National PhD Course in Political Geography
Spring 2017, 7.5 ECTS
Course organizers:
Dr. David Jansson, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University
([email protected])
Dr. Madeleine Eriksson, Department of Geography and Economic History, Umeå University
([email protected])
Dr. Mekonnen Tesfahuney, Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad
University ([email protected])
Course description:
The subdiscipline of political geography has had a fascinating journey. Present at the very
beginning of the founding of human geography as an academic discipline in the late 1800s,
political geography suffered several decades of intellectual exile in the mid-1900s as a result of its
connections, through the field of geopolitics, to theories that supported both Nazi Germany’s
aggressions and the more enduring Cold War conflict. But since the 1980s political geography has
experienced a revival, and it is now an exciting and vibrant field of study for geographers interested
in both theoretical innovations and “real-world” relevance.
This course provides an introduction to a range of contemporary debates in political geography.
Students will receive an overview of the ways in which political geographers, broadly defined,
understand events at various scales, and of the theoretical and methodological approaches that have
been brought to bear on the problems being studied. The course considers the “political” of
political geography to relate not solely to the actions of states (and of those contesting the actions
of states), but to refer more broadly to struggles over power at various scales.
The course will consist primarily of seminars, where the emphasis will be on student participation.
Examination will occur by a final paper of approximately 5000 words. The language of instruction
is English.
TO APPLY:
Send an email to David Jansson ([email protected]) confirming your interest in taking
the course and including an explanation of how the course might relate to your research interests.
Seats in the course are limited, so we cannot guarantee everyone admission. Applications will be
accepted up until 27 January 2017, and the organizers will inform all applicants whether or not they
are admitted to the course shortly after this deadline.
Preliminary list of instructors (subject to change):
David Jansson, Uppsala University
Madeleine Eriksson, Umeå University
Mekonnen Tesfahuney, Karlstad University
Don Mitchell, Uppsala University
Richard Ek, Lund University
Joanne Sharp, University of Glasgow
PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE:
Module 1: 23-24 February 2017, Uppsala University
Theme: Theory in Political Geography
23 February:
10.00 – 12.30: Seminar 1
14.00 – 16.30: Seminar 2
24 February:
9.30 – 12.00: Seminar 3
13.15 – 14.30: Public lecture
15.00 – 16.30: Dissertation workshop
Module 2: 23-24 March 2017, Umeå University
Theme: The Politics of Place
6 April:
10.00 – 12.30: Seminar 4
14.00 – 16.30: Seminar 5
7 April:
9.30 – 12.00: Seminar 6
13.15 – 14.30: Public lecture
15.00 – 16.30: Dissertation workshop
Module 3: 22-23 May 2017, Karlstad University
Theme: Geopolitics and Security
22 May:
10.00 – 12.30: Seminar 7
14.00 – 16.30: Seminar 8
26 May:
9.30 – 12.00: Seminar 9
13.15 – 14.30: Public lecture
15.00 – 16.30: Dissertation workshop
Subjects and literature:
The specific seminar topics will be announced at a later date. The themes of the three modules of
the previous course in 2014 were: Nationalism and geopolitics, Political geography and theory, and
Migration, security and public space. The topics of the individual seminars were: Nationalism;
Popular geopolitics 2.0; Spatial selves and Others; Territory; The politics and publics of democratic
space; Articulations of sovereignty, government and spaces of exception; Scale; Political
geographies of attention and decision-making; European Capital of Culture/living with difference;
Migrant spaces; and Activism and the politics of public space.
The literature for this course will be announced later. The literature assigned for the previous
edition of the course included the following readings:
Anderson, K. J. 1987. The idea of Chinatown: The power of place and institutional practice in the making of a racial
category. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77(4): 580-598.
Antonsich, M. 2009. On territory, the nation-state and the crisis of the hyphen. Progress in Human Geography 33:
789–806.
Barnett, C. 2004. Deconstructing radical democracy: articulation, representation, and being-with-others. Political
Geography 23: 503-528.
Crogan, P. and Kinsley, S. 2012. Paying attention: Toward a critique of the attention economy. Culture Machine 13: 129.
Dittmer, J. and Gray, N. 2010. Popular Geopolitics 2.0: Towards new methodologies of the everyday. Geography
Compass 4(11): 1664–1677.
Eriksson, M. 2010. “People in Stockholm are smarter than countryside folks”: Reproducing urban and rural imaginaries
in film and life. Journal of Rural Studies 26: 95-104
Fall, J. J. 2010. Artificial states? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders. Political Geography 29(3):
140-147.
Faria, C. 2014. Styling the nation: fear and desire in the South Sudanese beauty trade. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 39(2): 318–330.
Gill, N., Johnstone, P. and Williams, A. 2012. Towards a geography of tolerance: post-politics and political forms of
toleration. Political Geography 31(8): 509-518.
Hannah, M. G. 2013. Attention and the phenomenological politics of landscape. Geografiska Annaler: Series B,
Human Geography 95(3): 235-250.
Harvey D. 2008. The right to the city. New Left Review 53.
Herb, G. H. 2004. Double vision: Territorial strategies in the construction of national identities in Germany, 1949–
1979. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(1): 140-164.
Jansson, D. 2010. Racialization and “Southern” identities of resistance: A psychogeography of internal orientalism in
the U.S. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(1): 202-221.
Jones, R., Pykett, J. and Whitehead, M. 2011. Governing temptation: Changing behaviour in an age of libertarian
paternalism. Progress in Human Geography 35(4): 483-501.
Kingsbury, P. 2011. The world cup and the national thing on commercial drive, Vancouver. Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space, 29(4): 716-737.
Laurier E., Philo C. 2006. Cold shoulders and napkins handed: gestures of responsibility. Transactions of the institute
of British Geographers 31(2): 193
Marston, S. A., Jones, J. P. III and Woodward, K. 2005. Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers NS 30: 416-432.
Mitchell, D. 1995. 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(1): 102-116.
Moore, A. 2008. Rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice. Progress in Human Geography
32(2): 203-225.
Mostafanezhad, M. 2014. Volunteer tourism and the popular humanitarian gaze. Geoforum 54: 111-118.
Mountz, A. 2011. Where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between states. Gender, Place,
and Culture 18(3): 381-399.
Pinkerton, A. and Benwell, M. 2014. Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute:
Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft. Political Geography 38(1): 12-22.
Purcell, M. 2006. Urban democracy and the local trap. Urban Studies 43(11): 1921-1941.
Shaw, I. and Sharp, J. 2013. Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics. Social & Cultural
Geography 14(3): 341-359.
Sibley, D. 1998. The problematic nature of exclusion. Geoforum 29(2): 119-121.
Springer, S. 2014. Human geography without hierarchy. Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 402-419.
Staeheli, L.A., Mitchell, D. and Nagel, C.R. 2009. Making publics: immigrants, regimes of publicity and entry to ‘the
public’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 633-648.
Sundberg, J. 2013. Prayer and promise along the migrant trail. Geographical Review 103(2): 230- 233.
Valentine, G. 2008. Living with difference: reflections on the geographies of encounter. Progress in Human
Geography 32(3): 323-337.
Wacquant, W., Slater, T., and Borges Pereira, V. 2014. Territorial stigmatization in action. Environment and Planning
A 46: 1270-1280.