Geography

This is a highly interdisciplinary course about natural hazards and risk. This course is structured around a series of lectures and discussions aimed at understanding current methods for assessing, communicating, and visualizing risk and reducing disaster for hazards that are natural (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, mass wasting, floods, climate and extreme temperatures, multi-hazards) and environmental (e.g. heavy-metal contamination, chemical hazards), and the complex relationship that exists between these hazards and society. It is expected that students are already familiar with the material in the 2nd year Natural Hazards module (5SSG2042).

The course provides an introduction to the rapidly growing field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for social science students. Some of the most important theories and practices of GIS, within social sciences are presented. The course also addresses some key conceptual debates and developments in GIS. Practical tasks include exercises in a computer lab environment, and common analytical methods and tools within GIS are introduced. The course makes aware of the potential uses of GIS as well as its application within various fields of study.

This introductory course deals with changes in our physical and biological environment on a variety of timescales, looks into the causes of natural environmental change and examines the progressive environmental impact of people from the last glacial stage up to the present. This course aims to place present-day environmental issues such as climate change, evolution, biodiversity and human-environment interactions in a long-term temporal perspective, arguing that an understanding of the present and prediction of the future both require an examination of the past.

This course enables students to understand how money and finance, and processes of global political economy more broadly, enable, shape, and condition the way development, environmental governance, and conservation are practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. The course draws on economic geography, but also social, financial, and cultural geography, anthropology, development studies, and work on society and environment relations. Although the course will have a major reference to sub-Saharan Africa - including Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and South Africa - it also includes examples of financialization, conservation, and eco-system services from the UK, the Caribbean, and Asia. 

This course explores the diverse roles that money and finance have played across time and space, and the roles that we want them to play. Students explore debates about debt and democracy – from geographies of offshore tax and state financing, to the use of financial assets and property investment as the basis for social welfare. Students consider geographies of finance and development, including inequalities and inclusion in the global north, efforts to create more ethical and postcolonial approaches to finance, and the rapidly changing landscape of fintech. Themes may vary.

This course explores the changing relationships between health, lifestyles, and the city in both historical and contemporary contexts across the Global North and South. Focusing on a wide range of case studies, the course will critically examine the emergence of the idea of "lifestyle" as an explicit public health concern and, in addition, an object of geographic analysis. The creation of lifestyle as a problem to be addressed comes as part of a wider acknowledgement of the capacity of certain features of urban landscapes to perpetuate the risk of certain "lifestyle" conditions such as obesity that result from an amalgam of factors including sedentary behavior and poor diets, perpetuated by the risks presented by the places in which people live, work, travel, and play. 

This course introduces students to the field of Human Geography, which is the study of the dynamic relations between people and places. Students gain an understanding of such complex processes as globalization and development, and the regional disparities in prosperity and inequality that result from these. The discussion evolves around the three main themes of economic, political, and social actions, all of which significantly shape the spatial organization of human activities. The course presents a general overview of the discipline, provides the opportunity to develop independent critical thinking skills, and offers insight into practical skills and tools that can be applied to a wide range of research settings. Overall, the course supplies the foundation for further, more topic specific, courses that focus on the spatial analysis of political and socio-economic phenomena at later stages.

The course introduces students to different types and sources of pollution and their distribution and control methods, and students explore risk assessment strategies and the source-pathway-receptor framework to assess their risks to human and environmental health.

This course develops an understanding of the theory and methods involved in the creation, storage, analysis, and presentation of geospatial data. Using industry standard software, the course provides the knowledge and skills to tackle advanced problem solving using Geographic Information Systems. This knowledge is fundamental not only to research in physical geography, environmental science, and many other disciplines, but provides a critical skill set used widely within a range of industries (including environmental management, local and national government, the utilities, and the insurance sector).