Gender, Space and Place: Embodying Geography and Planning

Course goals

Content

Gender profoundly shapes how spaces are designed, experienced and governed—yet it is often marginalised or treated as invisible in geography and planning. In Gender, Place and Space, we explore how gender is never an “add-on”, but a way of understanding how space, power, and everyday life are produced, designed, negotiated and contested. You will engage with key feminist and gender scholarship in human geography and spatial planning, whilst also being equipped to challenge and disrupt gendered and spatial inequalities and imagine alternative ways to shape and design spaces and societies.

The course is structured around two interconnected feminist interventions: embodiment and reflexivity. Through the lens of embodied geographies, you will examine how bodies, space and place are co-constituted, and how these relations unfold across multiple scales - from the body and domestic spaces to urban, national and global contexts. We also consider the role of embodied scholarship in challenging dominant modes of knowledge production in geography and spatial planning. These perspectives are explored through key themes such as infrastructure, housing and home, urban design, public space, care, violence, deprivation and the natural environment.

To help you engage in embodied knowledge, you will practice feminist reflexivity to analyse your own embodied subjective positions, reflecting on your roles in the (re)production and negotiation of socio-spatial processes. This means that your own lives and experiences will be central to the knowledge we create in the classroom. We will also make space to examine diverse experiences, not only ‘marginal’ lives but also those we consider ‘normal’ and ‘privileged’. You will strengthen your theoretical and critical thinking skills and create a classroom culture where debate, disagreement and productive discomfort are possible. One method of assessment will require you to collectively analyse your embodied experiences of the world to create a reflexive output. By doing so, you will develop skills in reflecting on your role in broader society.

By focusing on feminist reflexivity, students will also learn to question geographical and spatial knowledge production. Students will learn what it means to ‘situate knowledge’, questioning its spatial, temporal and subjective origins. By doing so, you will learn to identify assumptions, normativities, and power relations in a range of academic and societal knowledge, and explore why studies of gender are so often marginalised in universities and planning and governmental departments. Through guided reading of challenging texts (including a range of feminist approaches, from foundational to radical and experimental writing), you learn to evaluate how knowledge is produced, whose voices count, and what it means to do gender- and place-based research responsibly. Such epistemological skills will support you in your own research in the bachelor’s program.

The course will be taught through a range of lectures, seminars and tutorials, with guest lectures from colleagues in Human Geography and Spatial Planning, enabling students to see how feminist geographical perspectives are integrated across the discipline.