This seminar builds on three elements: theoretical debates, academic writing and peer-reviewing. Each student will spend the semester writing an essay on a theme of her/his choice. Students will also have the opportunity to peer-review each other's essays and integrate feedback and comments into their writing. The goal of the seminar is to practice writing, analytical skills, peer-reviewing, and giving and integrating critical-constructive feedback.
Each student chooses a theme that has to speak to new approaches in human geography, such as, but not limited to, the following examples: Decolonization and coloniality; Governmentality and biopower; Feminist geography; Animal/more-than-human geography; Socio-ecological transitions; Capitalism and socioecological fix; Global supply chains, power and justice; Financialization.
Each student chooses a theme from above or suggests an alternative which is closer to her ongoing or planned MSc thesis project. The essay should build on a state-of-the-art bibliography to introduce key theoretical debates, put main debate protagonists and positions (across different epistemes, historical periods or geographical contexts) in conversations with each other, highlight how the student's MSc project intends to draw on these debates and engage with them, and suggest research problems and questions with relevance to the MSc project.
Through peer-reviewing, each student gets the opportunity to learn about other themes in human geography. Since we do not have a shared set of literature that everyone will have to read, the challenge for essay authors will be to express themselves as clear as possible assuming that they are the only ones familiar with the underlying literature. The challenge for peer-reviewers will be to identify conceptual, analytical, or stylistic issues with a text – even though they may be entirely unfamiliar with the underlying literature - and raise relevant questions to help the author to improve the text.
- Docente: Jevgeniy Bluwstein