Political Economy
Geographers at Syracuse University understand political economy to be a social relationship. This social relationship is deeply geographical: our research starts from the understanding that social relations, social struggles, and social justice are all intricately related to the ways that political-economic processes are imbricated in and transformed through spatial relationships. In addition to understanding the relationship between political economy and geography, we seek to understand the relationship political economy and gender; political economy and labor; political economy and the restructuring of places and regions; political economy and culture. In all of these we want to understand how space, place, region, and scale structure and restructure political economic processes, even as political economic processes restructure space, place, region, and scale.
Recent and current students have examined changing political economic regimes in Northeastern Asia and their impact on undocumented migrants from North Korea; the economic and spatial structures that make “placeless” media like MTV possible; the neoliberal transformation of New York and the changing landscape of alternative dance clubs; political-economic restructuring in Europe and immigrant youth in Paris; regional restructuring and geographies of social reproduction in South Dakota; the US state and the globalization of agriculture; the changing structures of livelihood in post-apartheid South Africa; the economic restructuring of India’s Information Technology industry and gender transformations of software work; and the urban spatial implications of Chilean development under Pinochet.
Faculty
Matt Huber (Political Economy, Historical Geography, Energy and Capitalism, Oil, Resource Governance, and Social Theory)
Don Mitchell (Political economy of culture; labor geographies; urban restructuring and the politics of public space; Marxism; political economy of landscape)
Thomas Perreault (Political ecology, political economy of nature, international development, Latin America)
Tod Rutherford (Political economy of innovation, work and labor markets; economic governance; and restructuring in the automobile industry)
David Robinson (Latin American micro-regional and municipal development; integrated development in the Andes)
Farhana Sultana (international development, political economy of the environment, South Asia)
Jamie Winders (Race/ethnicity, gender, migration, social theory, US South, urban and historical geography, research methods)
Related Courses
Undergraduate
GEO 173 World Political Economy
GEO 300 Environment and Development in the Global South
GEO 311 The New North Americas
GEO 321 Latin America: Spatial Aspects of Development
GEO 322 Globalization and Environment in Latin America
GEO 361 Global Economic Geography
GEO 367 Gender in a Globalizing World
Graduate/Undergraduate
GEO 558 Sustainable Development
GEO 558 Development and Sustainability
GEO 558 Sustainable Development
GEO 561 Global Economic Geography
GEO 573 Geography of Capital
Graduate
GEO 605 Theories of Development
GEO 700 Political Economy of Nature
GEO 720 Latin American Seminar
GEO 755 Seminar in Political Ecology
GEO 764 Gender and Globalization
GEO 773 Seminar in Economic Geography
GEO 815 Seminar in Urban Geography