GEOG019

Description

Section information text: This course will present students with a deep appreciation of the history, politics, and geography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while simultaneously offering students an introduction to different approaches and subfields within human geography. Approaching the conflict from different geographical perspectives allows us to reevaluate the way that the Israel, Palestine, and the conflict are represented in generic media and political analyses. For instance, we will ask such questions as, how do the colonial geographies of the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate determine much of the spatial politics in Israel and Palestine today? What are the contradictory cultural and political identities of the people who live in Israel and Palestine? How are borders created and how do they affect mobility and access? How do different flows of money and labor show how porous these borders are in reality? Why is the natural environment so central to cultural ideas of nation and belonging? How does the built environment of an urban space like Jerusalem speak to the ongoing conflict? How do Israeli and Palestinian feminists understand the myriad ways that the conflict specifically affects women and their livelihoods? These are just some of the questions we will delve into over the course of the semester. Class materials will vary between academic articles on different aspects of the conflict, to nonfiction writing, to graphic novels, to sitcoms, in order to show the multiple facets of life in Israel and Palestine. As a First Year Intensive (FYI), the course will also help introduce you to academic life at Clark, as well as reading, writing, and research within geography and the social sciences. We will spend approximately 1/3rd of each class meeting discussing ways to be successful academics, covering everything from how to write a paper, to ways to manage our time, to pointers on how to give good presentations, and more. We will also spend time in two class sessions reading each other's work in order to learn how to peer review. Meetings will include some brief lectures but will be centered on class discussion.