CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY

GEOG 518

Advanced political geography course that explores reconceptualizations of power, place, and identity, as well as the interactive forces at work that continually reshape place-making and the inter-related processes of identification and differentiation.

GEOG 300

An opportunity to re-imagine human geography. The history of geography is particularly violent and exclusive. It is well known that systems of colonialist exploitation, theft, kidnapping, and murder were facilitated in part by the work of modern cartographers and "explorers." The discipline that we have today is a product of these earlier colonial epistemologies and ideologies. The science that emerged from these fields - geography - institutionalizes and reproduces many the ideas and viewpoints of their modern practitioners. Creates a space to re-imagine and re-invent what the field of human geography might be. Interrogates the colonial history of geography as a social science and practice. Explores several ways of thinking about space and social life that might not fit cleanly into the discipline at large.

GEOG 301

An introduction to the spatial dimensions of social movements, social struggles, and radical social change. Provides a range of critical and theoretical perspectives for reading and interpreting space as a tool of social transformation. Explores a variety of historical examples from the nineteenth century to the present.

GEN&WS/GEOG 504

Provides an opening to some of the key debates and practices in feminist (political) geography. Feminist geography focuses on questions of power, difference, embodiment, and social change. How are feminist geographies in conversation with or part of other fields of inquiry, such as critical ethnic studies and Indigenous studies, which also focus on questions of difference, epistemologies of knowledge, and social transformation and/or decolonization? That is, what are the relationships of feminist geographic inquiry to liberatory projects of ending racism, capitalism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. Explore how feminist theories and approaches in geography transformed prevailing political geographic questions and concerns, such as power, politics, territory, boundaries, sovereignty, and violence. What do feminist principles and debates over feminist politics and methods bring to (political) geography?

GEOG 513

Explores several key events, sites, thinkers, and texts that contribute to the social, personal, and intellectual landscapes of Queer Geographies. An invitation to survey and reflect on queer critical strategies that sample, record, and remix constellations of relationships between theory, space, sexuality, gender, and identity. It foregrounds modes of queer spacing and placemaking in academic and popular works devoted to queer lives, studies, sexualities, narratives, publics and privates, joys and griefs, art, theory, and beyond. Offers a range of strategies for reading, interpreting, and developing nuanced scholarly interventions and theories. Question and reimagine normative notions of the personal, the social, and the socio-spatial.