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79746-01 - Seminar: The Battle of Materials: Commodities, Consumption, and Planetary Crisis (3 KP)
| Semester | Herbstsemester 2026 |
| Angebotsmuster | einmalig |
| Dozierende |
Miguel Cadórniga Martínez (miguel.cadornigamartinez@unibas.ch)
Adam Przywara (adam.przywara@unibas.ch) Moritz von Brescius (moritz.vonbrescius@unibas.ch, BeurteilerIn) |
| Inhalt | This seminar introduces students to commodity and material histories as key approaches to understanding the origins and drivers of today’s planetary emergency. Focusing on the modern world from the nineteenth century to the present, we examine how “everyday” materials — including rubber, sugar, steel, oil, plastics, and fertilizers — became strategic resources, reshaped landscapes and labor regimes, and underpinned powerful ideologies of abundance and infinite growth. The seminar combines close reading and discussion of foundational scholarship with selected primary sources, including corporate and state propaganda on resource extraction, military reports, and visual campaigns. We will explore how different materials shaped lifeworlds and everyday habits, how they competed for market share and consumer acceptance, and how the material fabric of modernity emerged through marketing, consumer manipulation, and the creation of new desires and demands. Alongside weekly text discussions, several sessions will feature invited external experts and leading scholars, giving students the opportunity to engage directly with current research in commodity history, consumption history, and the environmental humanities. We will also address major concepts and controversies surrounding the Anthropocene and related frameworks, including debates about limits to growth and the politics of scarcity. Throughout, we will ask how historical perspectives can sharpen our understanding of climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality, and how materials connect these crises across empires, periods, and social worlds. |
| Lernziele | Through intensive reading and discussion, participants will gain a historically grounded understanding of how modern societies built economies of ever-expanding production and consumption through plantations, mines, and factories, often by displacing ecological costs and coercing labor across imperial and post-imperial spaces. Students will strengthen their ability to connect specific commodities to broader transformations in landscapes, consumption, and geopolitics; critically assess competing narratives of scarcity, limits, and technological fixes; and situate Anthropocene debates in relation to older traditions of thinking about abundance, depletion, and planetary change. |
| Literatur | Sunil Amrith, The Burning Earth: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (London: Allen Lane, 2024). All weekly reading materials will be made available on the ADAM platform. |
| Bemerkungen | Enrollment is limited to 30 students. In the event of over-enrollment, priority will be given to students in the Master’s Program in European Global Studies, the BA and MA programs in History, as well as to those whose research projects focus on resources. |
| Weblink | Europainstitut Basel |
| Unterrichtssprache | Englisch |
| Einsatz digitaler Medien | kein spezifischer Einsatz |
| Intervall | Wochentag | Zeit | Raum |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Montag | 14.15-16.00 | Riehenstrasse 154, Seminarraum 00.022 |
Einzeltermine
| Module |
Modul: Areas: Europa Global (Master Studiengang: Europäische Geschichte in globaler Perspektive ) Modul: Epochen der europäischen Geschichte: Neuere / Neueste Geschichte (Master Studiengang: Europäische Geschichte in globaler Perspektive ) Modul: Fields: Environment and Development (Master Studiengang: African Studies) Modul: Neuere / Neueste Geschichte (Master Studienfach: Geschichte) Vertiefungsmodul Global Europe: Handel und Unternehmen in der Globalisierung (Masterstudium: European Global Studies) Vertiefungsmodul Global Europe: Umwelt und Nachhaltigkeit (Masterstudium: European Global Studies) |
| Prüfung | Lehrveranst.-begleitend |
| Hinweise zur Prüfung | 50% active participation in class 50% two response papers (up to 1,000 words each), each addressing a different session |
| An-/Abmeldung zur Prüfung | Anmelden: Belegen; Abmelden: nicht erforderlich |
| Wiederholungsprüfung | keine Wiederholungsprüfung |
| Skala | 1-6 0,5 |
| Belegen bei Nichtbestehen | nicht wiederholbar |
| Zuständige Fakultät | Universität Basel |
| Anbietende Organisationseinheit | Europainstitut |