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Summary

Geography, you may have come to believe, involves the study of maps and the mundane facts they represent: rivers, capital cities, international boundaries, etc. If geography ended there, however, it would be as boring as history that was only about important dates. Just as the significance of a historical perspective lies in understanding how a sequence of events adds up to important changes in the way we as human beings live our lives, the significance of geography lies in understanding how the relationships across space affect those lives.

This course is based on the theme of globalization, which can be understood as a general process of increasing influence and connection across geographic space. At a banal level, we can see the influence of globalization in Oxford. If we walk down High Street we can see a variety of so-called ethnic restaurants. At Kroger’s we buy foods that come from all over the world, while Wal-Mart offers bargain-basement prices by making use of cheap labor available in Southeast Asia and Central America. If we move outward from Oxford and visit various points around the world, we will also see similar evidence of globalization. From McDonald’s and American popular culture, to the increasing accessibility of similar images and information through global communications technologies, there is a sense that our world is an increasingly small place.

But as the events of September 11, 2001 show quite clearly, while we may indeed live in a global village, it is also a fundamentally divided one. As the world is made increasingly the same through processes of globalization, I will argue in this course, local places—where we actually live our lives—remain quite different. At the same time that increasing numbers of people are part of an emerging global consumer culture, vast numbers of the world’s population are mired in extreme poverty. As many of us live lives of unprecedented comfort, many others live lives marked by violence and indignity. Globalization is about both of these two sides to the contemporary geography of the world.

Goals

As part of the Miami Plan of Liberal Education, this course aims to develop critical thinking skills, which includes in the context of a human geography course the ability to:

• see relationships between global forces and local diversity
• undestand how a geographical perspective can offer useful tools to analyze global issues and problems
• appreciate the complexity of contemporary geographic relationships and processes
• be aware of your own position in the world, and how that shapes your understanding of it
• recognize that complex real world issues do not have simple solutions, and an ability to weigh different arguments based on evidence, logical consistency, and context

Requirements

Paul L. Knox and Sallie A. Marston, Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context, 4th ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2007.

Evaluation

1. Midterm exam (100)
2. Final exam (200)
3. Discussion section assignments (100)
4. Quizzes (50)
5. Participation and attendance (50)

Point Range	Grade
460–500	A
445–459	A -
425–444	B +
410–424	B
395–409	B -
375–394	C +
360–374	C
345–359	C -
325–344	D +
295–324	D
0–295	F

Assignments

1. Geography of Breakfast (August 30)
2. Global Economy (September 13)
3. T-Shirt Travels (September 27)
4. Development and Terror (October 25)
5. Migrant Culture (December 6)

Course Structure

If we think of globalization as a process, we can distinguish between three aspects of this process: economic, cultural and political. The economic relationships between places—and the efforts by various people and institutions throughout the ages to change those relationships for their own benefits—have been at the center of what we now call globalization. From the efforts of Spanish and Portuguese explorers seeking wealth in the New World roughly five centuries ago, to the activities of massive transnational corporations like AOL/Time-Warner to open up new markets in places like China today, the geography of the world has been rewired through the changing distributions of wealth and productive power.

Political institutions, however, have always been central to regulating such economic geographies. Indeed, the modern state developed in the context of the increasingly elaborate international connections that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism and European colonial rule. In some sense, however, the very notion of globalization suggests the decreasing power and relevance of these states. How, then, has the political geography of the world changed in a global era? What is the significance of what George Bush Sr. referred to as the New World Order? Is the contemporary world a safer, freer place now than in the past, or is it more dangerous and unstable? How can we understand the development of terrorism and drug trafficking as part of globalization too?

Finally, life is not about wealth and power alone. Culture—as a system of human meaning—is also of central importance to what we call globalization. How are places, and the systems of meaning they are imbued with, changed with globalization? Is the uniqueness that characterizes different places being undermined by the creation of a boring McWorld? Is local culture turning into global culture?

We will try to answer all of these questions. After spending the first few weeks on an introduction to geography and to the study of globalization, the remainder will be structured—though loosely so—around these three aspects of globalization. More significantly, we will examine various issues that illustrate the contradictions and complexities of this most significant of contemporary processes.

Schedule

Date	Topic	Reading
	Introduction
8/21-23	Introduction	KM Chapter 1
8/28-8/30	Geography and the World	KM Chapter 2
	Wealth, Poverty and Development
9/4-6	Economic Geography	KM Chapter 7
9/11-13	New International Division of Labor	The Churn, Shopping with Conscience
9/18-20	Development in the Periphery	KM Chapter 8, Nike's Dilemma
9/25-27	Challenges in a Global Economy	The Dumping Ground
10/2	Exam 1
	Power
10/4	Introducing Political Geography	KM Chapter 9
10/9-11	Nations and States	Kurdistan
10/16-18	Nation-States and Geopolitics	The Pivot of History, The Geographical Pivot of History
10/23-25	The New World (Dis)order	The Pentagon’s New Map
	Culture, Movement, Settlement
10/30	The Geography of Culture	KM Chapter 5, In 2,000 years, will the world remember Disney or Plato? , The Cultural Globalization Index
11/6-11/8	China, Globalization and Culture	Buicks, Starbucks and Fried Chicken. Still China?, Tibet Through Chinese Eyes
11/13-15	China, Tibet and Hollywood
11/20	Preserving the Local Through Global Means	The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle
11/22	Thanksgiving – no class
11/27-11/29	Migration and Globalization	KM Chapter 3
12/4-6	Future Geographies	KM Chapter 12
12/10, 2:45 PM	Final Exam

Rules and Suggestions

• You are expected to be an active participant in class! You should carefully do the reading before class, and be prepared to discuss it. To ensure you do the reading, expect quizzes (I’d rather not, but experience shows I must). While I realize the relatively large lecture is an intimidating venue for many to contribute, you should push yourself to do so. It is likely that if you have questions, others do too, so don’t be bashful. It is impossible for me to read your minds; your questions allow me to see what is unclear and rectify the confusion.
• Take advantage of office hours, and do so before the assignment is due, or the exam takes place. We are happy to help! We are less thrilled with hearing complaints about grades after the fact.
• Please show up to class on time. If you must arrive late, do so quietly.
• No sleeping, reading or talking during lecture. Such behavior is distracting both to me as a lecturer and to your colleagues, and neither you nor I want to interrupt lecture to ask you stop. If you don’t want to be here, don’t come.
• Do not cheat. If you do, you will punished severely. If you are unclear about what constitutes plagiarism, ask me.
• Late work will not be accepted, nor make-up exams given. If there is a legitimate, documented, reason for an exception, this must be arranged ahead of time.
• Staple the work you turn in; unstapled work will NOT be accepted. (And do not ask your TA or I if we happen to have a stapler; like any normal person, we don’t tend to carry them around in our back pockets).
• Do not submit assignments via email.