Module GEOG2581: POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Department: Geography

GEOG2581: POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Pre-requisites

Corequisites

Excluded Combinations

Aims

• To introduce students to the field of academic political geography.
• Promote an appreciation of the relationship between politics and geography.
• Develop understandings of the politics of space - and the spaces of politics.

Content

• (I) Politics, Geography and Political Geography: History of the Discipline and Critical Approaches: Conceptualising the Political.
• Geographies, "real" and imagined.
• Emergence of political geography as an academic discipline.
• Critical perspectives on political geography and geopolitics.
• (ii) Power, Politics and Space: Understanding Key Concepts: Power.
• Territory/Territoriality.
• Space and Spatiality.
• (iii) Mapping the World: Geopolitical Imaginations: The Cartographic Imagination.
• Imperial Geopolitics.
• Cold War Geopolitics.
• Geopolitics of the New World Order.
• (iv) State and Nation: Unpacking the State.
• Geographies of Citizenship.
• Nations and nationalism.
• Imagined communities and invented pasts.
• (v) Political Geography Beyond the State: Urban political geographies.
• Environmental geopolitics.
• "Anti-geopolitics": social movements and alternative political geographies.

Learning Outcomes

• Students are expected to be able to: Trace the emergence and evolution of academic political geography.
• Understand key political geographic concepts such as space, territory and power.
• Show an appreciation of the ways in which the political world is constituted through geographical representations.

• Think critically about the texts of academic and popular geopolitics.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• The lectures will introduce students to the history and evolution of the sub-discipline, and present key concepts and theories.
• Small group discussion in tutorials will allow students to work through theoretical understandings introduced in lectures and apply such understandings to real-world examples.
• Examination and coursework will test critical understanding of concepts and critical thinking.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment

In line with Board of Studies policy for all Level 2 optional modules, formative assessment is provided through formative feedback on summative coursework.