Carleton University
Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
Winter 2006
Mondays 11:35 - 2:25
Tory Building 219
Anne Galloway
anne.galloway@gmail.com
Office Loeb A701
Wednesdays 1:00 - 2:15
or by appointment
Assignment details & due dates
According to the United Nations, by mid-2000, almost half of the world's 6.1 billion inhabitants lived in urban areas and that proportion is expected to reach 60 per cent in the next 25 years. As urbanisation increases, so too does the need for richer understandings of the cultural, political, and technological complexities of urban experience.
Using a variety of local and global examples to evaluate our changing experiences of community and citizenship, we will build on John Urry’s premise that “mobilities, as both metaphor and as process, are at the heart of social life and thus should be central to sociological analysis.”
Students will critically engage questions such as: In a world where technologies seem to render space and time irrelevant, what happens to our sense of place? When cities embody global relations, flows, migrations and cultural ties to far-off places, for whom does the urban remain as tangible and clearly delimited as the medieval walled city? How is city space and public life organised? How are urban spaces becoming increasingly technologised? What forms do power, control and resistance take? What are the relations between production, consumption and urban living? How do different people negotiate personal and group identities and experience everyday life in the city?
The course includes a number of challenging assignments involving critical analytical, interpretive, observational and creative work. Weekly seminar readings are extensive and sometimes difficult, and students are simultaneously required to conduct individual research projects.
Sociology 3038 and fourth-year standing, or permission of the Instructor
The Sociology 4038 Urban Cultures Course Reader (Compiled by the Instructor and available at Haven Books.)
Malcolm Miles, Urban Avant-Gardes and Social Transformation, 2004
Malcolm Miles & Tim Hall (eds), The City Cultures Reader, 2003
Simon Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience, 2003
Letters to an Unknown Lover by Janice LaFlair
Welcome to The Turning Point by Shannon Gamble
Prepackaged Happiness by Wendy Van Oostveen
Welcome to Carleton University, How May I Help You?: 75 Haikus On Waste, Consumption & Identity by Kevin Conway
You might think of the course blog as our class journal.
There you'll find notes on assigned readings, assignment details, summaries of our class discussions, research resources, current events, class announcements and more.
In addition to checking it regularly, you're also encouraged to create a Blogger account and continue class discussions there by posting comments or links.
[Geek alert: If you use an aggregator like Bloglines or TagCloud, here's the rss feed.]