“Culture is what humans do” (J. Anderson, 2010: 3). Cultural geography is characterized by its attention to materialism, representations of the social world and the interactions between the two. Cultural geographers are concerned with how meanings become shared among a group of people and the process by which meanings become social and political (Kirsch, 2012). In this course, we will begin by thinking about how different cultural groups make places, then we will survey different topics within cultural geographies (e.g. clothing, music, food, the environment, craft, sport), and also some of the methodologies that cultural geographers can use in their research (e.g. art, landscape analysis, ethnography). The stories we tell about the world and ourselves create the boundaries of what we are able to imagine as possible. Therefore, studying cultural geographies can be one way to think through possibilities for the kinds of worlds we want to build.
Tentative schedule of the key topics:
Week 1: What are cultural geographies?
Week 2: Making Places
Week 3: Bodies & Senses
Week 4: Methods in Cultural Geographies
Week 5: The Environment
Week 6: Cultural Artifacts (music, food, clothing, art, books, photographs)
Week 7: Cultural Practices (craft, religion, dance, sport, national holidays)
Week 8: Counter-Cultural Practices