GEOG 70AC
The Urban Experience: Race, Class, Gender & The American City
In this course, students will observe and analyze how the American city has been built, experienced, imagined, and transformed. Using recent scholarship and primary sources, we will track the historical evolution of the city and assess change and continuity in major themes of urban life: race, gender, and difference, industry and labor, community and culture, and power and politics. These themes become increasingly intertwined throughout the course. We will focus on the particularities of place and the experiences of ordinary people but also seek to understand how broader political and economic processes shape the inequalities and opportunities that structure everyday life.
Topics
- • Be familiar with important trends and forces behind the reshaping of historical geographies of race, class, and gender in the city; • Develop and eye for “looking at cities” and being able to ask questions about the processes that produce urban form; • Understand historical and contemporary patterns of social inclusion and exclusion in cities and be able to identify their underlying causes and effects; • Develop a theoretical understanding of race and ethnicity based on geographically- and historically-specific accounts of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx, and European Americans; • In addition to geographical inquiry, identify and explore approaches and insights from a range of fields, including political economy and cultural studies.
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027