Suspended in 2025/26
GY477      Half Unit
Race, Capitalism and Resistance

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course examines the intertwined structures of race and capitalism in North America, focusing on how inequality and resistance are embedded in social and physical landscapes. From environmental racism and urban gentrification to borders and policing, students will explore how systems of oppression operate, and how communities challenge them.

Through case studies from the U.S. South, Caribbean, southern Mexico, and Canadian First Nations, students will consider how race, empire, and capitalism have shaped these regions in strikingly different ways. Key concepts such as settler colonialism, the Black Atlantic, and uneven development are introduced not as abstract frameworks, but as analytical tools for making sense of the world.

Anchored in the study of grassroots movements—including Indigenous sovereignty struggles, Black liberation efforts, and sanctuary initiatives—the course highlights how communities challenge dominant systems of power. Students will critically examine how global inequalities are experienced, maintained, and resisted at local scales, and will be encouraged to question normative geopolitical narratives that position North America as a universal model.

25 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

Students will receive feedback on their reading responses.

• Barra, M. P. (2021). Good sediment: Race and restoration in coastal Louisiana. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1), 266-282.
• Cahuas, M. C. (2020). The struggle and (im)possibilities of decolonizing Latin American citizenship practices and politics in Toronto. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(2), 209-228.
• Curley, A., & Smith, S. (2020). Against colonial grounds: Geography on Indigenous lands. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(1), 37-40.
• Davis, A. (2011). Women, race, and class. Vintage.
• Domosh, M. (2015). Practising development at home: Race, gender, and the “development” of the American South. Antipode, 47(4), 915-941.
• Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press.
• Gorman, C. S., & Culcasi, K. (2021). Invasion and colonization: Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiment in West Virginia. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(1), 168-183.
• McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(8), 947-963.
• Pulido, L. (2016). Flint, environmental racism and racial capitalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 27(3): 1-16.
• Woods, C. A. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso.

Portfolio (50%, 2000 words)

Essay (50%, 2000 words)

Students will submit short reading responses and a final essay.