Critical Geopolitics: Bodies, borders and bombs

In recent years, critical, feminist, and decolonial approaches have increasingly questioned Feminist geopolitics is a scholarly endeavor to question and criticize the mainstream geopolitical discussions, representations, and imaginations that focus geopolitical analysis of the scale of the global and nation-state. These approaches focus on how geopolitical processes both affect and result from and produce new ways of thinking for grasping embodied, affective, quotidian, and mostly invisible forms of global, geopolitical, and international formations. There has been a significant body of work on feminist geopolitics covering a series of themes, conceptual discussions, and multiple geographies in the past two decades. This seminar traces the development of this subfield of feminist geographysuch alternative approaches to geopolitics, paying particular attention to various uses of feminist different theoretical geopolitical lenses for understanding security discourses, subtle forms of racism and colonialism, gendered geopolitical formations, and everyday makings of states and international hierarchies.

Despite their various theoretical and methodological approaches, one of the vital common grounds of feminist geopolitical studiesfeminist and decolonial geopolitics is questioning the assumed hierarchies among different scales –such as macro and micro, global and intimate– and demonstrating how power also operates through everyday practices, emotions, bodies, and affects. Therefore, our examination will start with a broader discussion on the notion of scale within geography. Following this discussion, we will examine geopolitics and how this concept has been developed in time through critical and feminist approaches. Then, we will discuss various uses of feminist geopolitics to understand how the global and intimate, hot and banal, international and everyday intertwine, coexist, and reproduce each other.
This seminar is designed for graduate students interested in the conversation of feminist, post-colonial and critical theories and approaches with national, international, and geopolitical discussions. There are no prerequisites, and students are not expected to have a geography or feminist theory background.

The seminar is co-taught by Carolin Schurr and Devran Öcal, the new postdoc of the group Social and Cultural Geography.