Time Schedule:
Matthew Sparke
GEOG 575
Seattle Campus
Provides resources for theorizing how politics shapes and is shaped by geographical relationships. Examines how politics are situated in complex material and discursive geographies that are partly reproduced through political negotiations. Examines interrelationships of contemporary capitalism with other complex systems of social and political power relations. Offered: jointly with JSIS B 575.
Class description
IN 2012 the focus for GEOG 575 will be on post-colonial theory and global health. We will be reading some classic theorists of post-colonial criticism including Franz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Along the way we will examine recent work on global health and global death in order to reconceptualize their bio-political geographies and exceptions in terms of colonialism, neocolonialism and the struggle for post-coloniality.and humanities have sought to explain and document such global health inequalities in terms of neoliberal reforms, structural adjustment, and longer histories of colonial and post-colonial violence. To these more macrological studies, we will add further reflection on micrological explorations that consider the ways in which disease and illness also embody diverse forms of racial and sexual violence too. Finally, we will consider how imaginative geographies of public health: including the ways in which public health practitioners imagine the spaces of vulnerability and need as well as of intervention are changing in the context of increasing awareness about globally interdependent communities of connected, if not common, biomedical and post-genomic fate.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Seminar format.
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
Heavy reading load - at least one book a week.
Term paper and similar contribution.
