Unit information: Advanced Topics in Critical Political Economy in 2018/19

Unit name	Advanced Topics in Critical Political Economy
Unit code	GEOG30009
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12)
Unit director	. Fannin
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	1) GEOG25110 Philosophy, Social Theory and Geography
Co-requisites	Available to year-three Geography and year- four Geography with Study Aboard/Continental Europe students only.
School/department	School of Geographical Sciences
Faculty	Faculty of Science

Description including Unit Aims

This final-year unit will focus on advanced topics in human geography. It will introduce and review key theoretical and empirical research in political, economic, and cultural geography. The unit will develop students’ ability to draw on relevant conceptual vocabularies in feminist, Marxist, post-structural, and post-colonial thinking in both geography and other social science disciplines, including: gender, race, labour, capital, accumulation, production, reproduction, dispossession, colonialism, nature, and value. Lecture topics will focus in depth on concepts central to theorising contemporary political and economic formations, such as ‘biocapital’, with an emphasis on geographies of transnational or global capital, colonial accumulation, privatisation, technologies of dispossession, enclosure, resistance, representation, and cultural economies of contemporary embodiment.

The unit aims to introduce students to contemporary theoretical and empirical debates in political economic geography. The unit also aims to help students develop the ability to pose purposeful questions within these debates and to cultivate intellectual curiosity about their socio-political, economic, and technological contexts. It draws on research-orientated case studies that critically detail the social processes, structures, and causes underlying capitalist development.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, students will be able:

1. To (further) develop an awareness of the benefits of different theoretical approaches to the study of political-economic processes
2. To (further) develop an awareness of relevant conceptual and empirical research in cognate disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, political theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.
3. To comprehend key concepts in the historical and geographical study of political-economic processes such as value, labour, capital, biopolitics, neoliberalism, colonialism, accumulation, enclosure, corporeality, materiality.
4. To describe different ways of thinking about analytical categories in geographical research.

Links between learning outcomes and methods of assessment:

• The assessments will test your awareness of academic scholarship on the critical geographies of political economy and will require you to be conversant with key themes, concepts and case studies covered in lectures, readings and discussions.
• The assessments will require you to use your written communication, critical reasoning, and organisational skills to demonstrate the relationship between concepts/theories and empirical material, and to make effective use of wider literatures to support your arguments.

Teaching Information

Teaching will consist primarily of a 1-hour lecture, followed by a 1-hour seminar.

Assessment Information

Two essays: Research essay (40%) + Final essay (60%)

Research essay (40%) – 1500 words (due at midpoint of teaching block)

Final essay (60%) – 2500 words (due towards the end of the teaching block).

Both essays test all of the ILOs.

Reading and References

Essential:

Gibson-Graham, J-K. (2006) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press

Titmuss, Richard. 1970. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London: Allen & Unwin.

Waldby, C. and Mitchell, R. (2006) Tissue Economies: Blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Recommended:

Dickenson, Donna. 2007. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rajan, Kaushik S. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Vora, K. 2015. Life support: Biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Further Reading:

Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neo-Liberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Norton Library.

Rose N 2006 The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Schiebinger, Londa L. 2004. Plants and empire: colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.