Geography

This course develops students’ critical understandings of debates within cultural and historical geography and related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The course focuses on the emergence of representational approaches within cultural and historical geography, outlining their proximity to cultural studies and social theory, before exploring a range of approaches to the materiality of culture, from consumption to "things." The intellectual trajectories covered are explored through a range of sites, locations, spatialities, and empirical examples including, but not limited to: landscape, architecture and built space; racialization and spatiality; spaces of consumption, display and exhibition; regulated and policed spaces; artistic and creative spaces; spaces of practice, and so on. The course ends by considering the ‘rematerialization of cultural and historical geography’ offering students an accessible grasp of the theoretical staging grounds of debates at the forefront of the discipline.

The key modes of transportation chosen for consideration in this course are waterborne shipping, passenger railways, airplanes and private automobiles (there is limited coverage of buses, bikes or pedestrianism). The course involves examination of the permanent way of the canals, the railways tracks, the tarmac road surface, runways and the invisible air routes. The focus is on personal mobility, the mass of passengers, and the means of moving human bodies. 

This course focuses on the changes in Singapore's urban landscape. It places these changes within a framework that considers Singapore's efforts to globalize and examines how policies are formulated with the idea of sustaining an economy that has integral links sub-regionally with Southeast Asia while developing new spatial linkages that will strengthen its position in the global network. Emphasis is also given to recent discussions about how diversity and difference in the perception and use of space pose a challenge to the utilitarian and functional definition adopted by the state.