Courses

GEOG C149A, Climates of the World

Catalog Description: This course provides a very basic description of atmospheric physics and dynamics at the large scale, followed by region-specific climate systems and response. We examine the inter-relationships between the role of climate variations and change to impacts, risk and adaptation. Each week's reading will be integrated into class participation with examples from recent weather events. Class begins with a brief weather review that focuses on a specific geographic region, followed by the topic of the day, a break, and class discussion of weather events...

GEOG 130, Food and the Environment

Catalog Description: How do human populations organize and alter natural resources and ecosystems to produce food? The role of agriculture in the world economy, national development, and environmental degradation in the Global North and the Global South. The origins of scarcity and abundance, population growth, hunger and obesity, and poverty.

Units: 4.0

Prerequisites: None

Formats:

Fall and/or Spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture...

GEOG 161, Rethinking Latin American Geographies Through Social Mapping

​​Catalog Description: Maps are important tools for our daily activities and spatial imaginaries; however, the ways in which official and dominant Western maps organized the information about the world occludes other ways of knowing territories. How are these “other” geographies represented? How are maps re-designed and appropriated to visualize different spatialities? In this course, students will be introduced to key themes and design practices in social cartography in Latin America. These reflect on collective or individual mapping practices to represent...

GEOG 126, Sonic Geographies

Catalog Description: This is a practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce audio works that document and interpret the built environment and people in public places throughout Oakland and Berkeley. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into autonomous works, and critiquing them along the way, this course will engage with questions of how sound can help us understand the people we encounter and the spaces we move through everyday.

Units: ...

GEOG 142, Global Climate Variability and Change

Catalog Description: The course presents a conceptual basis for understanding of the workings of the global climate system, and how they conspire to bring about change. The goal is to give the student a climate dynamics basis for understanding global climate change. Covered topics include observations of the climate system; the earth's energy balance; atmospheric radiative transfer; atmospheric circulation; the role of the ocean and the cryosphere; climate variability on various timescales; climate feedbacks and climate change.

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GEOG 189, Visual Geography

Catalog Description: This is a practice-based course in which students will shoot and edit photographic works that document and interpret the landscape and people along San Pablo Avenue from Oakland to Hercules, CA. Through the process of making photographs, analyzing them, editing them into a body of work, and critiquing them along the way, this course will engage with questions of how photography can help us understand the people we encounter and the spaces we move through everyday.

Units: 4.0

Prerequisites: Consent...

GEOG 178, Racial Ecologies

Catalog Description: This course will introduce the ways race and racism are relevant to ecological processes and management through topics that broadly span both environmental and climate justice, while also exploring how we can understand non-dominant ways of knowing and relating to the environment, particularly focusing on Black and Indigenous ecologies and ecological relationships. In this course, students will learn the interconnections between ecological processes and the complexities that shape our social world. Students will learn how to apply a racial ecologies...

GEOG C154, Post-Apocalyptic Botany

Catalog Description: An in-depth study of taxonomy, with a special focus on plants. We will first learn how plants are classified and how they fit into the tree of life, and what practical challenges exist for current practitioners of botany. Next, we will study the history of the ideas underlying classification and their connections to colonial, extractivist empire-building activities since Linnaeus. Finally, we will work to create a new taxonomy that acknowledges and imagines other relationships with plants.

Units: 4.0

Prerequisites...

GEOG C148, Biogeography

Catalog Description: The course will provide a historical background for the field of biogeography and the ecological foundations needed to understand the distribution and abundance of species and their changes over time. It will also discuss developing technologies (including genomic tools and environmental models) together with the availability of big data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools to examine the relevance of the field to global change biology, conservation, and invasion biology, as well as sustainable food systems and ecosystem...

GEOG 147, Communicating Climate Science

Catalog Description: For upper division undergraduate students interested in improving their conceptual understanding of climate science and climate change through engaging in activities, demonstrations, and discussions, while also developing their science communication skills to advance the public’s climate literacy. The course will combine science content, active teaching and learning methods based on how people learn, and how to engage in effective interactions

Units: 3.0

Prerequisites: Prior coursework...