GEOG30S7: CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS: DIFFERENCE, AFFECT AND POWER

• Any Level 2 BA Geography module

• None

• None

• To introduce advanced conceptual debates in the academic field of critical geopolitics.
• To develop an understanding of geopolitics in relation to power, scale, and affect.
• To encourage engagement with contemporary geopolitical issues through critical lenses.
• To critically reflect upon how geopolitics affects the lives of us all. To engage with key academic debates in critical, feminist, and affective geopolitics and, in doing so, to enhance informed critical thinking and discussion skills.

• This module investigates geopolitics from a critical perspective. We begin with a return to the classical role of geopolitics in great power politics. Engaging with historical and contemporary primary geopolitical texts (e.g. articles, speeches, policy statements), students develop critical analytical skills that hone their understanding of geopolitics at the nexus of knowledge and power. Beyond classical geopolitics, the second block of lectures and workshops introduces the rescaling of geopolitics. Students will come to understand geopolitics as not only a question of global representations, but as lived and made at intimate and everyday scales in which questions of difference come to the fore. In the third section of the module, students will tackle the question of the relationship between affect and geopolitics. Key concepts in this section will be affect, the unconscious, and ideology. Lectures and workshops will explore what role feelings play in war and its aftermath and what sorts of collective feelings are at work in contemporary politics.
• Throughout the module, concepts and arguments will be demonstrated (in lectures, readings, and the film) through case studies, which may include:
• 9/11 and the lead up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq
• International anxiety and the war in Syria
• Love under occupation in Palestine
• Melancholic politics in South Korea
• Trauma and global refugee administration
• Right-wing populism at global scale

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Advanced knowledge and understanding of critical geopolitics as a topic of geographical study.
• Understanding of key concepts that can be used for analysing geopolitics across scale.
• Awareness of central debates about reason and unreason (e.g. affect, unconscious, irrationality) in relation to geopolitics and political outcomes.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Critically evaluate the geopolitical content of texts, arguments, media, and practices.
• Apply key concepts in critical geopolitics (including feminist, subaltern, and affective geopolitics) to contemporary problems and issues.
• Work across scales, discourses, and practices to recognise and analyse how geopolitics is constituted as a field of power and knowledge.

Key Skills:

• Demonstrate clear academic written communication skills.
• Demonstrate the ability to critically reflect upon the relations between academic and non-academic sources of knowledge and forms of debate.
• Demonstrate the ability to synthesise information and to relate academic concepts to contemporary issues and problems.

• Lectures will introduce students to the main module themes of 1) geopolitics as power/knowledge, 2) rescaling geopolitics and difference, and 3) affective (geo)politics. Each lecture will be paired with required readings as well as supplemented by reading lists for further study.
• Film: One film showing with an hour for discussion will provide an opportunity for students to exercise critical analytical skills in conversation with the each other and the module convenor.
• Workshops will offer students a chance to discuss module themes in a range of formats, including discussions, mental mapping, and critical readings. The workshops will involve independent and group work, thus enhancing student skills development in the areas of collaboration and presentation of ideas. Workshops will also provide the opportunity for formative feedback as students develop key skills.
• Summative assessment, in the form of a critical essay, will provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate conceptual understanding, reading, critical thought, originality, and application.

Formative assessment will take place within the workshops, each of which will include an exercise in which students are asked to deploy analytical tools of critical geopolitics. Students will receive feedback from the module convenor and their peers in the workshop setting.

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