NATION, CITY, & INEQUALITY

This course explores how power structures comprising nations and cities shape people's experiences worldwide. Students will be introduced to theories and empirical situations that broadly unpack various dimensions of inequality, such as wealth, housing, infrastructure, labor, public places, mobility. To understand the multitude of ways that inequality is experienced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this course insists that social based oppression at all scales cannot be made sense of without attentiveness to people's multiple identity markers such as gender, race, citizenship, class, sexuality, age, ethnicity, language, religion, caste, ability, education, and diet. By focusing on the relationship between nations, urban processes, and inequality, by the end of this course, students will understand how states wield power, who benefits from it, who falls victim to it, and why.