Geography 6742  Seminar in Cultural Geography

Spring Semester, 2010

Wednesdays 9:00 – 11:50  Guggenheim 201e

http://www.colorado.edu/geography/class_homepages/geog_6742_s10/

 

Oakes details

Email: toakes@colorado.edu

Web page: http://spot.colorado.edu/~toakes/

Phone: 3/ 492 8310

Office: Guggenheim 108

Office hours:  Tuesdays 11-2

 

This seminar offers an overview to the field of cultural geography, examines debates and developments concerning the two key concepts of place and landscape, and explores in greater detail my own area of research interest in cultural economy and related topics of cultural governance, development, themed landscapes and place-branding.  The course recognizes from the outset that cultural geography remains notoriously difficult to define or characterize in any coherent way.  Cultural geography is treated here as a loose assemblage of conceptions, methods, theories, and politics reflecting an array of understandings of both culture and geography.  Generally, my approach is to consider two dominant modes of inquiry in cultural geography, one broadly materialist with an orientation toward social constructivism, and the other broadly humanist with an orientation toward phenomenology, existentialism, and being.  The former orientation emphasizes questions of epistemology while the latter emphasizes questions of ontology.  While I do not regard these as mutually exclusive frameworks for examining human and social phenomena, they have formed the dominant centers of gravity around which critical debates within the field have developed.

 

Readings

We will read one book in its entirety:

  • Robert Foster, Coca Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

 

All other readings are available online, either via Norlin e-reserve (indicated by an asterisk and found at http://libraries.colorado.edu/search/p) or via Chinook http://libraries.colorado.edu.  In addition to your IdentiKey, you will also need to enter a course password to retrieve readings from Norlin e-reserve.  The course password is “culture”.

 

Requirements

Being there:  The expectation of regular attendance, preparation for and complete participation in all meetings goes without saying.  This doesn’t mean you have to be a blabbermouth.  It is everyone’s responsibility to ensure a meeting environment in which all voices are encouraged, heard, and respected.

Facilitating:  Everyone is expected to facilitate the discussion for one meeting (see below).

Writing:  The primary product of the seminar is your research essay, roughly 8,000 words.  It is expected that this paper will eventually be submitted to a journal of your choice for publication consideration.  Extended abstracts and bibliographies for the paper will be due 3/17.  Final papers will be due 4/28.  I will be scheduling mandatory meetings during early March in which we will discuss your paper topic, resources, and strategies for publication.

            In addition to the research paper, you will also have a brief ‘mid-term’ exam of sorts.  This will be a single essay question written in the style of a comprehensive exam question you might expect in the field of cultural geography.  This will occur during the week of 3/17 (but not during class).

 

Misguiding

Since cultural geography is meant to be a practice as much as a topic of contemplation, there will be a brief assignment involving some “fieldwork” of sorts.  The specific assignment will be discussed on 1/13.  It will involve a brief, but very unconventional, written product and presentation, due 3/31.

 

Facilitating

Facilitating involves three separate responsibilities.  1) Write a brief discussion paper (see below) on the week’s readings, to be circulated no later than 3:00 PM on the Monday prior to class.  2) Facilitate discussion during the meeting.  3) Write a brief follow-up to be circulated no later than 6:00 PM on the Friday following class.

 

Discussion papers

Your discussion paper should do several things:

  • Offer an interpretation of the arguments presented in the readings.  Note that an interpretation is not the same as a summary.  Do not simply paraphrase and restate the key points.  Instead, offer your own understanding of the arguments, why they are (or are not) significant, and what their strengths and/or weaknesses may be.  This will necessarily be a selective rather than comprehensive interpretation of the readings.  Probably the easiest way to offer an interpretation of the readings is to develop an argument and/or a position in relation to the readings.
  • Relate the readings to other work.  Try and situate the readings in a broader scholarly conversation.
  • Offer some questions about the readings and their overall theme or topic for discussion and provocation.

 

Grades

Facilitating:                             15%

Misguiding                              25%

Writing:

Comp Question           15%

Research Paper            45%

 

Additional Resources

The following collections of essays on Cultural Geography may be helpful in your facilitation assignments.

 

Anderson, Jon. Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (London & New York: Routledge, 2009).

Anderson, Kay and Fay Gale (eds.) Inventing Places; studies in cultural geography (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992).

Anderson, Kay, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.). Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003).

Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift (eds.). The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Anheier, Helmut and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds.). The Cultural Economy (London: Sage, 2008).

Atkinson, David, Peter Jackson, David Sibley, and Neil Washbourne (eds.). Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005).

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2000).

Blunt, Alison, et al. (eds.). Cultural Geography in Practice (London: Arnold, 2003).

Crang, Mike. Cultural Geography (London and New York: Routledge).

Duncan, James, Nuala Johnson, and Richard Schein (eds.). A Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Edensor, Tim, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington, & Norma Rantisi (eds.). Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy (London & New York: Routledge, 2009).

Foote, Kenneth., Peter Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and Jonathan Smith (eds.). Re-Reading Cultural Geography. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).

Hubbard, Phil, Rob Kitchen and Gill Valentine (eds.). Key Thinkers on Space and Place (London: Sage, 2004).

Kitchen, Rob (ed.). Mapping Worlds: International Perspectives on Social and Cultural Geography (London & New York: Routledge, 2009).

Mikesell, Marvin and Philip Wagner (eds.). Readings in Cultural Geography. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Oakes, Timothy and Patricia Price (eds.). The Cultural Geography Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

Shurmer-Smith, Pamela (ed.). Doing Cultural Geography (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).

Thrift, Nigel and Sarah Whatmore (eds.). Cultural Geography: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences.  Volumes 1 & 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

 

Schedule of topics and readings

 

DEFINING THE FIELD

1/13     Overview – A crisis of representation in cultural geography?

 

1/20     The Sauerian Legacy

*C. Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape” from: University of California Publications in Geography, 2:2 (1925), 19 – 54.

*C. Sauer, selections from The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. v-viii, 1-69, 196-217, 290-295.

*W. Zelinsky, “Process,” Chapter 3 from: The Cultural Geography of the United States (1973), pp. 67-108.

               

1/27     The Cultural Turn

*C. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” pp. 3-30 in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

J. Duncan, “The superorganic in American cultural geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79:2 (1980): 181-198.

*D. Cosgrove & P. Jackson, “New directions in cultural geography,” Area 19:2 (1987): 95-101.

*S. Hall, “The centrality of culture: notes on the cultural revolutions of our time," in Media and Cultural Regulation, ed. K. Thompson (London: Sage, 1997): 207-238.

               

2/3       Cultural Materialism

*A. Gramsci, “The intellectuals,” and “On education,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith (New York: International, 1972), pp. 3-43.

*E.P. Thompson, “The rituals of mutuality” and “Myriads of eternity” from The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), pp. 418-429 and 444-447.

*R. Williams, “Culture,” and selections from “Cultural Theory” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 11-20 and 75-135.

 

2/10     Postculture?

D. Mitchell, “There's no such thing as culture:  towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20 (1995): 102-116.

J. Duncan, & Nancy Duncan. “Culture unbound.” Environment and Planning A 36 (2004), 391-403.

A. Latham, “Research, performance, and doing human geography: some reflections on the diary-photograph, diary-interview method,” Environment and Planning A 35 (2003): 1993-2017.

H. Lorimer, “Cultural geography: the busyness of being 'more-than-representational'. Progress in Human Geography 29:1 (2005), 83-94.

               

PLACE AND LANDSCAPE

2/17     The politics of place

*J. Agnew, selections from Place and Politics: the geographical mediation of state and society (1987), pp. 25-107.

*D. Harvey, “From space to place and back again,” in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 291-326.

*D. Massey, “A global sense of place,” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 146-156.

J. May, “Globalization and the politics of place:  place and identity in an inner London neighborhood.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21:1 (1996), pp. 194-215.

 

2/24     Phenomenologies of Place

*E. Casey, “How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: a philosopical prolegomena,” in S. Feld and K. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research), pp. 13-52.

*J.E. Malpas, selections from Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1-43.

               

3/3       Landscape – Vernacular to Semiotic

*J.B. Jackson, “The Word Itself,” in J.B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 3-8.

*J.B. Jackson, “A Pair of Ideal Landscapes,” in J.B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 11-55.

*D. Cosgrove, selections from Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. xi-68.

*G. Rose, “Looking at landscape: the uneasy pleasures of power, in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 86-112.

 

3/10     Landscape – Substantive

*D. Mitchell, “Introduction and Chapters 1, 7 and 8 from The Lie of the Land (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 1-35 and 156-197.

K. Olwig, “Recovering the substantive nature of landscape,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1996, 86(4): 630 – 653.

 

3/17     Misguide Presentations

            Paper Abstracts and Bibliographies Due

 

CULTURE AS RESOURCE

3/31     Cultural Economy – Definitions and Approaches

            Misguides Due

*A. Amin and N. Thrift, “Introduction,” in The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. x-xxx.

*S. Cunningham, J. Banks, and J. Potts, “Cultural economy: the shape of the field,” in The Cultural Economy, eds. H. Anheier and Y. Raj Isar (London: Sage, 2008), pp. 15-26.

*A. Pratt, “Locating the cultural economy,” in The Cultural Economy, eds., H. Anheier and Y. Raj Isar (London: Sage, 2008), pp. 42-51.

P. Jackson, “Commercial cultures: transcending the cultural and the economic” Progress in Human Geography 26:1 (2002), 3-18.

 

4/7       Cultural Economy – Globalization, Localization and the Politics of Consumption

R. Foster, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

 

4/14     Leisure and Culture as Technologies of Government

*C. Rojek, selections from Decentering Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 1-27, 36-103.

C. Barnett, “Culture, geography, and the arts of government.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001): 7-24.

           

4/21     Leisure Culture and Consumption in China

J. Farquhar, “The park pass: peopling and civilizing a new old Beijing,” Public Culture 21:3 (2009): 551-576.

P. Festa, “Mahjong politics in contemporary China: civility, Chineseness, and mass culture,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14:1 (2006): 7-36.

P. Ngai, “Subsumption or consumption?  The phantom of consumer revolution in ‘globalizing China,’” Cultural Anthropology 18:4 (2003): 469-492.

L. Tomba, “Of quality, harmony, and community: civilization and the middle class in urban China,” positions: east asia cultures critique 17:3 (2009), pp. 591-616.

 

4/28     Research Presentations

            Research Papers Due