On June 10, Annie Tewksbury ’16, Emory Strawn ’17 and Skylar Smith ’18 presented their research at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS), held on the campus of American University in Washington DC.
The students’ work resulted from research they had conducted in the context of a class on Global Environmental Politics, taught by CES’ Prof. Pia Kohler in the Fall of 2015. Over the course of the semester, the 12 students enrolled in the class paired their exploration of multilateral environmental agreements with the development of research projects designed to build on data gathered through a “virtual field trip” to the Climate Summit held in Paris in December 15(COP21), at which world leaders negotiated the Paris Agreement. The class turned to official webcasts of the proceedings, daily reports, twitter feeds, media coverage and interviews with participants at COP21 to complete their research projects. In her paper, Annie Tewksbury used reports from the negotiations and different iterations of the draft text to focus on the outcome itself, tracking the evolution of how the treaty’s ambition was framed in the final document. In her work, Skylar Smith examined the role of a coalition of countries particularly vulnerable to climate change: the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS). Building on AOSIS leaders’ official declarations in Paris, she demonstrated how the coalition used certain framings to great effect, including in mobilizing the High-Ambition Coalition widely credited with facilitating the final outcome. In her paper, Emory Strawn turned to the demonstrations and actions unfolding outside the meeting rooms in Paris, showing a declining reliance by activist groups on polar bears as emblems of the need for climate action.
At the AESS conference, the students presented their work during a panel on “COP21 in the Classroom,” and these presentations then served as the foundation for a fruitful discussion on strategies for incorporating unfolding developments in global environmental politics into class activities.
Megamenu Social