Geography

This course introduces students to the discipline of geography, its history, and major ideas that have shaped its theory and practice. The course focuses on the historical roots of the discipline and its evolution to the present day introduces some important theories and their application to understanding the lived experience of different peoples in particular environments and outlines how geography matters beyond the academy, and how an active spatial imagination can play a role in addressing major societal challenges.

The course focuses on the dynamic surface of our planet and the environments it sustains. The Earth’s surface is shaped by a complex interaction of physical and biological processes operating over a range of spatial and temporal scales. Understanding these processes in the present day, as well as reconstructing landscape and ecological change in the past, enables us to predict their future response to climate change and human activity. This course studies the processes and spatial patterns that shape natural landscapes and learn about approaches of reconstructing their evolution. The course provides an appreciation of the ways that the dynamics of natural landscapes need to be incorporated into environmental management and the conservation of biodiversity. This includes an in-depth understanding of the wide spectrum of landforms (including mountains and hillslopes, glaciers, rivers, dunes, and coasts) and the processes contributing to their formation and decay. In addition, the subject addresses the geographic patterns and dynamics of life on the Earth’s surface and investigates the way in which certain landscapes support particular types of ecosystems (such as rainforest, grassland, desert, estuarine and marine communities). Finally, the factors that may cause change in natural landscapes are explored to assess the roles played by climate, tectonics and humans over various timescales.

This course explores the relationship between the physical base of Canada and its human geography. It examines regionalism, focusing on the causes for, and consequences of, regional variations in the economic, political, and social composition of Canada. Topics include: the nature of Canadian federalism; Indigenous peoples and Canada; growing cultural diversity; patters of resource extraction; manufacturing and service economics; core-periphery relations; urbanization; Canada in the global economy.

This course covers theories about the production of space, concepts related to agents and urban strategies, and the contradictory strategies that act on the urban space. It examines urban complexity based on interests that are at stake in city space, theories about the urban field, and the correlation of theory with practical reality. Topics include: governance instruments (communication, participation and strategic planning); training of urban agents in contemporary society; collective communication; urban conflict and consensus; management and experiences in urban policies and agents; technology, innovation, city construction, ideology and the future.

This course explores the climate system and the cryosphere, focussing on interactions between the two. The course provides a comprehensive treatment of climate processes over the 2000 years leading into the modern era of anthropogenic influence; case studies of ice-climate interactions; and recent behavior of ice sheets, mountain glaciers, and sea ice.

This course explores the complexity of climate change policy. Students explore, among others, generic policy and climate terminology such as IPCC, consensus, mitigation, sustainability, clean development mechanism, climate governance, COP, green investments, climate policy, and geoengineering.

This course takes students on a journey to discover Britain's Stone Age past. By participating in classroom-based sessions, hands-on activities, museum visits, and field excursions, students learn how archaeologists reconstruct past landscapes and understand the human populations that once inhabited these lost worlds. The course explores the first dispersals of humans across Europe; a remarkable story of survival in unfamiliar landscapes, where the challenges of changing climate, physical barriers, and food and resource availability tested human resilience to its limits. Located at the edge of this ice-age world, Britain uniquely documents these early inhabitants and their social, cultural, and technological development.

This course critically examines human-nature relationships in different societies and culture groups. The course also demonstrates that different human-nature relationships can provide important underpinnings to understanding the obstacles to development programs on how best to tap these relationships for sustainable development. Topics include: defining nature, environment, ecosystems, human-nature relationship in gender, religion, political ideology, and economics.