Module POC3136 for 2021/2
- Overview
- Aims and Learning Outcomes
- Module Content
- Indicative Reading List
- Assessment
Undergraduate Module Descriptor
POC3136: Field Trip
This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.
Please note that this module is only delivered on the Penryn Campus.
Module Aims
This module is intended to familiarise you with using ethnographic fieldwork within a safe and controlled setting, and under the supervision of staff, to develop and expand your independent scholarship. The course highlights the interconnections between space and politics through an exploration of various social and geographical spaces that form the background of political activity in a field trip location. It does so by enabling you to visit symbolic spaces of commemoration, negotiation, learning and debate. You will gain the capacity to integrate field methods such as participant observation of everyday events and sites, exploratory conversations with community members, situated analyses of grassroots organizations and visual, aesthetic, spatial, and economic analyses of politicised spaces and public forums. You will learn how to keep an ethnographic notebook of your travels, collect photos of meaningful sites, and carefully observe the landscape (‘natural’ and built environment). You will visit places such as museums and memorializations, community organizations, and practice approaching these sites through various lenses, working in student groups organized around substantive theoretical, practical and methodological research themes.
| On successfully completing the programme you will be able to: | |
|---|---|
| Module-Specific Skills | 1. demonstrate in both oral and written work substantive knowledge of major political dynamics affecting a field trip location, across multiple scales, in the various subfields we examine; 2. demonstrate in the field and in assessments the ability to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different research methods in oral and written work; 3. demonstrate in written and oral work the ability to apply a range of theories about politics and change to historical and contemporary debates; |
| Discipline-Specific Skills | 4. demonstrate in oral and written work the ability to apply political concepts and theories to specific case study sites; 5. synthesize field observations and research to support critical engagements with and extensions of existing literatures; 6. demonstrate in your oral and written work understanding of the implications of new evidence for a given political perspective; 7. demonstrate in your oral and written work that you understand different methods of research in the field and their implications for findings; |
| Personal and Key Skills | 8. work independently and in groups, including presentations for class discussion, and in spontaneous discussion and defence of arguments in class, and to manage conflict; 9. demonstrate analytical, creative, critical and organizational capacity in essays, group presentations and group discussion; 10. write essays and complete assessments to a deadline. |
Indicative Reading List
This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.
Seminars:
Amin, Ash. 2013. The Urban Condition: A Challenge to Social Science. Public Culture 25 (2): 201-208.
Amin, A. and N. Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boudreau, Julie-Anne. 2017. Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Brenner, N. 2013. Theses on urbanization. Public Culture 25 (1): 85-114.
Closs Stephens, A. 2010. Citizenship without community: Time, design and the city. Citizenship Studies. 14 (1): 31-46.
Coward, M. 2009. Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. New York: Routledge.
Curtis, Simon. 2016. Global Cities and Global Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Diouf, Mamadou and Rosalind Fredericks, eds. 2015. The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Farías, I. and Bender, T., eds. 2010. Urban assemblages: How actor-network theory changes urban research . New York: Routledge.
Jacobs, Jane. 2012. Urban geographies I: Still thinking cities relationally. Progress in Human Geography 36 (3): 412–422
King, AD. 1990. Urbanism, colonialism and the world-economy: cultural and spatial foundations of the world urban system. London: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2003 [1970]. The urban revolution, trans. R. Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Low, N. 1991. Planning, politics and the state. Abingdon: Unwin Hyman Ltd. Part I: Planning practice and political theory pp 11-51.
Magnusson, W. 2011. Politics of urbanism: Seeing like a city. London: Routledge. (selections TBD)
McLean, Heather. 2017. In praise of chaotic research pathways: A feminist response to planetary urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0) 1–9 DOI: 10.1177/0263775817713751
Merrifield, A. 2012. The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world. City 16 (3): 269-283.
Peake, Linda. 2016. The Twenty-First Century Quest For Feminism And the Global Urban. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 40 (1): 219–227. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12276
Pratt, G. 2017. One hand clapping: Notes towards a methodology for debating planetary urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0) 1–7 DOI: 10.1177/0263775817716555
Robinson J. 2002. Global and world cities: A view from off the map. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (3): 531-554
Roy A. 2009. The 21st-century metropolis: New geographies of theory, Regional Studies 43 (6): 819-830. DOI: 10.1080/00343400701809665
Sassen S. 2010. The Global City: Strategic Site, New Frontier. Accumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order ed. Swapna Banerjee-Guha. New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ldt.
Sennett, Richard. 1969. Classic essays on the culture of cities. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.
Wekerle G. 2004. Framing feminist claims for urban citizenship. Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography ed. LA Staehali, E Kofman, LJ Peake. New York and Oxford: Routledge. 245-259.
Methods Workshops:
Calvey, D. (2008) The Art and Politics of Covert Research: Doing Situated Ethics in the Field. Sociology, 42, 5, 905-918.
Iphofen, R. (2009) Ethical Decision Making in Social Research. A practical guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mertens, D.M. and Ginsberg, P.E. (Eds) (2008) The Handbook of Social Research Ethics. London: Sage.
Munro, E. (2008) Research Governance, Ethics and Access: A Case Study Illustrating the New Challenges Facing Social Researchers. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 11 (5), 429-439.
Israel, M., and Hay, I. (2006) Research Ethics for Social Scientists. London: Sage.
Van Maanen, J. (1983) The Moral Fix: On the Ethics of Fieldwork, in R. E. Emerson (ed) Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings, Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
