Time Schedule:
Maureen H. Hickey
GEOG 335
Seattle Campus
Characteristics and causes, external and internal, of Third World development and obstacles to that development. Special attention to demographic and agricultural patterns, resource development, industrialization and urbanization, drawing on specific case studies from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Recommended: either GEOG 123 or GEOG 230. Offered: jointly with JSIS B 335.
Class description
This course examines the relationship between the discourses and practices of development and global inequality. Drawing on a variety of theoretical frameworks, we will explore how development has been theorized and practiced over the last fifty years, and assess the impact on those places subjected to development policy and planning in the ‘Global South’. We will discuss the dominant themes, assumptions and practices of development and highlight the both the possibilities and the limits of the ‘development project.’ We will pay particular attention to the economic, geo-political and cultural relationships between places and the geographic imaginations that inform development thinking. Our objective is to rethink the meaning of development in a context of increased global interdependency and increased global inequality.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
The emphasis in this course is on exploration and analysis of the material through lectures, personal reflection and writing, through in-class discussions of the readings, and through further research culminating in a term paper at the end of the course. There will be two exams, a midterm and final.
Recommended preparation
This is a 300 level class and it is geared towards students with majors in geography, international studies or related social science disciplines. As such it assumes that enrolled students have taken one or more introductory courses in international studies, geography or a related discipline (such as political science, modern history or cultural anthropology).
This class assumes that you have some previous intellectual grounding in the following three areas; *Basic knowledge of contemporary world geography *Some familiarity with issues of representation, discourse and the social construction of knowledge. *A basic understanding of the historical development of the current political-economic world system.
Class assignments and grading
