This doctoral seminar examines how infrastructural configurations mediate everyday life. Infrastructures incarnate disparate and deeply contested social imaginaries, becoming nodes of expression that are interwoven into quotidian acts of making meaning and political acts of exercising voice. This seminar will provide foundational tools to approach infrastructures ethnographically, as assemblages of material, technical, and representational spaces that both shape, and are shaped by, constellations of social relations. Through this seminar, we will critically engage the discursive and material dimensions of infrastructural change and the production of urban space, focusing on infrastructures as key sites of translation, reproduction, and resistance. The course will provide an overview of foundational tools for ethnographic inquiry and theoretical approaches to the production of space.
The readings for this course draw together perspectives from media theory, political economy, spatial theory, and environmental studies to investigate global infrastructures as key sites of cultural and political-economic production. We will apply a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, with deep dives into energy, transport, and communication infrastructures, past and present. Engaging contexts across West Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, we will interrogate the tensions of mobility and fixity that emerge through these global sites of circulation. Across these sites, we will focus on the formation of infrastructural publics, asking how the work of constructing, sustaining, and reconfiguring infrastructure intersects with questions of identity, collectivity, and belonging.
What does climate change mean for the future of life on this planet? How does climate change intersect with ongoing struggles for racial justice, gender equity, and decolonial liberation around the globe? In this class students will grapple with these and other questions linking social and environmental change through writing, reflection, and dialogue. The future of climate change is still being written; through this course students are invited to take part in rewriting climate futures by developing the tools to effectively communicate information about climate change and environmental justice.
Amidst rising fears of climate change, environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and shifting patterns of migration, it is easy to feel inundated with apocalyptic imagery of global conflict. But does resource scarcity inevitably cause war and civil strife? What does climate change mean for social justice? This class will challenge students to critically reflect on normative frameworks that link resource scarcity and conflict, to rethink questions of social and environmental change from an intersectional perspective. Drawing on examples from around the world, this course will introduce conceptual tools from political ecology and social theory. These tools will help students become more critical, engaging, and effective writers of both analytical and creative pieces that explore and synthesize different positions regarding resource management and conflict.
The goal of this class is to provide space and tools for the women of the Hope Workshop to practice speaking, gain confidence, expand their skill sets, and improve their ability to communicate in English with a wide range of conversation partners. Rather than focusing exclusively on mastery of specific vocabulary or grammar outcomes, the overarching objective of this class is to provide tools to support the women of the Hope Workshop in expanding their range of comfort in another language and their confidence in sharing stories and finding ways to connect and talk about their work. Each lesson is designed to build skills in conversation components and gradually combine these elements in working towards conversational ease and fluidity. Throughout all of the lessons, the focus will be on interactive, engaging, and fun activities to help cultivate the joy of language learning and sharing stories.
The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 5 states that countries should: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” by 2030. What is empowerment? How will we know when gender equality has been achieved? In this course we unpack the different and often competing definitions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘gender equality’ deployed in development, and consider the historical lineages of feminisms and development theory that led to women and girls as an important constituency. We examine the programs and policies associated with these lineages and consider how women’s and girls’ intersectional experiences of gender, shape the outcomes of the programs and policies designed to improve their lives. This course blends practice and theory, encouraging students to evaluate the material effects of diverse approaches to reducing gender inequality through case studies, writing, and readings in gender and development.
This course was featured in an article written by one of our students for Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: https://cals.cornell.edu/news/2023/02/bringing-gender-lens-development-studies
This course investigates social, political, and economic life in the age of the “Anthropocene”: the current geological era in which humans have irrevocably altered the earth’s biophysical systems. We analyze what political-economic dynamics have led to this, how climate change is known and predicted scientifically, and the impacts it has on politics, economies, environments, and societies across scales. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we investigate topics including climate change impacts on land, oceans, animals, and forests; climate migrants and political instability; (un)natural disasters such as fires, floods, and hurricanes; and sea level rise and cities. We also investigate at existing and potential political and economic responses to climate change ranging from international governance agreements and green markets to local climate justice movements.
COVID-19 forces geographers to reckon with social media not only as a potential subject of research, but as networked sites essential to answering a wide variety of research questions. In this interactive workshop, graduate students will learn to situate social media conceptually and politically and explore digital ethnography and mixed methods approaches to move from accidental to ethical online research. We will brainstorm collectively and write individually to make an action plan to incorporate social media into ongoing research projects.