Geography

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others.

This course offers a study of the theories and methods of human geography based on review of the main works and authors in contemporary geographical thought.

This course explores the evolution of humanized spaces and their depiction in cartography across history and delves into the intricate relationships between populations and social landscapes. It examines the dynamics of urban spaces, from processes to structures, and the diversity of rural environments. Additionally, this course analyzes how economic activities shape territories and their implications on spatial organization. 

The course commences with an overview of contemporary CC/EC discourses, debates, the evidential base and international governance initiatives to address the challenge, including IPCC reports, UNFCCC and Stern, as well as regional and national-scale reports. It then examines the nature of urbanism and urbanization as linked networks and systems of urban areas embedded within multiscalar hinterlands. This provides the context for detailed examination of how urbanization and urbanism contribute to CC/EC; how CC/EC is affecting, and is predicted to affect, towns and cities in different regions, and how urban authorities and diverse groups of urban residents experience, perceive and respond to the phenomenon. Key concepts and literatures assessed include disaster risk, vulnerability, resilience, mitigation, adaptation, transformation, global(ized) urbanism and teleconnections, and the claimed conflict between tackling climate change and meeting immediate development needs.

This course discusses the historic evolution of rural spaces in Mexico and the world and the origins of problems facing the Mexican countryside. It focuses on policies in various countries around the world and their effects on global agrarian structures. This course analyzes methods of information management about rural areas in Mexico and the world and global trends related to rural organization in the future.

This course offers an overview of the history and recent transformations within the field of cultural geography including contemporary theories and practices. The four thematic units are: the objects of cultural geography; nature, landscape, and cultural geography; culture, territory, and identity in a global world; space, difference and power, and geographies of inclusion and exclusion.

This course covers theories and processes of contemporary urban development from a critical political economy perspective, addressing urban problems and policy responses in our rapidly urbanizing world. The course examines what urbanization means to the state, to (global/domestic) businesses, and ordinary citizens, focusing on a selected set of key themes that are pertinent to the understanding of urban injustice. Such themes may include, but are not limited to, the understanding of the (social) production of unequal urban space, global circulations of urbanism, gentrification, displacement, and dispossession. Case studies are largely drawn from a diverse range of cities across the world, providing opportunities for students to contest urban theories that have largely been rooted in the experiences of the advanced economies.

This is a research-led and research-based course, providing an introduction to the fields of cultural and historical geography. It has a slightly different emphasis to other courses because it explores some of the philosophies and methodologies used to create cultural and historical geographies, and is designed to give students the experience and confidence to undertake their own independent research using UCL’s museum and archive collections. The course encourages students to think critically about questions of representation, different kinds of materials, forms of analysis, and engage with questions of politics and ethics.

This course introduces students to geographical scholarship that has sought to explain, understand, and critically analyze the manifold relationships between space and society in different contexts. The course familiarizes students with innovative geographical research exploring issues such as, for example, environment and uneven development; culture, the global, and the local; transnationalism and migration; gender, race, identity; politics, the state, and regions; empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism; nature, materiality, and non-human agencies.

This course explores the relationship between landscape-scale spatial patterns and the ecological, physical, and social process that drive environmental change. It then applies this to real-world problems to achieve sustainable landscapes in the context of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and social-ecological outcomes.