POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

This course is part of the Bachelor's Degree Programme in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation. A geographical approach as a critical method is particularly useful to bring together and analyse the socio-cultural and material aspects, which are part of the “mediation” between subjects speaking in different languages and belonging to different cultures.
The aim of this course is to emphasise how culture, power, economy and geography shape social interrelations. The course develops a critical and cultural geographical approach to the main themes and topics discussed within and across political and economic geography.

Knowledge and understanding
Learn how contemporary geography approaches and theorises concepts and topics such as place, territory, power, borders, race and ethnicity, nation-state, identity and otherness, capitalism, production, consumption, nature as a resource, multinational corporations, uneven development, mobility, gender.
Develop and awareness of how geographical context (the place where we are) and geographical imaginations (which inform how we perceive others) shape social interactions and relations.
Ability to apply knowledge and understanding
Grasp how everyday experience and the interactions we have with others and other places and cultures are shaped by different modalities of power and geographical imaginations.
Apply geographical concept to analyse the everyday life of material and mediatic spaces, socio-cultural interactions and geographies at different scales (from the local to the global).
Learn the conceptual and basic terminology to understand complex academic texts related to political and economic geography
Grasp the rhetorical and discoursive aspects of the geographical imaginations reproduced by representations (texts and images) of the world and of the Other as presented in various media

Skills
Understand and be able to use political and economic geography’s terminology employed in the Anglo-American, international debate
Being able to analyse representations, images, newspapers’ articles, advertising, landscapes and place, etc. to grasp their ideological register
Select sound academic sources within the international academic debate
Being able to structure and present in a concise manner the knowledge acquired
Being able to work in group and converse with peers

Knowledge of English to read the compulsory texts uploaded by the instructor on Moodle

The course discusses ideas and topics developed in the Anglo-American geographical debate and useful to understand the main themes discussed in political and economic geography. The course is structured into two parts. The first discussed the key concepts of critical cultural geography:
Culture and place
Location, locale, sense of place, borders: place and territory as open and dynamic geographic formations
Power and places: how diverse modalities of power shape the production of places and territories (domination, transgression and resistance)
Values, beliefs and sense of belonging
Nation-state
Economy: capitalism, uneven development
The construction of nature as an economic resource
Race and ethnicity
Mobility
The body as a place and geographical scale, gender

The second part of the course applies the above mentioned ideas to read and understand the approach and some of the key themes of critical political geography developed in the book by Elena dell’Agnese (see title below), which includes a discussion of the relation between geography, power and representation and which refer to topics such as orientalism, collective memory, identity and racisms.

Anderson, J. (2015) Understanding Cultural Geography. Places and Traces. Routledge.


dell’Agnese E. (2005) Geografia politica critica, Guerini Scientifica Edizioni, Milano

The exam is written and is composed of open end questions, based on the readings uploaded by the instructor on Moodle and the book by dell'Agnese discussed in class

The teaching approach is inspired to the 'flipped classroom' approach combined with lectures. The instructor facilitates a discussion on the themes and topics of the selected text to be read before each class

Italian

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Poverty and inequalities" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development