ClassInfo

The formation of concepts and the construction of theories have always been vital aspects of how we grasp urban worlds. It is through such practices that we come to fathom who, what, where and why we are in these worlds. Theories provide cognitive maps for finding our way in a complex and changing environment. Experience leads us to construct, transform, and modify these cognitive maps continuously. This seminar offers a selective cut into urban geography scholarship, old and new, foreground three themes: production of space, marginality, and southern urbanism. While geographical political economy will form the seminar's center of gravity, our readings will include exemplars from other materialisms. Key monographs and writings in Geography and related fields that have been formative in theorizing the urban experience will be this seminar's raison d'être.

PROVINCIALIZING MARX

While Marx's corpus of writings remains formative and generative for left theory and praxis, the universality of its conceptualization of political economy, capital's deep structure, and capitalist dynamics has been questioned almost from its birth. For instance, an extraordinarily rich body of scholarship in the field of agrarian studies has long posed knotty questions about the 'nature' of capitalist development in at least three registers: ‘nature' as external world ('environment', 'ecology'), ‘nature' as internal world ('human nature', subjectivity) and ‘nature' as foundation or ontology (what 'is' the being of capital?). There is also a rich body of scholarship around the ‘social question'--the question of how to think the ‘rights' of marginal social groups: not just the proletariat, but landless laborers, lumpenproletariat, peasants, Dalits, blacks, and other minorities. These groups have at best a tenuous claim to the two sets of rights that constitute liberal democracies--the egotistical "rights of man" grounded in private property, and the "rights of citizen" they formally possess. And the marked differences in the tenuous relations of these various groups with the two sets of rights raises difficult questions about Marx's conceptions about the sociality of capital, or of resistance to it.

The agrarian question and the social question are symptomatic of fundamental puzzles about how we might theorize the dynamics of capitalist development, capital's articulations with and parasitic existence on other logics, the 'outsides' and 'limits' to capital, capital in the ‘peripheries' (as contrasted to the ‘core'), and the political forms (progressive and conservative) that emerge in the interplay with capital's solvent forces.

This seminar asks how tarrying with "the agrarian question" and with "the social question" puts Marx and Marxist political economy in 'crisis', and what this ‘crisis' demands from theory. After this crisis, how should we think about the geographies and temporalities -- indeed, the constitution -- of 'capital' (and its dialectical other, 'labor')?

What is knowledge for? What does it do? Who can make it? How can (and should) it be made? Who decides what should be known? What is the role of knowledge in bringing about emancipatory change?

Many are drawn to a life of scholarship by a sense that knowledge has the potential to contribute to or bring about change, yet the precise relationship between knowledge production projects, social change, and normative politics often remains underexplored in scholarly inquiry. This course will provide students with an opportunity to engage with some of the most influential and creative thinkers who have sought to dwell with, problematize, and theorize the relationship between politics and knowledge. In conversation with the the tradition of feminist epistemology, we will consider how asking and answering questions about difference, nature, and the economy in particular has been informed by and productive of the social world, and what that means for associated political possibilities of various ways of knowing. The course operates neither as a survey course, nor as a deep engagement with one specific tradition, but rather attempts to provide students with exposure to a range of critiques and practices of alternative epistemologies that they might further explore according to their interests to make a robust argument for the epistemological foundations of their own research approaches. The reading list (subject to minor changes) is made up of foundational texts as well as more recent experimental texts and includes selections from:

Cosmopolitics I by Isabelle Stengers

We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour

Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval

Citizens, Experts and the Environment by Frank Fischer

Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority and Privilege by Naomi Scheman

Vibrant Matter: The political ecology of things by Jane Bennett

Realism and Social Science by Andrew Sayer

Ecological Thinking by Lorraine Code

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by Donna Haraway

The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) by JK Gibson-Graham

Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua

Hot Spotter's Report by Shiloh Krupar

Muddying the Waters by Richa Nagar

The Archeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault

Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad