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.
Athena Title
Intro to Political Geography
Prerequisite
GEOG 1101 or 1103 or permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
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