Geography

The course develops an awareness of the structure and function of tropical forest ecosystems and provides an intellectually stimulating understanding of the biophysical, ecological and anthropic processes which characterize these environments. To develop an awareness of the human impacts on these important systems and the kinds of geographical tools available for monitoring, modelling, and mitigation of the worst effects of these impacts. 

The course examines contemporary social theoretical explanations of the salience of risk within so-called "late modern" society.  The course then explores the factors that shape the politics, processes, and outcomes of risk governance, as well as the factors that shape public perceptions of environmental risk and the associated problems posed for policy-makers, businesses, and other stakeholders in communicating risk issues.  The course finishes with reflections on the future management of environmental risk issues.

This course begins with exploring how digital technologies have proliferated every aspect of our daily lives, around work, travel, leisure, consumption, production, and reproduction, in ways that are simultaneously virtual and material. This focuses on how digital technologies, infrastructures, devices, logics, and methods are blurring the divides across analog and digital spaces. It then looks at how digital technologies can simultaneously break down and reinforce inequalities along class, race, gender, sexuality through new "digital divides." Finally, it examines the implications this has for producing new forms of digital citizenships and claims to social and spatial justice.

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.