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 SIS 575.
Class description
The focus of the seminar this year (2008) is global health and some of the main political geographies of domination, exploitation, and imagination that shape global health inequalities. We will begin by reading one of Paul Farmer’s eloquent indictments of our global system that can produce so much suffering and disease alongside so much unprecedented wealth. We will then examine how a range of theorists from across the social sciences 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.
