COURSES
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Taught by Jason Jackson
Do markets constitute a morally fair & economically efficient means of societal organization? Why have market institutions & logics become so pervasive in modern society? In this course, students are exposed to interdisciplinary theories of modern capitalism that highlight the political & moral dimensions of markets & their role in shaping the contemporary social order in both developing & industrialized worlds. Themes include colonialism & state formation; managerial & bureaucratic expertise; technology & industrialization; consumerism, credit & consumption; financial capitalism, subprime mortgage crisis & sovereign debt crisis; & inequality & the ‘shared economy’.
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Taught by Caley Horan & Jason Jackson
Discussion-based seminar that offers an introduction to the history of capitalism & a broad overview of debates concerning its impacts on social life, with a particular focus on the modern American experience. The U.S. occupies a central position in today’s capitalist global system & has played a key role in shaping both the development of capitalism & critical responses to its advance. Drawing on primary historical documents & secondary literature from multiple disciplines, the course examines capitalism’s relationships to race, class, & gender, as well as the impacts of business & government, nature & environment, & finance & technology on economic transformation in the United States & beyond.
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Taught by Delia Wendel & Jason Jackson
Gateway I is the core History and Theory of Planning course in the Master in City Planning (MCP) curriculum. Gateway I is organized in two half-semester modules. The first aims to highlight the challenges inherent in planning’s focus on the public interest from a political economy perspective. The second offers engagements with the ethical dilemmas that practitioners confront in planning for the public interest in contexts of entrenched social and racial inequity. Using a combination of lecture and workshop formats, the course provides a primer for exploring relationships of power and difference that have shaped urban spaces and are poised to recast urban futures.
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Co-taught by Jason Jackson & Balakrishnan Rajgopal
This course is delivered a two-semester sequence. The fall semester course provides advanced graduate students with a foundation in the evolution of theories of international development, spanning disciplinary approaches in the political economy of development, development economics, law and development and the history of capitalism. The spring semester course builds on this foundation by focussing on a few select topics at the frontier of international development theory and policy.
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Taught by Jason Jackson
This course highlights the structural forces and conditions—including those shaped by capitalism, imperialism, and state-market-society relations—from which modern planning has emerged. To do so it grounds the history of planning in structures of capitalism and imperialism, highlighting the role of displacement, violence and ecology in planning processes. The course moves across time and space showing how race is central in capitalism, imperialism and ultimately, planning across diverse global contexts.