ORIN 5005 - Getting to know existential risks

This 12h seminar-course will engage critically with the production, contestation and validation of knowledge claims about ‘existential risks’. It will start from your discipline, IR, to identify its blind spots as well as analytical opportunities when it comes to getting to know existential risks, before moving to case studies of technologies and and socio-technical systems which have been claimed to produce existential risk. We will focus on nuclear weapons and geoingeneering technologies and on controversy around the World 3 model of the 1972 Limits to Growth Report, disputed by the OECD’s 1975 interfuturs project and will compare the predictions of the model to historical data gathered in the following four decades.

This is designed for IR students so I will expect them to have a good grasp of the discipline. They can otherwise read Tim Dunne et. al.’s textbook International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, published by Oxford University Press.

The first four hours will be lectures with ability to ask questions for students

The following 8 hours will be in a seminar format, including close readings of the texts

Lectures demandées

(au minimum 1 lecture obligatoire, 5 maximum qui seront affichées dans le recueil des enseignements)

The students will be asked to write and will be assessed on the basis of a 4000 words essay which could either be about how what they have learned from the class will be mobilized or modifies the way they engage with their enquiry for their memoir, or a short scholarly note that they would be interested in submitting for publication to a scholarly journal.