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Economic Sustainability

I attended the 2022 Summer Valley & Ridge workshop with the goal of making explicit the connections to sustainability of the course material in Political Economy of Gender and the sections of Contending Economic Perspectives that I teach. Both courses have a sustainability connections designation and both courses include content that examines (a) how people secure their livelihoods through labor market and nonmarket work, and (b) the nature of labor market inequalities by gender, race, ethnicity and other social categories, how they are integrated with non-market activities, their wellbeing effects, their role in the macroeconomy, and the impact of macroeconomic policies on these work inequalities. In the past, the connections between the course material and sustainability have not been explicit enough, in part because sustainability still tends to be perceived as relating to the natural environment. With the support of the 2022 Summer Valley & Ridge workshop, I have had the opportunity to rethink course material and pedagogical tools that make the links to sustainability more explicit. Specifically, I will design exercises and assignments that incorporate the SDGs directly into the course. These exercises and assignments will ask students to build explicit linkages between SDGs and economic issues such as overwork, poverty, financial and economic crises, care as infrastructure, inequalities by gender, race, and class and with and one or more SDGs. We will then think about the normative frameworks of we study in the course and the strengths of these frameworks in eliminating economic ills. I have included in the syllabus for Political Economy of Gender that I will teach in Spring 2023, the working definition of sustainability at Dickinson and how our course relates to it. I will do the same when I teach Contending Economic Perspectives in 2023-24. I have designed a draft assignment for Political Economy of Gender that explicitly links the SDGs to research project in the course.