GEO - Geography

This course provides an overview of the landforms, climate, ecology, populations, economy, politics, and cultures of the regions of the world. Through attention to particular regions and their inter-relations, we will examine global issues such as development, migration, inequality, urbanization, nationalism, conflict, trade, and climate change.

This course examines theories, conflicts, and crises in global natural resource utilization. We will explore the causes of looming social and ecological threats and opportunities in areas such as global warming, food security, water wars, pollution, biodiversity, inequality, and development. We will evaluate debates over population and scarcity, commodities and institutions, environmental ethics, political economy, and socio-ecological change, and use them to inform our understandings of the promises and pitfalls of proposed personal, cultural, economic, and political solutions to resource dilemmas.

Why are some areas wealthy and some areas poor? Why do particular kinds of economic activities cluster in regions like Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and China’s Pearl River Delta? How do landscape, politics, and culture shape economic fortunes? There are spatial-geographic dimensions to all global economic activities: resource extraction, production, work, logistics, consumption, finance, debt, technological innovation, migration, and social reproduction. Considering geographic scales from the household division of labor up through global commodity chains, we'll explore the historical development, current dilemmas, and future directions of the world economy— with an eye towards crucial questions of growth, sustainability, and justice.

This course presents the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Students will learn how to design and create digital maps and will master the basic techniques of spatial analysis. We will use maps and other GIS tools to uncover the hidden geo-spatial relationships that shape the world around us. Through lectures, discussion and hands-on exercises and projects, the course will explore the many applications of GIS in the social sciences and environmental sciences as well as in the humanities, public policy and urban affairs.

How are our identities, cultures and social relationships shaped by the physical world around us? How, in turn, do our cultural patterns come to shape our natural and built environments? This course provides an overview of cultural geography. It covers the basics as well as new developments in cultural geographic theory. The main aim is to understand relationships between cultures and environments through geographical analyses of social processes, landscapes, cultural meanings, place-making and identities. We will examine questions of power, performance, diffusion, diversity, hybridity, homogenization, hegemony, conflict, expression and resistance through case studies of local, regional and global spatial-cultural dynamics.

How do cities grow and change? What environmental, economic, social, and political forces bring them into being? Why are they the source of so much of the world’s economic and cultural dynamism and at the same time the site of so much dysfunction and conflict? In this course we will use writing to investigate the geographic contours of key urban challenges such as economic development, segregation, inequality, housing, slum growth, gentrification, environmental justice, violence, downsizing, and urban sprawl. We will wrestle with the opportunities and constraints facing urban reformers and city planners, and explore visions of urban social justice and sustainability.

This course involves practical work in placements with organizations such as non-profits, businesses, government agencies, museums, or archives. Requires permission of the History Department Chair. Graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This course counts towards the Geography Minor.