Spring 2022 GEOG 520-001 Seminar in Human Geography

Landscape and Race

Instructor: Joshua Inwood
Semester: Spring 2022
Class Time: Wednesday 10 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Contact: jfi6@psu.edu, grad@geog.psu.edu
Credits: 03
Place: 319 Walker Building
Section: GEOG 520-001

Description

Conflicts over public health, in the face of COVID-19, and the older but no less lethal pandemic of white supremacy and police brutality against people of color are indicative of the central place that landscape plays within the struggle to create a more just and sustainable society. These realities raise key questions for scholarship and practitioners of landscape studies: To what purpose can an understanding of landscape, of its revelatory power and meaning, play in exposing for critical scrutiny the realities of poverty and racism, of violence and militarism, the conditions of sexism and patriarchy that characterize life and death in the United States? This seminar is designed to explore the concept landscape (broadly defined) and ideas related to race and racism within a US context. Because we have the opportunity to work and live at Penn State and the surrounding community, we will also explore the landscape of the University and the ways it naturalizes a set of discourses around race and place. It is my intention for us to work collectively over the course of the semester to write a manuscript for possible publication and which would emerge from our collective discussions and writing over the semester.

A partial list of works we will draw from include:

Doss, E. (2012). Memorial mania: Public feeling in America. University of Chicago Press.
Jenkins, D. and LeRoy, J (2021) Histories of Racial Capitalism. New York: Columbia.
McKittrick, K (2021) Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lipsitz, G. (2011) How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Pulido, L. (2016) Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 27 (3) 1-16.
Rowe, A. C., & Tuck, E. (2017). Settler colonialism and cultural studies: Ongoing settlement, cultural production, and resistance. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 17 (1) 3-13.
Singh, N. (2004) Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schein, R. (1996) The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 87 (4) 660-680.