Geography Minor

GEOG1102 Concepts basic to political geography. Elements of state, geographical characteristics: core, domain, boundaries, pressure points, location, climate, raw materials. Relation of political organization to people and culture. Nature and limitations of sovereignty. Spring

GEOG1111 This course serves as an introduction to the core principles, theories, and histories of economics, with specific attention to the issues that shape the spatial contours of the global economy. We will work to develop a basic understanding of contemporary public debates about economic policy and explore the relationships between spaces, labor, and markets. By the end of the semester, we will have engaged with concepts like globalization, austerity, and neoliberalism and studied the often-conflicting roles of economic actors like states, producers, and consumers.

GEOG2500 Global Development: Geographies of Wealth & Poverty This course provides an introduction to the multi-faceted process of social, cultural, and political-economic change commonly known as "development." We will ask why, for example, certain regions of the world collectively known as "developing countries" or "the third world" have come to experience conditions of crushing poverty while other areas have prospered. In engaging with these types of issues, we will examine the relationships between rich countries and poor, and interrogate the ways in which the links between different parts of the world have changed over time.

GEOG3030 Recent revelations about data collection by actors as varied as the National Security Agency and Facebook have challenged many of our most basic beliefs about power and privacy. It is increasingly clear that our bodies, images, and words are ceaselessly tracked, sorted, profiled, stored in databases, and recalled by algorithms-all in the name of a loosely defined concept called 'security'. In this class, we will interrogate these uneasy relationships between surveillance and security, looking at both state surveillance practices as well as visual practices aimed at monitoring the state. By engaging with a broad array of media- academic research, social theory, television, film, fiction- we will debate the role of surveillance in generating security, but also focus on the ways that broad data collection can actually enable populations to act in new and beneficial ways.

GEOG3040 Capture & Control: Geographies of Detention & Incarceration Modern democratic states often rely on practices of detention and incarceration in order to demonstrate (and increasingly, to circumvent) the power of the rule of law. As a result, international and domestic detention spaces like refugee camps, jails and for-profit prisons, war prisons, black sites, migrant detention islands, border checkpoints, and protest camps are utilized in an ever-expanding number of spatial, legal, and political contexts. In this course we will explore these spaces, and engage in a detailed historical and theoretical investigation of the complex and often-contradictory processes that produce them.

GEOG3405 This course will serve as a geographical introduction to the history, theory, form and function of cities. In the past decade, the number of people living in cities has surpassed the world?s rural population. Demographers speculate that cities will account for all global population growth over the next fifty years as people continue to leave rural areas for urbanized life. Most of these changes are happening in the developing world, making a globalized landscape no longer exclusively defined by places like New York or Paris, but also by ?third world? cities like Lagos, Mumbai, and Sao Paolo. As sites of economic production, spaces of cultural and artistic expression, and places where inequality is often rendered most visible, cities pose new challenges and offer opportunities for governments, communities and individuals the world over. Our class will employ a number of different vantage points and disciplinary lenses in order to interrogate these exciting and complex urban landscapes.