Geography

Incorporating the human security discourse into sustainable development, this course focuses on four themes representing overarching approaches for developing sustainability solutions, whose interests they represent, and their implications on the "individual" as the referent object of security and sustainable development. Engaging the human security components allows students to understand the implications of sustainable development, or lack thereof, on the people whose development is to be sustained. Through critical interrogation of approaches to the sustainable development, this course explores the benefits and trade-offs implicit in different dimensions of sustainability and their implications. The course builds on the core material of SD1000 and SD1004.

This course provides an introduction to political and economic geography. The course advances two key arguments, namely that politics and the economy are (1) tightly intertwined and (2) innately geographical phenomenon. It explores how politics, the economy, and the environment are constituted through different sets of actors and their interrelationships. It mobilizes core geographical concepts, notably place, space, scale and territory, along with notions of power and resistance, to offer a distinctive perspective on processes of uneven development in the contemporary world.

The course introduces students to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) using both the current industry standard software, and the increasing number of web-based geographical tools. The course provides a theoretical background that enables students to look critically at the subject while providing them with practical skills in using these tools. Students gain direct experience of a range of data collection, data capture, database, analytical, and visualization techniques.

This course introduces methodologies in geographical research, including research design, data collection and organization, interpretation, and analysis of results. Emphases are placed on how to undertake field surveys and how to analyze geographic information by exploring topics such as urban sustainability and the impact of COVID-19 on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The course enables students to acquire familiarity with, and practice of, quantitative and qualitative research methods in urban geography. Different ways of presenting and interpreting research results from geographic perspectives will be examined. The course also explores how to draw inferences from maps, graphs, and other sources to seek spatial patterns, relationships, and connections.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
(1) Understand the “field” – that is a complex social, environmental, and economic space in which we apprehend the world.
(2) Understand the “fieldwork” – that is a vital geographical tool for investigating the characteristics of the real world.
(3) Undertake geographical fieldwork that involves formulating a geographic inquiry question, gathering data, analyzing the results, and reaching conclusions.
(4) Understand the interconnectedness of human, social, economic, and environmental sustainability through conducting a field-based student term project.

 

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 explores the historical and contemporary complexities of Irish culture, place, and landscape through select case-studies, thematic and/or locational, and through a range of theoretical concerns from both archaeology and geography. It engages the key challenge of carefully contextualizing and historicizing understandings of landscape, heritage, and environment, and exploring urgent contemporary questions of landscape/environment sustainability, governmentality, and management. The course provides an introduction to the various ways in which human societies interact(ed) with their environment, and will provides both chronological depth and thematically-specific case-study knowledge of key sites and spaces across the island of Ireland. Particular attention is given to the range of competing discourses on issues of environment, landscape, and development in both rural and urban Ireland and their implications for communities in the present and the future. 

This course focuses on the distribution of economic activities to identify and contrast the territorial scope of their spatial organization. It analyzes both economic information and spatial relationship to explore geographic phenomena.

In this course students think critically about diversity and inequality and how they are manifest in place, focusing particularly on local scales. Students learn to see the places around them as a product of complex processes that reflect and reinforce social differences. In studying the making and meaning of place students consider themes such as international and internal migration, housing structures and gentrification, neighborhood representations, and place belonging. Students interrogate how social and spatial sorting (or stratification, or segregation) happens along lines of race/ethnicity, class, and age, and who is advantaged and disadvantaged. In this course students work with a variety of types of evidence (data) and be encouraged to appreciate how this can provide deeper and broader interrogations of social phenomena. There is considerable focus on the UK but also examples from elsewhere, and the inherent themes and theories are applicable globally.

This course studies the earth’s climate history from the deep past to recent climate change. It spotlights changes on geological time scales as well as variations over glacial-interglacial cycles, and recent human induced changes. There is a particular focus on the climate archives in the large polar ice sheets and the geological record. It introduces reading the paleo-climate archives and judging their uncertainties. This course provides an introduction to and general knowledge of what can be learned from paleo-climate archives about global and regional climate on timescales from a few thousand to millions of years. It provides an update of new records of past climate and their interpretation and the background for a critical view on man made climate change.

This course offers a broad introduction to the most relevant features of human geography in Asia. The first part of this course offers insights into main themes that are relevant across this diverse continent. As Asia is huge and the semester is short, this course focuses on Southeast Asia in the second part of the semester. On one hand Southeast Asia includes successful and developed countries like Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia, while it also includes countries where poverty is still widespread and difficult to reduce. Also, Southeast Asian countries both look at the USA and China for economic and political cooperation.  

This course discusses a range of prominent issues such as colonial legacies; nation-building projects amidst ethnic and religious diversity; natural disasters and climate change; economic geographical patterns; poverty; socioeconomic inequality; spatial disparities; land governance, and the South China Sea dispute.  

This course does not include in-depth studies of the Republic of Korea, China, and Japan.