autumn 2015
SPL-3010 Culture, Politics and Planning - 10 ECTS

Application deadline

Applicants from Nordic countries: 1 June for the autumn semester and 1 December for the spring semester. Applicants from outside the Nordic countries: 1 October for the spring semester and 15 April for the autumn semester.

Type of course

This elective course can be taken as a singular course.

Admission requirements

Bachelor degree in a social science subject is required as a general rule.

The minimum average grade requirement is:

  • C - for bachelor's degree or equivalent issued in Europe, Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand
  • B - for bachelor's degree or equivalent issued in all other countries

The course requires solid competence in reading and writing English.

Application code: 9371.


Course content

In this course we emphasise important aspects of culture and knowledge production as perspectives, but also how these aspects add to the tools of planning. The course gives an overview of concepts like situated meanings, values and local cultural processes and how these and other culture related concepts interrelate with planning processes and can be made relevant in understanding development.

Traditionally, planning involves making decisions about alternative ways of realising certain predetermined goals. Its basic tool is scientific knowledge, which standardises reality. In development policy-making, where power unevenness characterise donor-beneficiary relationships, a culturally aware or multi-knowledge approach has the capacity to temper the one-size-fit-all interventions that hardly serve the purposes of improving well-being.

The thematic issues for the lectures/seminars include: meanings of culture and modes of knowledge production; planning and development; ethnicity; gender and household dynamics; social capital, NGOs and micro-level inputs to policy-making. Illustrative cases will be drawn from both the South and the North.

Objectives of the course

Students who have successfully completed the course should have achieved the following learning outcomes:

Knowledge

  • A basic theoretical insight in challenges of development and North-South relations with special emphasis on aspects of culture and planning and the interfaces of culture and planning.

Analytical understanding

  • Abilities to make sense of historical and current perspectives on culture, knowledge production, social capital, gender and planning with relevance for development and NGOs.

Skills and competences

  • Competent application of theoretical and analytical concepts relevant to culture, planning and development

Language of instruction and examination

The language of instruction is English.

Language of examination is English or Norwegian.

Use of language during exam is addressed in paragraph 12 in Forskrift for eksamener ved Universitetet i Tromsø.


Teaching methods

Teaching forms and other related activities

The course consists of 10 double lectures and 10 single hour seminars.

Quality control of the course.

The course will be evaluated at the end of the semester.


Assessment

Coursework requirements:

Obligatory attendance in 75 per cent of the lectures must be documented. Presentation of an article at a seminar.

The assessment method will consist of a 8-10-page (approximately 3500-4000 words) essay, to be written during home exam. Duration home exam: 1 week.

The Grade-scale goes from A (tope score) to E (pass) and F (fail). A re-sit exam will be arranged for this course


Recommended reading/syllabus

ASSESSING CULTURE CONCEPTS

This section introduces theoretical approaches to the concept of culture from sociology, anthropology, cultural, cognitive and evolutionary theory. It provides basic insights into different theoretical foundations for understanding interconnections between culture and development and culture, evolutionary thinking and planning theory.

Jenks, C. (2005) Culture (Second Edition) Abingdon: Routledge. Chapter 1 The origins of the concept of culture in philosophy and the literary tradition, (pp 6-24) and Chapter 9 Urban Culture (pp 173-189) (34p); ISBN: 9780415338684

Pinker Steven (2002). ¿The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage and the Ghost Machine¿, Chapters 1, 2 and 3, in S. Pinker: The Blank Slate and the modern denial of human nature. pp.1-58 (58p); ISBN: 0-717-99256-5

Wolf R. Eric, (1999). Chapter 2 ¿Contested Concepts¿. In E.R. Wolf Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. University of California Press. pp. 21-67 (46p); ISBN: 9780520215368

Mehmood, Abid. (2010) On the History and Potentials of Evolutionary Metaphors in Urban Planning, in Planning Theory, Vol 9 (1), pp. 63-87, (24p). Downloadable

Gullestad, M. (2005) "Normalizing racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term neger", in Social Anthropology, Vol 13 (1), pp. 27-46 (19p)

Young, Lola (2000) ¿How do we look? Unfixing the Singular Black (Female) Subject¿. In P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg and A McRobbie (Eds) Without Guarantees: In honor of Stuart Hall. London: Verso 416-430. (14p); ISBN: 1859842879

(tot:195)

 

THEORIES OF CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT

This section presents selected articles on how to conceptualize culture in development from different disciplinary, interdisciplinary and thematic angels

Da Costa, Dia (2010). ¿Introduction: relocating culture in development and development in culture, Third World Quarterly, Volume 31:4, pp. 501-522 (21 p) (downloadable)

Appadurai, A (2004) "The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition" Rao, V. & Walton, M. Culture and Public Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 59-84 (25p); ISBN: 9780804747875

Benería, L. (2003) "Markets, Globalization and Gender" in Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered. New York: Routledge, Pp. 63-90 (27p); ISBN: 0415927072

Crush, J. (2003) " Introduction: Imagining Development" in Crush, J. (ed.) Power of Development. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-26 (26p); ISBN: 978415111768

Ishemo, S. "Culture, liberation and development"; in Eade, D. (2002) Development and Culture: Selected Essays from Development in Practice. Oxford: Oxfam pp 25-37 (13 p); ISBN: 0855984724

Watene Krushil and Mandy Yap (2015) ¿Culture and sustainable development: indigenous contributions, Journal of Global Ethics, Volume11 (1), pp. 51-55 (5 p) (downloadable)

Oware, P. (2005) "Situated Development: A Policy Option for Ghana?" in Engelstad, E. & Gerrard, S. (eds.) pp 101-124 (23p); ISBN: 9059720687

Førde, A. (2010) "From fish industry to "fish porn". Tourism transforming place" in Macleod and Gillespie: Sustainable Tourism in Rural Europe: Approaches to development. Routledge pp.196-209 (14 p). ISBN: 9780415547994

Rao A. and D. Kelleher (2003) "Institutions, organizations and gender equality in an era of globalizations", in Gender and development, Vol 11 (1), pp. 142-149 (7p)

Henkel, H. and R. Stirrat (2002) Participation as Spritual Duty, Empowerment as Secular Subjection. In B. Cooke and U. Kothari Participation: the new tyranny? London/NY: Zed books. Pp. 168-184 (16p); ISBN: 1-85649-794

David Mosse 2005. "The Social Production of Development Success" in Cultivating Development. London: Pluto pp157-184. (27 pages)

Robertson, A. F. 1984. "Structures and Processes". In People and the state. CUP. Pp85-139. (54p); ISBN: 052131948X

(tot: 258p)

PLANNING CULTURE AND PRACTICES

This section presents planning theory and practices in a comparative perspective

Abram, S. (2011) Culture and Planning. Aldershot: Ashgate. (138p). Downloadable e-book

Young, G. (2008) "The Culturization of Planning", in Planning Theory Vol 7 (1), pp. 71-91, (20p)

Sanyal, B. (2005) "Hybrid planning cultures: The search for the global cultural commons", in Sanyal (ed.) Comparative Planning Cultures, Routledge. pp 3-25. (22 p); ISBN: 0-415-95134-8

Friedman, J. (2005) "Planning cultures in transition", in Sanyal (ed.) Comparative Planning Cultures, Routledge. pp 29-44. (16 p)

Cowherd, R. (2005) "Does planning culture matter? Dutch and American models in Indonesian Urban Transformation", in Sanyal (ed.) Comparative Planning Cultures, Routledge. pp 165-192. (28 p)

Brox, O. (2006) "Out of poverty", in The political economy of rural development. Eburon. Pp 15-23. (9p)

Watson, V. (2003) "Conflicting Rationalities: Implications for Planning Theory and Ethics, Vol 4 (4), 395-407, (12p)

(tot. 245p.)

(This curriculum list includes a number of downloadable entries marked in bold)

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  • About the course
  • Campus: Tromsø |
  • ECTS: 10
  • Course code: SPL-3010
  • Tidligere år og semester for dette emnet