This module examines how space actively structures human experience and asks what the built environment can teach us about how people organize social worlds, construct political projects, and plan for the future. Using theoretical orientations from cultural anthropology, geography, sociology, political science, and history, this module will investigate how social structures shape and are shaped by contemporary urban spaces.
Understand the different ways in which social and cultural practices are embedded in a variety of built environments.
Analyze the relationship between specific built environments, their users and the activities that such environments facilitate and/or hinder.
identify how the built environment can contribute to various forms of inequality (including race, class, and gender), as well as how it has been critically repurposed in the interest of resistance and revolution.
Research a topic by combining and critically reviewing information from a variety of sources, and carry out primary research using a selection of social science methods (surveys, mapping, participant observation, interviews, oral histories, focus groups, etc.) with supervision.
Ingy is a political economist and postdoctoral researcher at the American University of Cairo (AUC). She is the Research Manager at Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).