Class Description
GEOG 3701: The Making of the Modern World
The Making of the Modern World is a course taught by Mat Coleman, a professor in the Department of Geography. This course critically investigates the spatial formation and transformation of our modern world. By scrutinizing the forces and concepts of modernity, modernism, and modernization, we examine what animates the modern world system in order to help students better understand the world we live in, and their place in it. If you want to learn about the events and processes that underpin the modern world from a critical political economic standpoint, this is the class for you. Students will be walked through a number of important issues ranging from slavery to settler colonialism to imperialism to oil to the Anthropocene, and a lot of other things as well. A specific emphasis is also placed on the politics and practices of representation constitutive of modernity, as well as on migration, mobility, and movement as core, constitutive components of modernity. In addition, we do deep dives into case studies and theoretical basics to have an overall understanding of the concepts. The modern world is very complex, but this course provides a good breakout of a lot of elements that can make this topic difficult to understand.
Class Reflection
The class structure consisted of weekly lectures, readings, and a discussion post. The topics included: Modernity, Settler colonialism, Slavery, plantation economy, and the emergence of policing, Industrial revolution, world-as-exhibition, Orientalism, Evolution and fin de siècle anxiety, Classical imperialism, Eugenics and genocide, U.S. geoeconomics, U.S. in the global economy, undocumented migration, and Anthropocene. The readings each week made me focus more and enhance my comprehension skills. It was an important part of the class to read each article or book and understand the topic, to fully grasp the impacts that it had during that specific time. Some of these readings were very complex and difficult to understand, which would oftentimes lead me to reading and re-reading multiple times. By really taking the time to read and gain a deeper understanding of the reading material was instrumental in my development and ultimately remembering things that I had learned. A global mindset is in part what you learn, what you remember from what you were taught, and continued education. Without continuing your education on global topics and staying up to date on the events that are happening around the world, it is easy to become blind and complacent.
By the end of this course, I was successfully able to:
- grasp the centrality of the slave trade, the plantation economy, and their afterlives to the world we live in
- understand modernity in terms of the ongoing problem of settler colonialism
- analyze capitalism in terms of the circuit of capital and its permanent spatial contradictions
- understand the centrality of exhibition, ethnography, and racialized difference to modernity
- articulate in detail what colonialism and imperialism mean, both theoretically and empirically
- understand the role of the U.S. in the modern world economy
- define modernity dialectically as a ‘maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish’ (Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 1982, p. 15)
It is difficult to put into words how much I was able to learn in this class. It not only taught me about the past and the domino effect that certain events can have, but also more about myself as a person. I have a different outlook on life after taking a closer glance at the modern world through watching videos and completing the readings. In the past, I had been a little indifferent to learning history and doing deep dive, but this class taught me so much about why history needs to be appreciated and taught correctly. Throughout the semester that I took this course, I was able to learn so many important topics that are relevant to society and the way society is structured. I will be able to apply all of this knowledge as I look into my community impact and what I can do to positively influence people. Learning about the history of various cultures through modernity, modernization, as well as colonialism, brought a new perspective to what I thought about the world and enhanced my overall global knowledge.