Courses

GEOG C136, Terrestrial Hydrology

Catalog Description: A quantitative introduction to the hydrology of the terrestrial environment including lower atmosphere, watersheds, lakes, and streams. All aspects of the hydrologic cycle, including precipitation, infiltration, evapotranspiration, overland flow, streamflow, and groundwater flow. Chemistry and dating of groundwater and surface water. Development of quantitative insights through problem solving and use of simple models. This course requires one field experiment and several group computer lab assignments.

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GEOG N130, 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: 3.0

Prerequisites: None

Formats:

Summer: 6 weeks - 7.5 hours of lecture per week...

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 129, Ocean Worlds

Catalog Description: This course explores oceanic connections, movements, livelihoods, developments and imaginations in the modern world. We read the oceanic novel Moby Dick and think across themes including the geography of the Mediterranean, the riotous Atlantic, the imperial Pacific, the anticolonial Caribbean and the Muslim Indian Ocean; and we look at ports, containers, oceanic infrastructure and precarious marine livelihoods today. We read thinkers from our oceanic planet to imagine an oceanic way of thinking.

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GEOG 124, Urban Sites and City Life

Catalog Description: This course explores historical, cultural, and socio-economic geographies of cities, city life, and the organization of metropolitan political power. It is primarily focused on the U.S., but will draw on select examples from abroad. We will investigate urbanization as a general process and the resulting physical, social, cultural, and political economic forms of cities and examine the ways that cities have addressed tensions emerging from segregation and urban renewal. We will also look at both the ways in which social inequality is...

GEOG 114, Thinking Globally, Acting Regionally: Geographies of Climate Change

Catalog Description: This writing-intensive course engages all fields of inquiry and forms of evidence in the geographies of climate change. Course topics include impacts on human and biophysical systems; mitigation and adaptation; global, regional and local policy efforts; gender and climate; and environmental justice and human rights. Regional and historical approaches underlie all topics.
Students will use common rhetorical strategies in writing; trans-disciplinary forms of evidence for characterizing, analyzing, narrating and explaining;...

GEOG 123, Postcolonial Geographies

Catalog Description: Postcolonial studies focus on how processes of colonialism/imperialism continue even after the formal dissolution of empire. A central argument of this course is that critical human geography can make important contributions to understanding the interconnections between forces at play in different parts of the world. Drawing on concepts of space, place, culture, power, and difference, its purpose is to provide a set of tools for grappling with the conditions in which we find ourselves, and for thinking about the possibilities for...

GEOG 110, Critical Economic Geographies

Catalog Description: This course examines the fundamentally geographic nature of our current, historically unique system of material reproduction—capitalism—and how capitalist logics have shaped places and forms of life over the course of the system’s growth and change. We will explore how capitalist processes shape the rise (and inevitable fall) of places, techniques, social worlds, and divisions of labor, and pay close attention to the power relations and spatial organization that accompany them. The course provides a grounding in critical...

GEOG C112, Global Development: Theory, History, Geography

Catalog Description: This course examines whether the convergence between the ‘new Right’ and the ‘new Left’ has successfully addressed the central challenge of contemporary global development studies. It asks students to assess the multiple, nonlinear, and interconnected paths of change in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East that are now taking place. It explores the context of intensified global integration and capitalist development. Students will consider what changes in this context mean for larger social change, especially given...

GEOG 105, Black Geographic Thought

Catalog Description: Black Geographies considers the concept of geography to examine multiple orientations through engaging critical race, black feminist, diaspora and queer studies. The course covers approaches to the geographical categorization of blackness through two organizing frameworks. The first, the ‘black geographic,’ ‘geography’ serves as a productive analytic for examining the lived experiences, conceptual limits, and theoretical purchase of blackness through the reading of some seminal and contemporary texts by black geographers. The...