GEOG30Y7: The city of the Middle East: culture, politics and poetics

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• To offer an examination of the core debates that relate to cities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
• To enable students to develop critical area-specific knowledge around the cities of MENA
• To equip students to explore and broaden their knowledge of creative practices the shape urban living in the Middle East.
• To develop a critical, anti-colonial, approach to understanding the co-constitution of everyday urban living and historical and structural process the shape the city of the region.

• Cities of the Middle East are enigmatic. They are the subject of orientalist imaginaries and futuristic fantasies. They appear as the targets of violence and, simultaneously, the agents of revolts. Amongst these competing tendencies it is easy to either exceptionalise Middle Eastern cities, or to subsume their urban transformations under generic trends. This module explores the intersection of space, power, and culture in the cities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by paying attention to knowledge and creative practice in, from, and on the region.
• The module enables students to develop critical area-specific knowledge and to engage with core debates that relate to cities of the Middle East and North Africa (such as the meta-geography of the Middle East, the Islamic City, or the Non-Western City). It provides an overview of historical, structural and contextual dynamics that continue to shape the cities of MENA on one hand (such as colonialism, orientalism, and capitalism). On the other hand, it invites students to explore and broaden their knowledge of urban creative practices that shape urban living in the region. These practises are conceptualised broadly in this module. They may include film, fiction, poetry, speculative work, political mobilisation, architectural experimentations and artwork emerging from MENA and that takes the city as its focus.
• Focusing on the city, the module mobilises multi-disciplinary perspectives: architecture, anthropology, history, politics, the humanities as well as urban and cultural geography. It is taught through a series of lectures, a film showing, an essay planning workshop and seminars. The seminars will be dedicated to a deep engagement with a range of selected case studies.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• On successful completion of the module students will be able to:
• Reflect critically on the complexity of the meta-geography of the Middle East
• Demonstrate an advanced empirical and theoretical knowledge of the spatial, political, and cultural dynamics in the cities of Middle East and North Africa
• Demonstrate awareness of key academic and conceptual debates in relation to urban questions in the region

Subject-specific Skills:

• Critically and creatively reflect on conceptual and theoretical frameworks used to understand cities of the Middle East and North Africa.
• Engage confidently with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on cities that emerges from and on the region
• Critically identify and evaluate creative productions and practices that are ongoing within the cities of the region

Key Skills:

• Demonstrate an ability to critically engage a range of academic and non-academic resources including creative and cultural production
• Demonstrate effective written communication, peer review and support skills
• Demonstrate a capacity to reflect critically and contextually on current political issues using academic concepts

• Lectures, Seminars, Workshops, Film viewings, summative essay.

The formative assessment is a 1-page essay plan (excluding bibliography) presented in the workshop. Students will expect to give and receive peer feedback on the essay plans, further feedback on the plan will be given by the module leader. Constructive peer-feedback is centred as assessment support. Pedagogical research shows that giving feedback is one of the key ways to improve writing and critical thinking skills.

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