Urban Studies Proseminar

Catalog description

This scholar-oriented seminar explores how academic researchers from different disciplines define researchable questions, craft research designs, and contribute to knowledge through an examination of important and/or recently published books and monographs with an urban focus. Through rigorous textual analysis, the seminar explores the economic and political philosophies that have come to shape 20th and 21st century urbanism. Ultimately, it is intended to offer a range of analytic approaches to understanding urban structures and processes that urban scholars, policy planners, and community activists seek to influence. We will focus primarily on postwar Midwestern and Northeastern U.S Cities, emphasizing the political economy tradition as well as the crisis of representation. We will evaluate competing analytic trends in the social sciences, critically analyzing urban research from the disciplines of sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and social welfare.