Sustainability Courses

Introduction to food studies covering a variety of topics including how food was consumed over history, land use and aquaculture, food in the arts, food and culture in the American South, food politics, and nutrition science.

This course will take students on a journey through some of the key moments in “American” food studies and its beginnings across a range of disciplinary homes: the study of nutrition and food security; the study of food systems and the vocabularies that subtend them.

Explores the historical arc and study of food in America and how culinary cultures reflect regional, national, and global narratives, challenges, and identities. As an intriguing lens on to the American experience, food reveals how race, class, gender, and place are entwined in cuisine, food economies, and interactions.

This service-learning seminar examines water threats to port cities and low-lying areas from sea-level rise, extreme weather, and inadequate infrastructure. The focus is on the Americas, small and barrier islands, and high hazard regions including the South East and Gulf Coast communities. The APPLES project will focus on North Carolina resilience strategies. Recommended for juniors and seniors. Permission of the instructor for first year students. Honors version available

Evolutionary and ecological approach to understanding the human species’ past and contemporary human variation. Emphasis on evolutionary processes, biological adaptation, and biocultural interactions with diverse environments.

Anthropological perspectives on foodways. This course examines the biological basis of human diets as well as the historical and cultural contexts of food production, preparation, presentation, and consumption.

The course examines ethnographic, theoretical, practical, and policy approaches to community development and community organizations in America and the English-speaking Caribbean. Students can work with a local community organization.

Explores the nexus of agricultural, ecological, and food systems as they dynamically interact. The class examines case studies from North Carolina and other parts of the world. Themes include nutrition, food security, agroecology, and sustainable livelihoods. Students engage in readings, class projects, and hands-on activities in a laboratory setting.

Critical exploration of current debates in the anthropology of Third World development, the production of global inequality, and the construction of parts of the world as underdeveloped through discourses and practices of development.

Examines environmental degradation, hunger, and poverty through the lens of power relationships, particularly inequality, political and economic disenfranchisement, and discrimination. Discussion of global case studies, with a Latin American focus.