Dr Austin Zeiderman

This course is available on the BA in Geography, BSc in Environment and Development, BSc in Environmental Policy with Economics and BSc in Geography with Economics. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

None

This course will critically analyze the intimate relationship between race and space in the modern world. Through a range of historical and contemporary examples, it will examine how interconnected forms of racial and spatial difference are produced, reproduced, and transformed. Focusing on the material and cultural formation of racialized geographies, students will learn to recognize how racially inflected discourses and practices shape the production of space and how geographical location matters to racial classification, identification, and discrimination. The course will be organized around a series of archetypal spaces: for example, the body, the home, the ghetto, the wild, the frontier, the prison, the plantation, the border, the colony, the school, and the street. In each case, students will examine the confluence of race and space as well as their intersection with broader socio-spatial processes, such as colonialism, capitalism, urbanization, globalization, environmentalism, migration, and incarceration. Since race is often entangled with other forms of difference, students will also learn to interrogate the influence of gender, class, religion, and sexuality on the production of space. Texts from human geography, critical race theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, and related fields in addition to other media, such as film, literature, journalism, and photography, will provide students with conceptual resources and methodological tools. Ultimately, the objective of the course is to advance a comparative, critical analysis of the relationship between race and space, past and present, and to explore the conditions of future possibility for the linked political projects of anti-racism and spatial justice.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT.

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays in the MT and LT.

A detailed syllabus will be provided at the beginning of the course, but will include works such as: CLR James, The Black Jacobins, 1989; F Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 1963; E Said, Orientalism, 1983; K Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 1985; A McClintock, Imperial Leather, 1995; TB Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, 2001; RW Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California, 2005; O Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, 2006; KM Clarke and DM Thomas, Globalization and Race, 2006; JN Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool, 2005; L Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, 2006.

Exam (75%, duration: 3 hours, reading time: 1 minute) in the main exam period.
Essay (25%, 2500 words) in the LT.