Ph.D. in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion

Our Approach

Our department has come to understand that the ecological crisis represents a crisis of human consciousness and demands a fundamental revisioning of cultural values. Our Ph.D. students strive to not just identify the conditions contributing to ecological crises, but they also use their research to propose creative alternatives. To that end, our curriculum trains students to explore and contribute to scholarly and political discourses and practices, articulating academically rigorous, culturally informed, and ethical solutions for a more just, sustainable, and flourishing future.

Career Paths

Students in both of our programs gain skills and insight needed to transform practices, worldviews, and consciousness in service of a more just, sustainable, and flourishing planetary future. Many of our graduates have found fulfilling positions in some of the following fields:

• Teach, publish, and conduct research in academic settings
• Research and publish in non-academic settings (journalism, fiction, and nonfiction)
• Create or work for nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
• Integrate Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion knowledge and skills into their current careers

Curriculum

Doctoral students are expected to publicly present their research findings at least twice during their studies at relevant conferences at CIIS and nationally. One potential opportunity is via CIIS’ Religion and Ecology Summit, our transdisciplinary conference, which assembles cutting-edge scholars, thinkers, and activists to share innovative work rooted in ecologies and traditions from around the world.

Curriculum Highlights

PARP 6522 Science, Ecology, and Contested Knowledges (3 units) To understand the current ecological crisis, we need to investigate the ontological and epistemological foundations of our knowledge about the environment. The science of ecology, in its social and biophysical permutations, is a dominant way of understanding the natural environment. Examining the social construction of scientific and ecological knowledge will shed light on how we know and what we know about the natural environment. In this course, we will critically examine the social construction of scientific and ecological knowledge, coming to see Western scientific knowledge as a particular cultural phenomenon. We will examine countervailing epistemological understandings, such as situated knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge, that challenge the idea of a dispassionate and omniscient scientific viewpoint. We will investigate the compatibility of religious and spiritual insights with ecological knowledge. Applying feminist and non-Western epistemologies to environmental issues, we will seek to generate alternative ways of understanding ecological crises, which may, in turn, generate healing alternatives.

PAR 6483 Hinduism and Ecology (3 units) Indian tradition preserves cultural features that sometimes date back to the Neolithic. As a result, though India in modernity may often succumb to destructive views toward the Earth that belong to industrialized modernity, it also preserves rich strands of culture and tradition with strong resonances of much earlier ecological views that emphasize human embeddedness in nature and a holistic sense of existence in the cosmic and earthly context. This course will survey both folk and classical traditions, as well as elements of literature, art, and culture from 3600 BCE to the present, in order to show the presence of powerful ecological views at the core of Indian culture. These perspectives can be a rich resource for reimagining ecological understandings in the face of the world's modern ecological crisis.

PAR 6080 Decolonizing Ecologies (3 units) This course takes a critical view of conventional conceptions of "Nature" inherent in modernist Eurocentric thought. An interdisciplinary and decolonizing approach considers Indigenous epistemologies and practices based on relationships between people, other beings, territories, and conceptions of time. This course is grounded in readings, discussion, exercises involving interactions with one's environment, and a semester-long investigation of place.