Reshaping Environments
Reshaping Environments looks at real world situations. It will teach you to audit environmental practices used across the university’s disciplines and provide you with your own Environmental Toolbox that you can use to examine your own environment.
Ruth Beilin is the Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) in the Melbourne School of Land and Environment, and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Resource Management. With a combined educational background in biophysical and social science, she has developed a multi-disciplinary approach to research theory and praxis. The focus of her work to-date is on everyday landscapes and 'ordinary' people. In this pursuit, I have grappled with policy frameworks, planning institutions, resource use and have located these in a landscape context centred on human interaction with 'place'. She researches and writes on catchment management, Landcare, rural women and landscape policy in particular. Her Master of Science degree in Agriculture Extension and Rural Development linked agricultural policy to the household level by developing indicators accessible to family farmers. HEr PhD involved examining conservation on rural private land in Victoria. She utilized a farmer based photo-elicitation method as part of the research into the meanings and understanding of landscape that farmers evoke when considering and implementing conservation and production regimes. Ruth has worked as both a short and long-term adviser on a range of AusAID-funded projects; and have researched and written extensively on issues relating to landscape, conservation and environment, community development programs, participatory research methods, gender analysis and women in development, and in agriculture extension. |
This subject explores how environments shape us and we humans reshape the environment. It examines human attitudes to, impacts on and interactions with the environments in which we live by considering ‘natural', transformed and built environments as sites of production and consumption, imagining and contest, in different parts of the globe. The subject considers the material relationship between the natural and built environments by exploring issues of resource use.
Human demands for water, energy, food, fibres and minerals, will be examined in relation to the technologies and practices used to meet those needs, and the resulting creation of waste and pollution and impacts on climate and a range of ecosystems and species. These issues and processes will be presented and considered using thematic, geographically varied, historic and contemporary examples. The subject will operate at three ‘scales' including: ‘natural' landscapes and their ecosystems; cities and the urban environment; buildings.
Skills you will learn
- Basic analytical skills for observing human-environment interactions
- Skills for the observation and interpretation of practices which transform natural and urban environments
- Skills in synthesizing, reporting on and discussing issues relevant to this subject
Contact Hours
120 Hours
More information
Handbook Entry for 880-102 Reshaping Environments