Over the last three years, I have offered the following courses:
Geography 367: Governing Development: Institutions, Networks, Space, Place
This course was developed at the request of, and in collaboration with, a group of graduate students. It investigates the theoretical potential and pitfalls of conceptualizing development as a field of networks of actors and institutions, and it poses the challenge of geography in understanding these networks. This course engages with various literatures to analyze how networks can be theorized and visualized in relation to actors such as the state, private entities, civil society and beyond.
Geography 368: Development of Western Geographic Thought
This is a required graduate seminar for all our incoming doctoral students. It explores currents, recurring ideas and debates within the development of geographical thinking and theory, with a particular focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Geography 370: Development’s Geographies: Debates and Interventions
James Ferguson once referred to development as anthropology’s “evil twin,” an ambivalence that also characterises geography’s relationship with development. With this ambivalence in mind, this seminar explores the place of international development in the social sciences with a particular focus on these two disciplines. The course considers the extent to which it is useful to speak of development and development geography as an intellectual enterprise, approaching “usefulness” in terms of both theoretical and practical engagement. The latter half of the seminar does this through explorations of a series of keywords and concepts: livelihood; resistance; state; civil society; network; social movement among others.
Geography 376: Natural resource governance in Latin America
The purpose of this seminar is to debate historical and contemporary writing on natural resource governance in Latin America with a view to giving students who will work on environmental issues in Latin America a firm footing in some of the core literature, debates and authors.