Course ID: | GEOG 3690. 3 hours. |
Course Title: | Introduction to Political Geography |
Course Description: | A survey of contemporary political geography structured around
contemporary globalization. It focuses on major concepts in
political geography, such as territoriality, geopolitics, and
scale, while also introducing important topics in the subfield,
including the geographies of nations, political identity, law,
migration, political violence, and social movements, among
others. |
Oasis Title: | Intro to Political Geography |
Prerequisite: | GEOG 1101 or 1103 or permission of department |
Semester Course Offered: | Offered fall semester every odd-numbered year. |
Grading System: | A-F (Traditional) |
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Course Objectives: | Globalization is an inherently geographic concept. It implies
that social, cultural, economic, and political processes are no
longer contained within the borders of nation-states or
localities, and now operate on a global scale. Popular
accounts of globalization describe it as flattening socio-
spatial relations, making places more similar to one another,
and suggest that space and distance are increasingly irrelevant
to understanding social and political change. This course
investigates this claim as a means of introducing students to
basic concepts in political geography. As opposed to presenting
globalization as the end of geographic differences, the course
examines globalization as a political process that is highly
dynamic and uneven, and produces new relations between places.
Though globalization provides the entry point for the course,
the course also aims to introduce students to major themes in
political geography. The central objective of the class is for
students to gain an understanding of the ways that political
geographic phenomena, such as geopolitics, nationalism,
territoriality, electoral politics, law, political violence,
and political identity, are reshaping space and society. By
examining globalization, the course emphasizes the ways
geography and politics are mutually constituted. The focus on
globalization also contributes to our undergraduate track
in “Globalization, Politics and Economy” and supports the
proposed campus-wide Student Learning Initiative that seeks to
internationalize the curriculum.
The course is intended to produce the following outcomes:
i) To provide students with a geographic and historical account
of globalization as a political process that is reshaping the
relations between economies, cultures, state territories, and
citizens. Students will gain the ability to think about global
problems and interdependence from a variety of perspectives, as
well as understanding their inherently contested nature.
ii) To improve students’ research and writing skills. Students
will be asked to research and analyze in writing various
political aspects of contemporary globalization.
iii) To highlight the geographic aspects of political change.
Students will recognize that globalizing processes are not
simply moving from local or national scales to the global, but
are rearticulating spaces and their interrelationships at a
variety of different scales in highly uneven ways.
iv) To understand the political aspects of basic geographic
concepts. The course expects that students have some exposure
to concepts of scale, territory, place, space, and networks
from their introductory courses in human geography or cultural
geography (1101 or 1103). The course builds on that initial
exposure by examining the politics behind the production of
these geographic configurations. Rather than treating
geography and politics as independent variables, the course
will encourage students to think about the ways that the two
are mutually constituted and the variety of actors involved in
global processes. |
Topical Outline: | Topics will vary by instructor, but a typical course might
include the following themes:
- Globalization and the End of Space-Time?
- Genealogy of the Global: Geopolitics
- Sovereignty and Territoriality
- Legal Geography and International Economic Regulation
- Nations and Nationalism
- Migrations
- Political Hegemony
- Electoral Politics
- Legal Geography and Urban Space
- Citizenship and Rights after Globalization
- The Politics of Scale |