Geography

This course examines a range of contemporary environmental challenges in Australia and globally, with particular emphasis on climate change, energy transitions, and the role of resources. Through case studies, students will examine the history and emergence of these issues, the key actors involved, and the dynamics that shape their governance. Special attention will be given to the environmental and social impacts of the problems of resource extraction and climate change, as well as the strategies used to manage these two conjoined problems. The subject covers multiple dimensions (scientific, socio-cultural, economic, political) of environmental challenges and highlights the forms of knowledge and power that mediate human-environment relationships. Students will gain insights into the drivers of environmental conflicts and the mechanisms for their resolution, situating these discussions within broader questions of environmental governance, sustainability, and the global shift toward low-carbon energy systems.

Coastal regions are some of the most dynamic on Earth, not least because human and natural processes act in tight connection to each other. This dynamism poses one of the great societal challenges of the 21st Century. Building upon a basic, foundational knowledge of ocean and coastal processes covered in relevant courses within the first and second year ("Spaceship Earth" and "Physical Geography: Dynamic Earth"), students gain wide ranging theoretical and practical skills required to address those challenges. The lectures and seminars take students on a journey that highlights how the natural processes operating within estuaries and on coasts are a function of external factors (past and present climate, geology, human influences) and feedbacks in which the landforms themselves affect the operation of processes that shape the landforms. Equipped with this knowledge, and several examples from around the world, students put their knowledge into practice. A day field trip and practical exercise challenges students to apply what they have learnt to real-world coastal management problems. 

Students explore the ideas of "rural" and "rurality," how these ideas are constructed, and evaluates different definitions of these terms. It identifies both historical and ongoing processes that shape (and cause conflict) in rural spaces. As part of the European Union, Ireland is subject to a wide range of EU policies that influence agricultural, environmental, economic, and social sustainability. These policies and their impacts are discussed in conjunction with issues and processes that underpin rural decline.

This courses explores the nature and impacts of globalization in Africa. It focuses on the geography of HIV/AIDS, gender and development, China’s rising role in the continent, oil politics and the so called “resource curse” or paradox of plenty that Africa is the most resource rich continent in the world but also the poorest. Other topics covered included gender and the mobile phone revolution. 

This course charts the evolution of modern Ireland from the height of colonial expansion in the 17th Century, through the era of the landlords to the Act of Union, and through the Great Famine to the revolutionary period of the War of Independence and the creation of the Irish Free State. This course examines the historical geography of Ireland through the prisms of colonialism and decolonialism and challenges the notion of Ireland as a 19th Century colony raising questions about this island's position within the British Empire. The course focuses on both urban and rural areas and discuss the importance of historical geography in understanding the contemporary Irish landscape. Course includes a compulsory one-day fieldtrip.

The course highlights the ways in which economic and financial processes both shape, and are shaped by, space. In particular, the course focuses on understanding of how uneven development occurs, alongside exploring questions of how social inequalities arise and what causes economic and financial crises. In addition to this, the impacts of economic and financial processes on the environment and the climate crisis are considered. In doing so, the course engages with fundamental challenges facing contemporary societies and explores policy options to address them. Students gain a solid grounding in a number of theoretical approaches, concepts and debates pertaining to the economy, finance and space; explore economic and financial processes in the real world through case studies from a range of different contexts, including those in the Western capitalist core and (semi-)peripheries of post-socialist Eastern Europe; and debate policy options for the future. 

This course examines how environmental challenges have been, and continue to be, shaped by empire. These impacts affect how Earth's history, the biosphere, and the climate are known, and extend to both extractive technologies and financial relationships that enable extraction. But the effects of empire run deeper, to the very way the environment is understood. Using London as a launchpad for field trips and firsthand encounters, this course challenges students to rethink how ideas of the planet’s past, present, and future are shaped by empire. Students examine how empire has shaped, and continues to shape, environmental knowledge; explore sites and spaces of empire, such as where the material markers of scientific knowledge persist in advancing ways of knowing and relating to the environment today; investigate how contemporary modes of extraction maintain links to the legacies of empire, such as in and through financial activities; are provided with concrete analytical skills for situating contemporary challenges in historical context; and are encouraged to engage critically and thoughtfully with how environmental thought, and baselines for assessing environmental impacts, have been influenced by the data collected through empire.

The course provides a foundation for the understanding of fundamental concepts and current ideas in physical geography. The course begins by considering in broad terms the development of physical geography and the key concepts and phenomena of change and evolution, cycles, fluxes and events, the environment as resource and hazard, and the human impact on the environment. The remainder of the course explores these themes in more detail in the context of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, and biosphere. The course emphasizes the importance of spatial variation, and temporal and spatial scales, and interactions between human society and the biophysical environment.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on some main issues of the contemporary geographical thinking, starting from authors like David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, Neil Brenner, Ash Amin, and Nigel Thrift. Specific topics concerning the spatialization of the ideas of city, sovereignty, and border will be analyzed during the lessons. Theories, models and their implications will be connected to specific case studies. The course offers advanced critical instruments to understand some issues affecting contemporary geographical space both at local and global scale.