NCSS Graduate Concentration

Cutting across academic departments and degree programs, the concentration lets you shape an individualized course of study focused on environmental learning in an art and design context, while being part of a multidisciplinary cohort of students who share scholarly and creative interests in nature, culture, and sustainability.

To fulfill concentration requirements, you must complete a minimum of credit hours of relevant coursework. Six of the total credits must come from Liberal Arts classes, including one of the concentration’s core courses: Theories of Natureculture or Inventive Political Ecologies.

You may distribute the remaining six credits of coursework according to individual need, choosing from graduate courses in your major, your thesis project, non-major and/or cross-disciplinary studio electives, and/or Liberal Arts electives. If courses in your major engage topics related to NCSS, you may double-count them towards fulfilling the NCSS graduate concentration.

Students who complete the NCSS graduate concentration are prepared to:

• interrogate and articulate the historical and contemporary causes and consequences of environmental challenges.
• critically engage with how aesthetics, objects, and language interact with culture, power relations, and institutions to shape how we view and interact with the natural and built world.
• articulate an understanding of the ways that environmental risk, while a universal problem, is distributed and experienced unequally.
• challenge dominant, normative, and/or colonial ways of thinking about the environment and environmental challenges.
• generate and disseminate theoretical, creative, justice-oriented, and/or critical responses to historical, contemporary, and future environmental challenges.
• demonstrate independent research and writing skills.
• hone specific theoretical and methodological approaches to be able to critically assess topics in nature–culture–sustainability studies in coursework.
• grow their own interests and think through how they relate to their making practices in nuanced ways.

In order to declare your intention to concentrate in Nature–Culture–Sustainability Studies, please complete the form below. The NCSS graduate coordinator will receive your completed form, as well as the registrar and your major’s department head. There is no penalty for withdrawing from the concentration.

RISD graduate students who wish to apply credits earned in a non-NCSS designated course may petition their NCSS coordinator by completing the form linked below.

In your petition, you must demonstrate and document to the NCSS coordinator’s satisfaction that your completed work is substantively informed by the themes of the concentration, and engages meaningfully with topics such as, but not limited to:

• living systems
• biomaterials
• biodesign and bioart
• environmental politics, policy and law
• animal rights and interspecies coexistence
• ethical and sustainable supply chains
• landscape systems and design
• reuse, adaptation and upcycling
• environmental storytelling
• speculative ecofutures
• science communication
• environmental data-driven art and visualization
• the intersection of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and the environment
• Traditional Ecological Knowledge
• community-based social and environmental impact design

Classes taken at Brown University may qualify for NCSS credit. To petition for inclusion of these classes, submit your request to the concentration coordinator with the course description and other relevant information included.

You may also petition your NCSS coordinator to count earned credits from thesis projects, if you can demonstrate that your work is substantively informed by NCSS concentration themes. Both the NCSS coordinator and your thesis advisor must approve of the thesis counting toward the concentration requirements in order for approval to be granted.