Geography

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. 

In this course students examine challenges related to measuring and modelling sea rising level, and they learn to appreciate why the sea level is rising and how sea level rise is estimated through a combination of observations and modelling. Reliable estimates of future changes are crucial, and students examine how knowledge of past sea level changes can be used to project future sea level rise, and students assess the limitations of such methods. Since, the ice sheets are the most important driver of sea level rise over the long-term, these are a particular focus of the course. The course also examines the economic and social consequences of sea level rise.

The course covers the various events and processes that can create natural hazards. The concept of natural hazard is defined and the history of this important field in the various natural sciences is examined. The physical causes and processes of various natural hazards are discussed. Ongoing climate change is discussed as a form of hazard, as well as the links between climate change and various weather- and climate-related events. The role of Icelandic Meteorological Office in research and monitoring of natural hazard is discussed.

In this interdisciplinary course, students are introduced to the risks, hazards, and disasters associated with the Earth’s natural environments and the growing impacts of human activity on them. Students consider the nature of hazards, disasters, risks, and how their impacts can be reduced through mitigation, protection, and adaptation. 

The course looks at the global Indo-Pacific system, area ,and politics. The Indo-Pacific space has both a geographical dimension and a geostrategic dimension. As a geographical object, this area refers to the vast sea area stretching from the South China Sea to East Africa, through the Pacific Ocean, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the shores of East Africa. As a geostrategic object, Indo-Pacific must be understood as the expression of an objective alliance of regional powers (Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand) seeking to promote alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative, both in the Indian and Pacific oceans and on the Asian and African continents where China is present. As a political object, what is the name Indopacific?  The course questions these different representations of space, their political use, and the related cooperation policies, at the intersection of military and development issues.

This course provides a survey of the geography and geopolitics of Europe throughout history. It considers how Europe was created and the contents significance on a global scale.

In this course, students learn the fundamentals of spatial information, spatial querying, spatial information systems, and geometric problems involved in a spatial information system. They learn details about the spatial data formats (raster and vector), spatial relations (with particular emphasis on topological relations), spatial data structures, digital terrain modelling, geometric problems arising in spatial information systems, and algorithms to solve them. They develop a critical understanding of the different approaches to storing and manipulating spatial data: the loosely coupled approach of classical GIS versus the integrated approach of spatial database management systems. Students also analyze the Oracle Spatial object-relational model for storing and indexing spatial data. These notions complement their knowledge of other types of information systems seen in other computer science courses.