University of British Columbia

This course examines city systems and theories of urban location; internal spatial structure of the city; commercial and industrial location; social areas; neighborhood and land use change; and urban trends and public policy.

This course examines visual art practices and movements within the social, economic, philosophical, and political contexts of Europe and North America, circa 1900-1960. Concepts to be considered and interrogated through a decolonial, feminist, and Marxist lens include: abstraction, the avant-garde, expressionism, modernity, modernism, primitivism, and the readymade.

This course examines a geographical perspective on cities and the urban process in the context of contemporary globalization. It examines how differentiated livelihood possibilities and practices in cities across the globe have been shaped by global processes, local policies and initiatives, as well as the transformative possibilities of citizen agency. In other words, it will examine the interplay between the structuring forces of (primarily) capitalist globalization, on the one hand, and the agency and every-day actions of urban residents, on the other, in order to understand and explain cities and their transformations.

This course examines theoretical and practical aspects of Geographic Information Systems, including cartographic modelling, digital terrain models, management issues, and spatial interpolation.

This course examines conceptions and experiences of the body, health, illness and healing from the ancient world to the early modern period. It will focus on the historical development of western medicine in relation to religion, politics, science and culture. Topics covered include changing views of male and female bodies; the meanings of health, illness, disease, and disability; the evolving status of healers and medical practitioners; the role of religion, magic and natural philosophy in this world; and the rise of medical institutions such as hospitals, asylums, pharmacies, universities and anatomy theaters. 

This course will introduce students to important concepts, processes, and debates in World History (and Global History) from ancient times to the end of the 15th century. A fundamental goal of this course is to recognize that the premodern global past was not a Eurocentric phenomenon. It will de-center Europe in it's study of the past and will pursue a greater plurality of perspectives than what historians have often traditionally examined. Students will be introduced to the practice of history: our goal is not to absorb random historical “facts” but to learn how to think historically and to strive to understand how past people understood the world around them. Throughout the course, students will reflect on the enduring relevance of the premodern past to their own lives and society in the 21st century.

This course examines forms of economic development; changing location of economic activities and functions; implications for government and politics; and local strategies for growth and equity.

This course examines the relationship between visual art and technology, through a history of new media and the emergence of mass audiences. The aim is to illuminate a constellation of artifacts, publics, power dynamics, and patterns of experience that are equally significant to art history and to media studies; the methods of formal analysis, historical contextualization, and critical self-reflexivity will be foregrounded. Case studies are chosen to explore the origins of mass media and modern visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present. We will consider the experimental and competitive environments of creative practice and technical innovation; tensions between democratization and commercialization in the circulation of images, identities, and world-views; powers of voicing, silencing, belonging and exclusion in spaces of representation and the formation of publics; and the changing social and perceptual conditions of spectatorship. We will examine the effects of participatory and immersive frameworks that gather large heterogeneous audiences in a shared space (such as festivals, exhibitions, panoramas, and cinema) and images for the masses that are optimized for isolated, partitioned interfaces (such as print, photography, virtual reality, and social media).

This course examines the spread of capitalism across the world in the late 19th – early 20th century, and the variety of responses to this phenomenon. Topics to be covered include the golden age of globalization in the early years of the century, the gold standard, the economic crises of 1914-1945, the divisions of the Cold War world, and the rise of the Bretton Woods system, and, ultimately, the turn toward global integration at the end of the twentieth century. The students will trace the patterns of change in the international markets, investments, and global trade and try to highlight the changes brought about by social movements, political ideologies, and shifts in the economic balance of power.