Learning outcomes

By the end of the module students will be able to:

• Understand the inherent relevance of social and cultural geography to everyday life and to current issues and debates in contemporary society, adopting geography as a critical tool to interpret contemporary world.
• Understand key themes and concepts in social and cultural geographic scholarship, navigating theories, methods, historical developments and emerging debates within the discipline.
• Appreciate the pedagogical scope of social and cultural geography, relating geographical knowledge to a range of examples drawn from research and educational projects and case studies.
• Think geographically about society and culture, critically engaging with ideas in the module to show how they relate to everyday experience and relevant societal issues.

Program

Central theme: The module is structured around a core theme, that is the relationship between social and cultural geography and contemporary world. The chosen topics aim to clarify such a relationship by addressing a diversity of traditional and emerging ideas and fields of study within social and cultural geography.
The module will develop as follows:

FOUNDATIONS
• What is geography?
• The concept of ‘paradigm’; paradigms in geography.
• Geographical theories: German, French, British and American traditions.
• The concept of ’culture’ and the cultural studies revolution: the cultural turn in geography.
• Cultural geography and ‘New cultural geography’.
• The ‘social’ in geography: critical perspectives on issues of power, identity, difference and (inter)action.
• Representation and practice; the ‘performative turn’ and the new ‘non-representational’ geographies
• Italian social and cultural geography

KEY CONCEPTS
• Place
• Landscape
• City

GEOGRAPHIES OF MOBILITY: TOURISM, TRAVEL AND GEOGRAPHY
• Geographies of the ‘Other’ and ‘Elsewhere’ (notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’).
• Orientalism and ‘imaginative geographies’
• Tourist representations and imaginaries.
• Beyond representation: travel as embodied experience of the world. New phenomenology and the ‘more-than-representational’ approach in tourism geographies.

GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE
• Geographies of gender
• Geographies of dis/ability

CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES
• Re)thinking childhood practices, representations and spatial relations geographically.
• Case study: India.

DOING GEOGRAPHY
• Methodologies, approaches and techniques in social and cultural geography; qualitative methods.
• The key contribution of Postcolonial and Feminist theories.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Minca, C. and Colombino, A. Breve Manuale di Geografia Umana, Cedam, Lavis, 2012 (Introduction; Part I: chapters 1,2,3; Part III: chapter 8; Part IV: Introduction and chapter 10).
• Martinelli, C. La geografia culturale nel contesto della geografia umana “internazionale”, QuiEdit, Verona, 2015.
• Teaching material available on Moodle (e-learning platform).

Additional ‘essential’ readings will be indicated during the lectures; these readings are specific to each lecture‘s topic. Students are expected to double check lecture-specific bibliographies made available on Moodle in order to make sure that they have the complete list of ‘essential’ readings required for the exam.

FOR STUDENTS NOT ATTENDING CLASSES: extra required readings for the exam will be indicated in each lecture-specific bibliography, which will be uploaded on to the e-learning platform. These readings will be marked as “essenziali per non-frequentanti” (that is, ‘essential for students not attending classes’).

Examination Methods

Written exam.
Evaluation criteria will include:

• Knowledge of the module’s contents and topics
• Ability to engage critically with themes and ideas of the module and to support the discussion with evidence and examples.
• Appropriate use of geographical lexicon.
• Ability to communicate in a clear and coherent way.
• Correct use of grammar, punctuation, spelling and syntax.