Courses

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...

GEOG C135, Water Resources and the Environment

Catalog Description: Distribution, dynamics, and use of water resources in the global environment. Water scarcity, water rights, and water wars. The terrestrial hydrologic cycle. Contemporary environmental issues in water resource management, including droughts, floods, saltwater intrusion, water contamination and remediation, river restoration, hydraulic fracturing, dams, and engineering of waterways. The role of water in ecosystem processes and geomorphology. How water resources are measured and monitored. Basic water resource calculations. Effects of climate change on...

GEOG 127, Geographic Film Production

Catalog Description: What makes a film geographical? How can we explore humans’ relationships to their environment through sound and image? How might we make nonfiction films which foreground place and give it actual agency and voice? How can we use documentary film practices to depict place, culture, society, gesture, movement, rhythm and flow in new and exciting ways? This is a production workshop where each student will conceptualize, shoot, and edit one short documentary film project that centralizes some aspect/s of geographic thought.

Units: 4....

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: 4.0

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GEOG 180, Field Methods for Physical Geography

Catalog Description: Field introduction to geomorphology, biogeography, and California landscapes. Students conduct field experiments and mapping exercises. Results of field projects are analyzed and presented as a technical report. Oral field reports are required for some trips.

Units: 5.0

Prerequisites: GEOG 1 or equivalent, and consent of instructor

Formats:

Fall and/or Spring: 15 weeks - 0 hours of lecture per week...