3.0

Average Course Rating

The “grabbing” of land and natural resources has, in recent years, generated widespread political conflict across the world and put dispossession on the agenda of academics and policy-makers. Nevertheless, compared to other social relations of power, land dispossession has not been central to scholarly or public understandings of capitalism, the state, development, or politics. In this class, we will collectively explore the nascent field that we might call the sociology of dispossession. We will examine existing theories of dispossession, and proceed to challenge, reconstruct or supplant those theories as we consider a wide range of historical examples of dispossession from the English Enclosures and colonial plunder to contemporary urban redevelopment and rural land grabs. This is a reading- and writing-intensive seminar.