Courses

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 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 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 108, Geographies of Energy: The Rise and Fall of the Fossil Fuel Economy

Catalog Description: This course surveys the historical relationship between fossil fuels and the capitalist economy. Beginning with the origin of intensive fossil fuel use in the early modern world, and then moving through the industrial epochs of coal and then oil, this course asks how have fossil fuels shaped the trajectory of our modern economic world? Students will investigate the broad, structural impact these resources have had on labor relations, economic development, culture, the environment, politics, and more. Framed around the current,...

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...

GEOG 107, Waste Matters: Exploring the Abject, Discarded, and Disposable

Catalog Description: This experiential undergraduate seminar seeks to interrupt traditional managerial discourses about waste that view it as a technocratic problem and instead understand waste as deeply embedded in society, culture, and politics. In this class we will explore the myriad sociocultural, political, and economic processes on “the problem of waste” and also open up the classroom setting to an intimate and immersive engagement with the various lived experiences of people whom inhabit and are entangled ‘with/in/by waste’. To do so, the...

GEOG C100, Art and Ecology

Catalog Description: Taught by faculty from the Departments of Art Practice, Geography, and History of Art, this Big Ideas course is a space where we collectively study, think, and make art about the cataclysmic ecological crises that threaten our planet today. Examining possible notions of the animal, the botanic, the oceanic, the geologic, and the atmospheric, among other themes, the course prompts embodied responses to this urgent moment through complex, experimental, scholarly, and practice-based interventions. The aim is to read human...

GEOG 104, The Black City: Oakland California

Catalog Description: Since the late 1990s, Oakland has experienced considerable racial and economic restructuring. Oakland’s formerly prominent Black population has dwindled precipitously, as the city lost nearly 25% of its Black population since 2010. Cultural institutions, like churches, barbershops, blues clubs, and restaurants that once served its vast working-class population were replaced by trendy shops and hipster outlets. Students will engage the sense of loss and possibility arising in the city as they participate in a series of in-class...

GEOG 85, Mapping: Space, Cartography and Power

Catalog Description: From mapping protests to the polar ice caps, colonialism to crises, board games to the baroque, this course offers an introduction to critical cartography and the politics of maps. Broadly centered on the contemporary carto-politics of the Pacific, each lecture focuses on a different field of mapping - such as protest mapping, ocean mapping or star mapping - comparing the techniques and conceptual underpinnings of cartography as a representational tool. It explores the way in which maps continue to reflect and shape our worlds, how...

GEOG 81, Data, Evidence, and Methods in Geographic Inquiry

Catalog Description: This course introduces students to the many kinds of qualitative and quantitative information, data, and evidence that geographers use across the range of fields of study within geography, and to methods for collecting and analyzing these kinds of information.

Units: 5.0

Prerequisites: None

Formats:

Fall and/or Spring: 15 weeks - 2 hours of lecture and 4 hours of laboratory per week

Grading Basis...