Unit name | Advanced Topics in Critical Political Economy |
---|---|
Unit code | GEOG30009 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | . Fannin |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
1) GEOG25110 Philosophy, Social Theory and Geography |
Co-requisites |
Available to year-three Geography and year- four Geography with Study Aboard/Continental Europe students only. |
School/department | School of Geographical Sciences |
Faculty | Faculty of Science |
This final-year unit will focus on advanced topics in human geography. It will introduce and review key theoretical and empirical research in political, economic, and cultural geography. The unit will develop students’ ability to draw on relevant conceptual vocabularies in feminist, Marxist, post-structural, and post-colonial thinking in both geography and other social science disciplines, including: gender, race, labour, capital, accumulation, production, reproduction, dispossession, colonialism, nature, and value. Lecture topics will focus in depth on concepts central to theorising contemporary political and economic formations, such as ‘biocapital’, with an emphasis on geographies of transnational or global capital, colonial accumulation, privatisation, technologies of dispossession, enclosure, resistance, representation, and cultural economies of contemporary embodiment.
The unit aims to introduce students to contemporary theoretical and empirical debates in political economic geography. The unit also aims to help students develop the ability to pose purposeful questions within these debates and to cultivate intellectual curiosity about their socio-political, economic, and technological contexts. It draws on research-orientated case studies that critically detail the social processes, structures, and causes underlying capitalist development.
Upon successful completion of this unit, students will be able:
Links between learning outcomes and methods of assessment:
Teaching will consist primarily of a 1-hour lecture, followed by a 1-hour seminar.
Two essays: Research essay (40%) + Final essay (60%)
Research essay (40%) – 1500 words (due at midpoint of teaching block)
Final essay (60%) – 2500 words (due towards the end of the teaching block).
Both essays test all of the ILOs.
Essential:
Gibson-Graham, J-K. (2006) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press
Titmuss, Richard. 1970. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London: Allen & Unwin.
Waldby, C. and Mitchell, R. (2006) Tissue Economies: Blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Recommended:
Dickenson, Donna. 2007. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rajan, Kaushik S. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Vora, K. 2015. Life support: Biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Further Reading:
Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neo-Liberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Norton Library.
Rose N 2006 The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
Schiebinger, Londa L. 2004. Plants and empire: colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.