International Relations of Asia-Pacific

coming soon

Mapping Powers: Political Geographies Across Scales (2026 spring)

This 5-week course introduces students to a foundational insight of political geography: space is political, and politics is spatial. Rather than treating maps, borders, or regions as natural facts, we explore how they are produced through power—shaped by empire, war, mobility, and everyday life. Students will learn to see world politics across multiple scales—bodies, neighborhoods, nations, the planet— attending to how gender, race, and colonialism structure spatial orders. Designed for first-year and sophomore students from any major, the course combines short readings, hands-on workshops, and guided archival encounters at Hopkins Sheridan Libraries to teach both conceptual tools and beginner-level mapping and digital storytelling skills using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Drawing on examples from the Asia/Pacific region and Baltimore, we move from imagined geographies and archival cartographies to war zones and local landscapes where global power relations become visible. The course builds toward a final counter-mapping project: students create an original StoryMap of a place that matters to them—at any scale—challenging a dominant spatial narrative and visualizing connections that conventional maps obscure.

Syllabus

Intimate Geographies of Gender and Power

What does gender justice mean, and who gets to define it? Categories we often take for granted—women’s rights, empowerment, and protection—have specific genealogies shaped by projects of empire, civilization, and war. This course begins by examining how liberal frameworks of gender justice emerged through colonial governance and postwar reconstruction. The course explores gender and power through the lens of intimate geographies—the everyday spaces and relations in which global structures of war, empire, and security are lived, reproduced, and contested. Focusing on Asia and the Pacific as a region shaped by imperialism, war, militarization, and transpacific mobility, it traces how women’s rights, protection, and vulnerability have been framed, mobilized, and governed from the interwar period of the 1920s to the post–Cold War era. Through interdisciplinary readings in feminist geography, postcolonial studies, and critical war studiesalongside films, visual archives, and primary sources—students develop critical skills in contextualizing diverse materials and tracing connections across scales. Rather than studying gender “beyond the Global West” as a fixed category or a merely identitarian project, the course asks how these histories and structures shape the terms through which we understand justice, care, and violence in our own lives. Students learn to read power relationally, connecting intimate experience to transnational forces and questioning the universalizing frameworks that often define “progress” in gender politics.

Syllabus

International Security and Geopolitics

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Regions and World Politics

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