{"id":23,"date":"2013-08-22T22:24:20","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T22:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wordpress\/?page_id=23"},"modified":"2013-12-05T05:12:53","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T05:12:53","slug":"courses2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/courses2\/","title":{"rendered":"Courses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Geog 230: Geographies of Global Inequality<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the most pressing challenges facing us at the beginning of the 21st century is the world\u2019s ability to address the increasing global inequalities. Extremes of wealth and poverty across the globe (in the global South and the North) underlie conditions of health and illness, educational opportunity and illiteracy, land ownership and forced migrations, employment protections or unregulated \u2018flexible\u2019 work. The World Bank\u2019s 2000 report states that: \u201c\u20262.8 Billion people \u2013 almost half the world\u2019s population \u2013 live on less than $2\/day\u201d and that: \u201c\u2026 the average income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times the average income in the poorest 20 \u2013 a gap that has doubled in the last 20 years\u201d. The Human Development Report (1999) notes that: \u201cThe fifth of the world\u2019s people living in high income countries has 86% of the world gross domestic product; 82% of export markets; 74% of world telephone lines; the bottom fifth in the poorest countries has about 1% of each\u201d. According to the Multinational Monitor in 2003 (7\/1\/2003), \u201c[T]he richest 10 percent of the world’s population’s income is roughly 117 times higher than the poorest 10 percent, according to calculations performed by economists at the Economics Policy Institute (data from the International Monetary Fund). This is a huge jump from the ratio in 1980, when the income of the richest 10 percent was about 79 times higher than the poorest 10 percent\u201d. Paul Krugman (2002) notes that in the United States the 13,000 richest families have as much income as the 20 million poorest. This course examines the paradox of expanding and deepening levels of inequality after fifty years of \u2018development\u2019 in the post-war era.<\/p>\n

Links to<\/em>: Most recent\u00a0Course Syllabus<\/a><\/p>\n

Geog 331: Global Poverty and Care<\/strong>
\nThis course explores causes and patterns of global poverty and links this with the urgent need for care and care ethics in our lives and in society broadly. We will begin with a critical approach to global poverty studies, focusing on the production of inequality across the globe (including the rich countries). We will look at how shifts in contemporary society suggest an urgent need for care (in many senses). Specifically, we will examine the context for care including: i) the extension of market relations into almost everything (health care, education, environmental protection, elder-care etc.; ii) the systematic devaluation of care-work; iii) pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.); and iv) withdrawal of state supports in many crucial arenas. We will focus particularly on how care work is devalued and globalized through international flows of care that contribute to global inequality. Through our analysis of global interconnections we will think about our responsibilities to care for those who are near and those who are across the globe. Students will learn about the possibilities and challenges of caring across distance (geographical and social) and about how to respectfully engage with people in different places.<\/p>\n

Most Recent Course Syllabus<\/a><\/p>\n

Geog 432: Geographies and politics of poverty and privilege<\/strong>
\nThis course introduces students to relational poverty knowledge and explores spatial, \u00a0material and discursive processes producing poverty and inequality.\u00a0 The course draws on the Relational Poverty Network project led by Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood.\u00a0 The course also investigates geographies of engagement and spaces through which poverty\/inequality become politicized.\u00a0 The course draws on feminist care ethics, postcolonial theory and research on contact and spaces of politics.\u00a0 Topics include: relational poverty knowledge; grounded neoliberalisms and inequality across the Americas; spatially varied forms of poverty governance; theories of encounter and radical contact; and forms of poverty politics.\u00a0 Students will be involved in grounded engagements with poverty and inequality both through service-learning and activities with actors involved in the production of poverty knowledge and politics from across the Americas. \u00a0Students will also learn about inclusive models of learning such as transformative pedagogy and South-North learning.\u00a0 A goal of this class is to move beyond critique towards ethically engaged action (Req: 331 is strongly encouraged).<\/p>\n

Geog 502: Writing for Publication<\/strong>
\nThis seminar guides graduate students as they write a publishable paper.\u00a0 It can easily be argued that no activity is as important to a graduate student\u2019s success as the completion of excellent research and the refereed publications that emerge from that work.\u00a0 However, the process of transforming ideas and research into publishable papers is not obvious, and it is quite difficult to maintain the motivation and discipline to carry through with a paper that deals with past research when the individual is deeply involved in a new intellectual project.\u00a0 This seminar is devoted to \u2018how\u2019 publication is done; looking at the skill and commitment needed to successfully publish.\u00a0 The seminar is organized around the creation of a published paper.\u00a0 It is assumed that each student will come to the seminar with a document that has some promise for publication and we will proceed with a discussion of key issues in publishing and peer reviews of drafts of the article.\u00a0 Substantial emphasis will be places on understanding the process of paper submission, review and rewriting.<\/p>\n

Geog 533: Globalizing Care and Responsibility<\/strong>
\nThis course explores the centrality of care work and care ethics to our lives and to society broadly.\u00a0 We will look at how shifts in contemporary society (in the U.S. and across the globe) suggest an urgent need for care (in many senses).\u00a0 Specifically, we will examine the context for care including:\u00a0 i) the extension of market relations into almost everything (health care, education, environmental protection, elder-care etc.; ii) the systematic devaluation of care-work; iii) pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.); and iv) withdrawal of state supports in many crucial arenas.\u00a0 We will examine how care work is being intensified and simultaneously devalued, we will explore the ways in which care is a public rather than a private matter and we will think about our responsibilities to care for those who are near and those who are across the globe.<\/p>\n

The first part of the course will examine the growing need to take care seriously in academic work, in public policy and in our own lives.\u00a0 We will then think about the possibilities and challenges of really caring across distance and to respectfully engage with people in distant and different places.\u00a0 Finally, we will explore the myriad theoretical and practical challenges of care ethics: how do we navigate the research\/politics boundary; how do we understand ourselves in a global frame; what approaches to research enable a critical and yet analytical view; what do care ethics mean for our professional practices and involvements?\u00a0 We will think through the challenges of producing innovative and caring knowledge under ethical and responsible relations to people with whom we work.<\/p>\n

Most Recent\u00a0Course Syllabus<\/a><\/p>\n

Geog 542: Reframing Poverty<\/strong>
\nWe will discuss poverty and inequality drawing on theoretical ideas developed in both Majority and Minority Worlds.\u00a0 We will pose questions about how political-economic forces, cultural productions and discursive formations come to frame people and places as ‘poor’.\u00a0 We will investigate how political-economic and cultural productions work to reproduce poverty through processes of exclusion, exception and arguments for the remaking of people and places.\u00a0 We will explore the construction of geographical imaginaries and of spaces in which only certain things are possible in relation to poverty.\u00a0 We also consider the co-production of poverty, attending to how people accommodate poverty, seeking to maintain dignity and civility rather than resisting either representations or material productions of poverty\/inequality.\u00a0 Finally, we will interrogate dominant theorization of ‘Economy’ as the only way to frame, and respond to, poverty.\u00a0 We will draw on feminist theorizations of care to demonstrate the inseparability of care\/uncare in all social relations that matter.\u00a0 We will ask how poverty results from uncare — the separation of economy from the social.<\/p>\n

The first part of the course will examine the contemporary context and histories of poverty knowledge across the Americas.\u00a0 We then explore the theoretical and methodological challenges in constructing transnational approaches to rethinking poverty knowledge and practice.\u00a0 We read a series of case studies that engage these innovative approaches to rethinking poverty in relation to middle classes, across race difference and in rural and urban places.\u00a0 Finally, we turn to consider a feminist care ethics approach to reframing poverty knowledge.\u00a0 In so doing, we will think through the challenges of producing innovative and caring knowledge under ethical and responsible relations to people with whom we work.<\/p>\n

Most Recent\u00a0Course Syllabus<\/a><\/p>\n

Less often taught courses…<\/em>
\nGeog 430: Contemporary Development Issues in Latin America<\/strong>
\nThis course focuses on how we might understand intensifying inequality, across the Americas and across the globe?\u00a0 What does a geographic approach contribute to understanding development processes?\u00a0 Starting from development geography, we will pose the question \u201cwhat\u2019s missing in development theory?\u2019 with a focus on the subjects, places and scales that have been excluded from particular theorizations of development.\u00a0 We will also pose questions about which development and whose development?\u00a0 Our focus will be on a critical reading of development theory, paying particular attention to Latin American theorizations, and empirical experiences with development.\u00a0 However, this is not a course about Latin America so much as it is a course about critical development geography.\u00a0 We will also think through the challenges of producing development knowledge under ethical and responsible relations to people with whom we work.<\/p>\n

Geog 513: Proposal Writing<\/strong>
\nThis seminar deals with methodology, the research process, and writing fundable research proposals.\u00a0 The seminar has two objectives.\u00a0 The first objective is to demystify the research process by examining in detail the processes of research formulation and execution.\u00a0 We will discuss processes of identifying a topic and researchable questions and we will discuss how to connect these questions with an appropriate research design and methodology.\u00a0 I require students to already have had training in social science methods since this course will not teach methods.\u00a0 Rather, the focus is on linking research problems and methodologies — using the ongoing research of each student.\u00a0 Course content addressing this first objective will focus on the practice and challenges of scientific discovery in the context of rigorous thinking about the student’s own research project.\u00a0 The second objective of this course sequence is for each student to submit a research proposal to a funding institution such as the Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Inter-American Foundation, Fulbright, etc.\u00a0\u00a0Prerequisites<\/strong>: Geog 511 and 426 or equivalents.<\/p>\n

Geog 531: Reworking Development<\/strong>
\n\u201cAs most of us are aware, development rarely seems to \u2018work\u2019 \u2013 or at least with the consequences intended or the outcomes predicted.\u00a0 Why then, if it is so unworkable, does it not only persist but seem continuously to be expanding its reach and scope?\u201d (Crush, 1995: 4)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe notion and practice of development have been severely critiqued from both modernist and postmodern perspectives, yet the global development industry flourishes\u201d (Blaikie, 2000: 1033)\u201d<\/p>\n

This seminar assesses recent intellectual trends within development geography and analyzes development theory and practice from a feminist political-economy perspective. Geography\u2019s power in analyzing development stems from its enduring interest in the everyday, the mundane (Hanson, 1992).\u00a0 This emphasis on the world not as we would like it to be but as it is, acts as a check on abstract theory and bears witness to the impacts of development in places.\u00a0 Geographers have also insisted on the importance of relational analyses of place as the contexts within which power relations are constituted and in which identities take shape and salience.\u00a0 And geographers have argued for the mutual interconnections of material and discursive processes.\u00a0 In this way, geography challenges much development theory by pointing out that development does not exist as a thing, or an end point.\u00a0 Rather, development is a series of relations between places, social groups, cultures, spheres of production and consumption.\u00a0 Development is viewed as both a politically powerful discourse and as relentlessly material, entailing substantial transformations of society as a result of these power relations.\u00a0 Livelihoods are transformed, people and communities are moved, social relations are reworked.\u00a0 Contemporary development geography insists that these dimensions of development cannot be separated and has insisted on the centrality of spatiality, discourse and materiality in development debates.\u00a0 We will analyze ‘development’ as polyvalent and contextual in terms of its intellectual and material foundations.\u00a0 We will also attend to the formation and experiences of diverse subjects (people not topics) of development, analyzing the ways in which particular intellectual streams privilege or erase different subjects and actors.\u00a0 We will also discuss the spatiality of development — the ways in which discourses and practices of development link places, move through scales and operate in relation to boundaries — in order to reveal and help explain the paradoxes of development.\u00a0 In so doing, we will assess the ways in which analyzing the spatiality of development processes works towards democratizing development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Geog 230: Geographies of Global Inequality One of the most pressing challenges facing us at the beginning of the 21st century is the world\u2019s ability to address the increasing global inequalities. Extremes of wealth and poverty across the globe (in the global South and the North) underlie conditions of health and illness, educational opportunity and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"page-full.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/lawson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}