Geography / Environmental Planning 305:
World Regions in Global Context
Sonoma State University - Fall 2017
Instructor: Meleiza Figueroa
Text of original syllabus:
Among its proponents, globalization is conceived as a singular process inexorably heading towards sameness: one where liberal democracy and mass consumer culture spread across the globe, resulting in a world ‘melting pot’ where all societies converge into a common global culture (generally assumed to be modeled along American cultural standards). This is, however, not the only story that the experience of globalization has to tell. Many geographers view globalization differently, focusing on the particular distinctiveness and incredible diversity of cultures, values, and ideas of place that still exist around the world, still cherished and valorized by the people who live there. Geographers also recognize that as globally scaled social processes spread across space, their encounters with diverse places actually produces difference, rather than sameness. In this class we will study world ‘regions’ in terms of the internal relationships and similarities that make them more or less coherent as a region, as well as the relations that render them different and distinct from the surrounding social world. We will explore the various geographical dimensions of each world ‘region’ through a study of its environmental geography (physical and biotic environment), its demographics (migration and population characteristics), as well as the social, cultural, economic, and political distinctiveness of each region in the context of intra- and inter-regional relations. We will explore key geographical concepts as a way of guiding us through our exploration of regional processes, which in turn provide us with a way of ‘ground-truthing’ these concepts in the social realities, historical processes, and lived experiences that have shaped the nature & character of these regions.
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Notes: On class restructuring, critical challenges, & pedagogy
After the Sonoma/Napa wildfires of October 2017 affected the campus community and suspended classes for 10 days, the class was restructured to focus on key issues and processes that were at the root of current events and the unexpected social / political / ecological twists, changes, and disasters underway in many parts of the world. This was at once more relevant and engaging to most of the students, many of whom had been suffering adversity in other parts of life aside from the immediate problem of wildfires.
The class was restructured to foreground the relational nature of multi-scalar historical, political economic & geophysical processes and their particular regional articulations -emphasizing global economy, geopolitics, and climate change as global-scale drivers of local/regional phenomena. Each subsequent week focused on each region's relation to these global processes, tracing the ways in which regional particularities shaped the dynamics of friction & transformation on local, national, and regional scales.
Infographic created to illustrate the relationships among scales & processes.
We also explored in depth the dynamics of power and representation, especially in relation to the Global South and the legacies of colonialism, and covered special topics such as the ongoing global economic crisis and its fallout, as well as meanings of the nation-state and the rise of xenophobia, ethnic conflict, ethnonationalist and neofascist movements in various parts of the world.
There were a number of cognitive & pedagogical challenges** that had to be overcome in the course of this class, including developing critical thinking & argumentation skills amongst students who came from a variety of disciplines throughout the campus (as the class was an upper-division GE requirement).
**It is important to note that I do not identify these challenges as a deficit on the part of the students themselves, but that these challenges highlight the systemic issues for educators at all levels of higher education, especially as the glut of bachelors' degrees on the labor market is spurring a rush for graduate degrees. Many critical scholars and educators, including Henry Giroux, have documented the remarkable decline in critical thinking abilities. and creative problem-solving aptitude amongst the college population as a whole - which many analyses lay at the feet of neoliberal restructuring and the commodification / Taylorization of higher education, from which a host of consequences for socialization & democratic citizenship have become all too apparent. (See this excellent edited volumeLinks to an external site. on neoliberal education for more perspectives.)
Overcoming this fundamental gap required both restructuring of content towards material with greater explanatory relevance to immanent issues affecting students' lived experiences than those which had been presented in the textbook, as well as pedagogical reliance on more visual, kinesthetic, and intuitive forms of communication and learning - including the prodigious use of infographics, dynamic lecture slides with in-classroom exercises and reflection prompts, documentary films, and guided online discussions. A selection of the more effective materials is presented below.
Links to an external site.
icons at the top right corner of the subsection.