Human Geography

The fundamentals of human geography including the meanings of place, the impacts of globalization, multiculturalism, population change and movement, environmental history and politics, cultural geography, issues of uneven resource distribution, the role of colonialism in the modern shape of the world, agricultural geography, and urban geography. 

Please note: This course is typically offered in the winter term

This course takes a spatial approach to social problems widely considered important including energy, economy, the environment, urbanism, social division, public space, racism, geopolitics, migration. Probably the two largest problems faced by the world today are environmental degradation and regional, national and global inequality. Taking a spatial approach to these problems grounds and focuses them on the human and human-non-human relationships that shape the problems, making them at once more real and more personal to you. In this class you will discover that these very large issues are personal in another way: what you do matters. You make the world. In the way we move from place to place, in the way we heat our homes, in the way we choose to communicate with each other and consume, for example, we have an impact on the environment and on other people both near and far from us. Living responsibly is, in part being aware of our choices and their impacts. But of course, it is not quite that simple: the world has been made and unmade and is being made and unmade by you and others all the time. In this class we will work to understand the forces that make the world we live in and remake by our actions. In this course, through the relatively simple concepts of location and distance and the much more freighted concepts of space and especially place we will consider how economic development, city design, geopolitics and geo-commerce, policies on migration and population movement shape a landscape of inequality and desire.