Geography
Class, Community, Nation
Module code: 009GS
Level 6
30 credits in spring semester
Teaching method: Seminar
Assessment modes: Essay, Coursework
On this module, you’ll explore how people experience class-based inequality, and how racism has shifted over time.
You’ll draw on different disciplines, critical analysis and practice to study the languages, practices and impacts of colonialism - from rural neighbourhoods to entire countries. Through this, you’ll inspect:
- the questions ‘What does this place stand for?’ and ‘To whom does this place belong?’ (Doreen Massey)
- ideas from feminist, anti- racist and anti-colonial scholars – such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mahmood Mamdani and Lisa Lowe
- ‘community’ itself
- the tensions within communities, including unequal land ownership and gender inequality
- places of hope, solidarity, resistance and abolition
- work by writers in the black radical tradition
- political ideas across groups and generations, inside and outside of higher education
- what drove the rise of right-wing nationalist movements in the late 2010s in India, the UK, the US, the Philippines, continental Europe and Brazil
- why the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016 and then to ‘get Brexit done’ in 2019
- the cause of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement
- how these right-wing shifts affected human travel after the pandemic and during the climate crisis
- whether using Gramscian methods, as developed by Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart, helps us study these issues.
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