Geog 410/510
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
View
from inside the shopping mall on the Kremlin in Moscow, looking out at Lenin’s
tomb.
Ideology as tourism through the prism of capitalism in post-Soviet Russia.
Winter
Condon 260
Office Hours T 2:00-3:00, OBA
Condon 107G
tel. 346-4500
scohen@uoregon.edu
Goal:
Cultural Geography has a long genealogy in our discipline, and in recent years has become a significant forum for analyzing and critiquing popular culture in all its guises. Today, cultural geography can be a key tool for understanding the cleavages in society that are referred to as “culture wars”. Culture, as a human construction, is always dynamic, and always contested. In this course we will develop the approaches and determine the questions that help us to understand where culture comes from, where it’s going, and how it is determined, shaped, represented, and challenged, from place to place, people to people, time to time. Culture is power, culture is politics, how can we understand it, and influence it, as it unfolds around us? Beyond that, how do we "do" cultural geography as students of the world around us? How do we understand ourselves, and others, in relation to cultural geography? As we work through the course we are going to explore layers relating to place, space, landscape, identity, and power. What are these things/processes, how do they work?
Method:
We will draw upon readings that will be available on blackboard, on the web, from literature, and from the New York Times. As we study the perspectives offered by the contributors, we will develop cases that correspond to the points and interests they offer. Our supplemental material will be from beyond the classroom: landscapes, buildings, magazines, literature, music, dance, film, television, discourse, and so on. Each week we will blend the theoretical/methodological reading with examples from the “real world.”
Requirements:
Your primary task is to read and participate in discussion,
but you must also be looking for illustrations of our themes in the world around
you. Each student will be
responsible for presenting and analyzing cultural “artifacts” in class, and
creating a final project. You will have one mid-term, a brief take-home essay that will
serve as preparation for the final project, one book analysis, and there will be no final exam.
Grading:
You will be accorded 20% of the final grade for mid-term, the book analysis and the take-home prep essay each, 30% from the final project, and the remaining 10% from class participation. I will keep track of attendance, and make note of contributions to class discussion and the presentation of our "artifacts."
Reading Schedule: (subject to modification
prior to week 2 of the term)
Please read the New York Times, at least Monday-Friday, looking for items that
relate to our course issues. You can pick up free copies around campus
(early in the day anyway), get a cheap subscription at the
University Bookstore, or read it online.
Place and Space
Weeks 1:
Read Tim Cresswell's "Defining Place" pp. 1-12 and William Sewell's
"The Concept(s) of Culture" on Blackboard and Caleb Crain's essay "Twilight of the Books" in the New Yorker
magazine, Dec. 24, 2007, available at
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain
(if you click "Print" you can see it without all the extraneous material).
Crain you can skim if you're impatient (figure out the irony in that as you
read...).
Week 2 Read Tim Cresswell's "Geography, Ideology, and Transgression: A Relational Ontology" and James Kneale's "Secondary Worlds: Reading novels as geographical research" and Doreen Massey's "A Global Sense of Place."
Landscapes
Week 3 Read Don Mitchell's "California: The Beautiful and the Damned",
Denis Cosgrove's "Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human
Landscapes"
Weeks 4: Read Benjamin Forest's "West Hollywood as Symbol: The Significance of Place in the Construction of Gay Identity"
Week 5 - Book Reviews due Tuesday Guest Lecturer Demian Hommell Read Tim Cresswell's "You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor"
Identity Spectacles
Week 6 Read Cohen's "An Absence of
Place" and "Winning While Losing" available
in Blackboard Test 1
Material and Non-material Spaces of Cultural and Consumption
Week 7 Read Mike Crang's "On Display: The poetics, politics and
interpretation of exhibitions", Mitchell's "From Values to Value and Back Again:
The Political Economy of Culture"
LOGGING CONFERENCE THIS WEEKEND!
Weeks 8 Read McNamara's "Publicising Private
Lives: Celebrities, Image Control, and the Reconfiguration of Public Space" scan (read as best you can)
the article by Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception" which can be found online at
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.htm
Take Home Essay due Thursday
Week 9 Read Bobrow-Strain's "White Bread Bio-politics: Purity, Health, and the Triumph of Industrial Baking" and Collins' "Kimchi and Coffee: Globalisation, Transnationalism and Familiarity in Culinary Consumption"
Week 10: Monday - topic presentations, Wednesday Where are we going with Cultural Geography?
Final Projects Due Monday of Exam week, Geography Department Office, 5:00 pm