University of British Columbia

This course examines contemporary city development trends, policies, and practices across the globe as explored against the backdrop of culture and technology. Includes hands-on learning.

This course examines Socio-ecologies in 1491; Spanish colonialism and biological imperialism; contemporary coloniality and neoliberalism; and social movements.

This course examines the history of Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries: the growth of Islam and Christianity, the impact of European colonialism, the development of nationalism, and the variety of different political and social outcomes after independence

This course examines the fundamentals of accounting theory and the conceptual framework that underlies financial reporting in Canada, and the procedures currently used in accounting for assets, revenues, and expenses. 

In this course, students use GIS in primary research applications in conservation biology, crime analysis, and health geography. Theoretical and practical aspects are considered in a hands-on environment.

This course examines anthropological approaches to foodways and agricultural sustainability. It considers how small-scale producers and their communities fulfill their basic needs, and how they relate to the living world, including the plants and animals that are the sources of valued foods. It also undertakes the critical analysis of food movements, food systems and the socio-economic contexts of food provisioning and food production, particularly through ethnography.

This course examines contacts between and among diverse peoples in many of the places that came to be known as “the Pacific World”: Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the South Pacific, the Northwest Coast, and elsewhere, focusing mostly on the late 17th to early 19th centuries but reaching back to the first peopling of these territories. It explores the challenges – theoretical, moral, methodological, and beyond – of cultural encounter and makes connections between these early contacts the present day, thinking critically about the legacies of events that are not really in the past at all. 

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.