Washington, DC as Global City

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Washington, DC is both a pivotal node of global power and a place where people live. This seminar course will explore the relationships between these two realities, analyzing how Washington acts as a site of transnational command and exchange and how these processes are entangled with the built environment and everyday life of the city and wider region. We will begin by situating the nation’s capital within comparative histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, asking how doing so might reframe the ways we understand its spatial arrangements and symbolic sites. Examining how Washington-area financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have reshaped cities globally, we will assess how neoliberal ideologies and policies are implicated within the cultural and economic shifts that have taken place in DC over the past thirty years. Turning to the wider region, we will grapple with the connections between its development and designs for war and empire, from the dominant role of defense contractors and national security institutions within the local economy to the multiple migrations of survivors of US military interventions to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. Finally, we will survey the ways that social movements and subaltern populations have sought to reclaim the city as a proving ground for alternative forms of political order and an assembly point for forging internationalism(s) from below. To further our inquiry, we will draw on multiple fields of study including anthropology, critical ethnic studies, geography, history, and transnational American studies. Engaging Washington as our classroom, we will also take several field trips throughout the course. For a final project, students will analyze a specific site through a critical transnational lens and contribute to a collective ‘counter-mapping’ of the city.