Geography

Class, Community, Nation

Module code: 009GS
Level 6
30 credits in spring semester
Teaching method: Seminar
Assessment modes: Essay, Coursework

What lay behind the rise in right-wing nationalist movements and regimes across the world in the late 2010s including in India, the UK, the US, the Philippines, continental Europe and Brazil? Why did the UK vote to leave the EU in 2016 and then to ‘get Brexit done’ in 2019? What caused the emergence of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement? What are the implications of these developments for the direction of human travel beyond the pandemic and in the face of the climate emergency? How much does it help to think conjuncturally about these questions building on the gramscian methods of Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart?

This module creates a collective, interdisciplinary learning environment which will pay attention both to critical analysis and to praxis. The analytical content will be centrally concerned with two questions raised by Doreen Massey:

  • what does this place stand for?
  • to whom does this place belong?

You will explore frameworks developed by feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mahmood Mamdani and Lisa Lowe. The scale of inquiry will range from the rural, through neighbourhoods and cities to whole countries.

We draw on critical ethnographies to consider how class-based inequality is and has been lived in communities, and ways in which racisms have emerged and shifted historically, including through the language and practices of colonialism, and their effects on the present. ‘Community’ itself will be unpacked to be understood as something always containing tensions and contradictions, for example around unequal land ownership and gender inequality.

We will think through geographies of hope, solidarity, resistance and abolition, drawing on writers in the black radical tradition, and on coalitional and inter-generational politics within and beyond higher education.

Module learning outcomes

  • Summarise and explain key concepts
  • Demonstrate a systematic understanding of key interdisciplinary debates on class, community and nation
  • Recognise and critically evaluate knowledge and understandings of the diversity of scales at which class, community and nation become meaningful to people as well as the interrelation between those scales
  • Identify, explore, and discuss appropriate empirical evidence in relation to the key concepts of class, community and nation