GGR1807H: Geographies of Postcoloniality and Development: Exploring the 'Infrastructure Turn'

This course reviews recent scholarship in geography and critical development studies that seeks to investigate and theorize the significant role of infrastructure in shaping political, economic, and social space, and also its efficacy as a genre of thinking. The course begins by revisiting the now-canonical literature on uneven development to capture some perspectives on what is at stake politically, and how best to conceptualize the development as a contested terrain of practice and representation. Drawing on science and technology studies, mobility studies, critical development studies, and contemporary urban theory (especially as they manifest in scholarship with geography and planning), we will engage infrastructure as materiality, as method, as terrain of expertise, as complex socio-technical system, as powerful political address, and as a critical political field.

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