Geography as World-Writing

This course is about space and power. If “geography” is literally “world-writing”, then who is doing the writing, how, and why? Where is the line (the border!) between neutral, descriptive writing about the world and agenda-driven, ascriptive writing upon the world? Moreover, who is the reader of the so-written world? How and why is it to be read? This course invites students to think more deeply about those questions, taking on concepts and categories from the literature of geography, political geography, and geographical imaginations, as well as classical geopolitics and critical geopolitics. Various cases will inform the material of this course – the United States, China, India, Serbia, Senegal, Kenya, and the Middle East more broadly, with some emphasis on Armenia and Azerbaijan and the conflict over Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. This course is designed to be a highly interactive semester-long engagement, based partly on texts and partly on visual discourse, with significant student-designed components. By the end of this course, students will become familiar with a number of analytical thinking tools related to geography, space and place, and power dynamics alongside substantial information on the cases examined. There are no pre-requisites or co-requisites. All accommodations welcome.