Description
The purpose of this interdisciplinary, experimental course is to encourage students to think critically about the ways in which we – scholars, commentators, decisionmakers and ‘lay’ human beings – divide up the world into pieces, categorizing, delineating and fencing off certain areas from other ones; and to provide theoretical and methodological tools, equipping students to deploy a critical approach to “area” in their academic and professional (and other) lives. In particular, it encourages participants to think about what heterodox visions of the world can be drawn up from an “East European” vantage point; or rather, from the point of view of what we are calling the “Global East” – a porous zone, centred-on but not restricted to East Europe, which encompasses the (post-)socialist world and its transnational entanglements.
Students will be encouraged throughout to think critically about the following key questions:
· How reflexive have we really been about the definitions and genealogies of our divisions of the world?
· What can we do to convert reflexivity into real-life frontier-shifting and boundary-dismantling or re-drawing?
· How commensurable – and limited – are the ways in which we have conceived of the world’s intense interconnectedness so far? What is the difference between globalization and mondialization, internationalism and transnationalism, post-colonialism, post-socialism and non-alignment, location and locality?
· How does the current practice of area studies challenge or reproduce inequalities, particularly between the ‘core’ countries of the “Global North”, and those in regions that tend to be studied in area studies programs?
· Can ripping up the atlas also help us to shatter the Chinese Walls between scholarly disciplines?
· What heterodox, counter-canonical (Global Eastern and otherwise) mappings and imaginaries of area can we draw on? Which new terrains should our re-mappings of area converge on, and who or what can we follow to guide us on our way?
· Can we read Gombrowicz’s Transatlantyk alongside Gilroy’s or Cole’s Black Atlantic? Ought we tread the paths of the refugees, the diplomats, the terrorists, the hedge-funders or the trafficked women?
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 19th August 2024.