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
Lillis 175
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?
Method:
We will work from a primary text, Blunt et al.'s Cultural Geography in Practice. 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 the world around us: landscapes, buildings, magazines, literature, music, 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 for
writing a final paper of 10-15 (grads 15-20) pages in length. Undergraduates will have two mid-term exams, graduate
students one mid-term exam, there will be no final exam.
Grading:
Undergraduates will be accorded 25% of the final grade from each of the two exams, 35% from the final paper, and the remaining 15% from class participation. I will keep track of attendance, and make note of contributions to class discussion and the presentation of our "artifacts." Graduate students will get 30% of their grade from the mid-term, 50% from the final paper, and the remaining 20% from class contribution.
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 get a cheap subscription at the
University Bookstore, or read it online.
Weeks 1: Read 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) and Chapter 15 "Cultural geographies of architecture and place-making" in our text.
Week 2 Read Chapters 9 "Selling America" and 17 "Deep listening" in our text and 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
Week 3 Read Chapters 12 "Cinematic cities" and 10 "Photographs from the edge of empire" in our text and "An Absence of Place" available as a pdf in Blackboard
Weeks 4: Read Chapters 3 "Reading novels as geographical research" and 2 "Geographies of homelessness in the British newspaper press" in our text.
Week 5 Read Chapter 1 "Using archival research to interpret
state formation" in our text, Test 1
Week 6 Read Chapters 5 "Life stories in text and person" and 14 "Public art in urban regeneration" in our text
Week 7 Read Chapter 16 "The poetics, politics and interpretation of exhibitions" in our text
Weeks 8 Test 2 due Wednesday week 8 Read Chapters 6 "Critical ethnographies of migration in Indonesia"
Week 9 Read 11 "Cartography and the politics of representation" in our text
Week 10: Monday - topic presentations, Wednesday Where are we going with Cultural Geography?
Final Papers Due Monday of Exam week, Geography Department Office, 5:00 pm