Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership

ANTH 302: Oil, Culture, Power

(cross-listed with ENVS)

Instructor: Zainab Saleh

The discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, by Colonel Edwin Drake in 1859 ushered in new realities whose consequences have reconfigured and reshaped the world. On the one hand, the oil industry has engendered spectacular innovations and tremendous wealth. On the other hand, the rise of oil monopolies, concerned about profits, have wreaked havoc upon oil-rich communities in terms of environmental collapse and destruction of local industries. Moving between different registers, this course explores how oil has shaped local, regional, and imperial politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the single most important commodity in the world, the story of control over this highly prized resource is a violent one. While oil revolutionized modern life, its rise has been associated with unethical practices, dispossession, and corruption. This interdisciplinary course addresses the ways in which oil has defined the fates of empires and nation-states, the rise and fall of local political movements, neoliberal governmentality, and knowledge production. In addition, it explores migration and citizenship, gender dynamics, racial relations, social inequalities, and weaponization of the justice system. Finally, this course examines global processes across different regions, such as Nigeria, Russia, Ecuador, Venezuela, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• This course delves into oil companies’ interventions in the legal systems in different countries in order to suppress any efforts by local communities to hold them accountable for environmental degradation and dispossession.
• It chronicles how oil companies have resorted to policies of divide-and-rule, through the mobilization racial differences, in order to prevent workers from unionizing.
• It details oil companies’ involvements in coups and civil wars, in collaboration with their governments, all over the world.
• It examines how the oil industry, from its inception, has led to the rise of monopolies and destruction of any competition through the use of different illegal practices.

ENVS H222 / HLTH H222: Heat and Health: Design Action Lab

(cross-listed in Growth and Structure of Cities and Anthropology)

offered through Tri-Co Philly, Fall 2025
Instructors: Joshua Moses and Anna West

This community-engaged course examines and responds to experiences of extreme heat in Philadelphia. Site visits, guest speakers, and readings will deepen students’ understanding of the intertwined social, economic, health, and environmental challenges facing Philadelphia residents in a warming world. The course centers a collaborative design partnership between artists, community partners, students, and faculty to generate “social practice” art that responds to the health impacts of extreme heat, particularly on those most vulnerable to its impacts.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• How can ethnographic attention to the uneven distribution and impacts of extreme heat inform ethical arguments for investing in urban heat resilience and climate adaptation?
• How do we come to see our daily response to the heat-related distress around us as essential to our conceptions of interpersonal and professional ethics?
• How can making heat's impacts visible work to foreground “everyday ethics” and opportunities for individual, collective, and institutional action toward a more just and equitable city?
• What ethical principles and practices should guide our community-academic-artistic design partnership? What can we learn from collaborators' past experiences? What processes can we put in place that will ensure we are listening, learning, iterating, and reflecting in response to emergent concerns?

HLTH215: Sacrifice Zones: Empires, Epidemics & Climate Changes

Instructor: Lauren Minsky

In this big picture course, we explore how humanity’s diverse imperial projects have interacted with specific ecologies and climate changes to shape the changing spatial distribution and concentration of human experiences with hunger, famines, droughts, floods, and diseases from pre-historical times to the present. In the process, we reflect upon and question commonsensical (and often mutually reinforcing) historical and
presentist logics — of environmental determinism; historical inevitability; Eurocentrism; national becoming; development and growth; modernization and conservation; technological salvation; and of futility, doom and despair. In turn, we consider how fresh perspectives on the past can significantly (re)shape our assessments of contemporary global health and existential challenges, including what we make of the ongoing green
growth vs de-growth debate and calls to cultivate “indigenous” understandings and approaches to life.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• What are the ethical implications of identifying a new ecological era within the long history of humanity called “the Anthropocene” and of different ways of periodizing it? What do we make of related projects that reject the “Anthropos” and instead identify a “Plantationocene”, “Capitalocene”, “Africanocene” or “Chthulucene”, among others? What ethical possibilities do these differing concepts open up? What do they foreclose, particularly with regards to “the time before” and understandings of “the indigenous”?
• What is at stake in the long human history of tying political legitimacy and the provision of basic human needs to energy-intensive forms of imperial expansion enabled by the creation and acceptance of “sacrifice zones”? How have projects of imperial growth and the nature of imperial sacrifice zones changed over time? How can the study of sacrifice zones help us re-think and intervene in debates on the “Anthropocene” and “sustainability”?
• What ethical possibilities — particularly those stemming from “non-Western” world regions — can we identify and appreciate by studying the “big history” of human responses to climate changes, from the onset of the Holocene 10,000 years ago to our current era of global warming? What dynamic political institutions and cultural forms did “sacrificial populations” create and what can we learn from these? What, in particular, are the ethical possibilities inherent in understandings of “animated ecologies” and what lies behind “modern” scientific rejections of the “backwardness” of “traditional” vitalism?
• What competing historical understandings and ethical visions are inherent in today’s green growth vs regrowth debate? How did we start the course thinking about this debate and how has our thinking changed by the semester’s end? How has engaging and partnering with residents of local sacrifice zones changed our perspectives?

HLTH315: Cancer & Climate Change

Instructor: Lauren Minsky

In this course, we explore malignant, “self-devouring growth”: a global pandemic condition afflicting both the human and planetary body. We start by studying scientific models of oncogenesis — including infectious, genetic, behavioral and metabolic — and the kinds of connections each makes with climate changes. We then turn to probing the social determinants of rising cancer incidence and mortality during our present era of global warming, including social inequality; biodiversity loss; changing food systems and entitlements; novel and expanding pandemics of infectious disease and industrial air, soil and water pollution. In the final section, we read cancer memoirs that reflect on the deeply human experience of making meaning of existential threats, and the possibilities that exist for hope, caregiving, transformation and healing. Throughout the course, we engage with own greater Philadelphia/Delaware river “cancer center”, as well as consider the many “cancer villages” and “cancer alleys” with which we are interconnected around the world.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• What are the ethical complexities associated with different models of oncogenesis and oncological treatments? How do we navigate our current cultural moment that simultaneously denies and hides, attempts to universalize and cure, and profits from and expands both cancer and climate changes?
• What is at stake in tethering political legitimacy and the provision of our basic needs for food, water, transportation, and healthcare to energy-intensive forms of capitalist growth and development, even when that “self-devouring” form of growth is causing biodiversity loss, species extinction, and pandemics of malignancies that portend the slow death of our own species?
• What are the political possibilities and limitations of the genre of cancer memoirs? What makes a “good” memoir? Are we in need of new genres of writing to capture human experiences of malignancy and to inspire new forms of caregiving? What do we make of the rise of the parable?

PJHR 2XX: Plantation Legacies

(Crosslisted with Asian Studies)

Instructor: Prea Persaud

This course investigates the plantationocene, a term used to describe the connections between the exploitation of natural resources and forced labor on plantations and ecological destruction around the world. Topics discussed include: the history of forced labor systems, such as slavery and indentureship, the consequences of subsequent geographical changes, plantation tourism, land dispossession, the possibilities and limitations of small-scale farming and plantation housing, and what repair might look like in the wake of the plantation.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• How do we address the historical and ongoing environmental damage caused by plantation systems?
• What are the ethical obligations of corporations and nations that have benefited from these systems?
• How do we acknowledge and address the historical trauma and ongoing inequalities resulting from plantation systems?
• How do we reevaluate the value of non-human life, within the context of the damage caused by the plantationocene?
• How can we create more equitable and sustainable food systems that prioritize the well-being of people and the planet?

POLS H224 The American Presidency

Instructor: Zachary W. Oberfield;

This course examines the causes of presidential power as well as the tension, faced by all democracies, between deliberation and action.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• How much power should U.S. presidents have in implementing laws and public policy?
• How should democratic publics settle the tension between their desire for democratic control/deliberation and their desire for efficiency/action?
• When is unilateral presidential action right/wrong?
• Should U.S. presidents have different levels of control/input in national versus international affairs public policy?

WRPR 135B: Health and the Humanities (cross-listed in Health Studies)

Instructor: Jess Libow

Over the last few decades, “medical humanities” and “health humanities” initiatives have been established at health professional schools across the country. In these programs, students study art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are “the humanities”? How do they differ from and relate to “the arts” or “humanity” itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit both healthcare providers and their patients? In this writing seminar, we will explore how humanistic inquiry contributes to knowledge about health and healthcare by turning to four foundational humanities concepts: observation, narrative, history, and ethics. Throughout the semester, we will focus in particular on how we might leverage tools from the humanities to promote health equity and create more just systems of care.

Key ethical questions the course will address 

• How can humanistic ways of knowing be leveraged to promote health equity and create more just systems of care?
• How can the study of ethics inform our perspectives on topics including the social determinants of health, the future of Medicaid/Medicare, the pharmaceutical industry, the use of AI in research and clinical care, and/or genetic testing and editing?
• How does public writing about bioethical issues engage readers? What rhetorical strategies do writers of op-eds employ and how do these compare to other writing endeavors?