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GPHY 365 - Geography, Development, and Environment in the Third World
Course Coordinator
Office
Contact Time
Format
Class Assessment
Dr. Beverley Mullings
Email: [email protected]
D302 Macintosh-Corry Hall
Two 1.5 hour lectures per week
Phone: 533-6000 xtn 78829
Lectures, discussions, and debates based on key texts, case studies and videos
In-class writing assignment
20%
Week 3
Three page paper proposal
15%
Week 6
Take home writing assignment
20%
Week 9
Course Essay Due
30%
Week 12
Attendance, Group Work
and Participation
15%
COURSE OVERVIEW
This course examines the evolution of discourses of development and their relationship to western (Anglo-American) notions of
progress and modernity. Taking a political economy approach we will examine the economic and social conditions under which
wealth and value are created within the capitalist world economy and the environmental outcomes of those processes in places
considered to be part of the ‘third world’. Throughout the course we will pay particular attention to the role that current neoliberal
development theories and practices are playing in the changing human-environmental interactions in the global South. By examining
the emerging patterns of uneven development in the cultural and physical landscapes of the third world, we will take the opportunity
to re-examine deeply held concepts such as progress, civility and modernity that continue to govern how, and what, we value as
humans. Drawing on case studies we will examine the impacts of contemporary policies on development issues such as poverty, food
security, climate change, as well as income, race and gender inequalities. In each case we will examine the relationship between the
contemporary functioning of the world capitalist system, local patterns of uneven development and human-environmental
interactions.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
 To provide a critical understanding of key concepts related to capitalism, modernity, development, justice and environment in the
global South
 To examine the role of neoliberalism (the mobilization of state power in the extension of market rule) in creating and sustaining
inequalities
 To provide a set of analytical skills to evaluate the social, economic and political relationships that structure these concepts
 To explore the ways that ’common sense’ /’taken for granted‘ understandings of development and environment shape how the
assets and rights of particular groups are regarded, articulated and mobilized
COURSE TOPICS
Development as progress and the role of Nature; Locating the ‘3rd ‘ world; Modernization theories; Dependency theories;
Neoliberalism, Accumulation by dispossession and uneven development; Climate change; Disaster capitalism; urbanization and
poverty; Ethnicity, Gender and Uneven Development, Human-Environmental Interactions; Social movements and agrarian Reform;
Food insecurity and crisis, Resource curse; Development beyond Neoliberalism; the Post-Washington Consensus.
SELECTED COURSE READINGS
Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development. New York Verso.
Klein, N. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York Simon & Schuster.
Mills, C. W. (2006). Modernity, Persons, and Subpersons. Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy. Joseph
Young and Jana Evans Braziel. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press. 211-51: 211-251.
Woods, Clyde 2006. "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues."
American Quarterly 1005-1018.
Watts, Michael 2004. “Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria”, Geopolitics 9(1): 50-80.