HISTORY 82N: Development and Dispossession
General Education Requirements
Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.
Course Description
Where do our ideas about human development, progress and improvement come from? This class asks you to consider these ideas from a global historical perspective, including examples from the United States, Turkey, Germany, Palestine, Ghana, India and Indonesia. How do ideas about human progress intersect with the development of nonhuman landscapes, built environments and infrastructure? What are the intended and unintended consequences of the projects and plans these ideas inspire? In particular, we will examine how projects aimed at improvement have legitimated and shaped colonial expansion, large-scale infrastructure schemes, and population exchanges, alongside human experiences of dispossession, loss, and exile. At the end of the course, we will bring our investigation of development and dispossession back to our own learning at Stanford in our current context of climate crisis and the fast-paced changes of generative AI. This course will prepare you to critically engage your peers, colleagues and a wider public in speech and writing. It will also provide conceptual frameworks for approaching your further coursework at Stanford after your first year.
Meet the Instructor: Nora Barakat
“I am a historian of the modern Middle East and the late Ottoman Empire. I grew up in a small village in the interior of Maine in the northeastern United States, and subsequently spent time in rural regions of Jordan. I've lived in cities and megacities since, including Cairo, New York, Amman, Berkeley, Istanbul, Doha and Abu Dhabi. However, my historical research has focused on places considered marginal targets of "development" from the nineteenth century until the present. My scholarship engages the intersections and contradictions between what was written about the people inhabiting these landscapes and what they said and wrote about themselves. I am also interested in how these dynamics of development play out on regional, national and global scales. In class, I will introduce some of the methods I use to approach these topics historically: reading court records and laws to access people's stories and administrative hierarchies, and using visualizations like maps to understand both spatial relationships and different historical ideas about space.”
