Geog210 Human Geography

Description:This assessment item requires you to research and write a formal academic essay  based on independent review of relevant theoretical and empiric literature. In answering one of the following essay questions, it is important that you make the relationship(s) between power, identity and place explicit. You can choose to answer a pre-set essay question or create your own essay question. No matter which essay question you decide to work on, I encourage you to take your essay into a direction you find most interesting. The main aim of writing the essay is to showcase your critical understanding of major theories and debates surrounding one form of contemporary social geography:

·         Unpack one major social geography issue (e.g. mobilities and gender, racism within NZ, Decolonising the Universities, housing and homelessness – any of these broad topics should be narrowed down further, but we will provide more information in the tutorials) and ensure you make the relationship(s) between power, identity and place explicit by drawing on relevant social geography theories, concepts and debates.

Chris Philo (2000: 751) suggests that exclusion [and more broadly power] should be thought of “as simultaneously social and spatial.” Discuss the way that different identities are formed, intersecting, contested and negotiated as a simultaneous social and spatial process of ‘in and exclusion’. Illustrate your discussion by drawing on your high school (or university) experience or any other relevant setting that helps you to illustrate your argument