Temin in the Fall.
As a part of the Year of Sustainability, we are interested in sharing, uplifting, and highlighting stories about the people who make up LSA and have experience teaching about sustainability. We sat down with a series of LSA faculty to discuss their background and courses and will feature these conversations in our Faculty Spotlight series.
To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu.
