Geography

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).

This course examines Socio-ecologies in 1491; Spanish colonialism and biological imperialism; contemporary coloniality and neoliberalism; and social movements.

This course introduces students to the basic principles of spatial analysis. Students learn how to use spatial analysis methods and fundamental spatial algorithms for a variety of applications in human and physical geography. The course is structured along the two spatial data representations, vector data, and raster data. Students learn to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to perform the analysis.

This course examines the urban fact in the state of Rio de Janeiro as a category for analyzing the organization of Rio de Janeiro's space. It discusses the city of Rio de Janeiro and its metropolization, the organization of the internal space of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the rural and the urban, the countryside and the metropolis: singularities in Rio de Janeiro. The course also highlights the structure of political, economic, cultural, and social powers in Rio de Janeiro today. It considers planning and management of the state's productive spaces; the dynamism of Rio de Janeiro: heyday, decline, and emergence; and environmental issues in Rio de Janeiro.