Looking for an exciting upper-level course to fill out your schedule? Check out the highlights below of new and revamped Geography courses spanning pressing topics such as the planetary polycrisis, the political economy of white supremacy and the historical relationship between capitalism and racism.
GEOG_V 411-101: Dynamics of Agriculture and the Global Environment
Winter Term 1 | Wed 11am-2pm
Taught by Loch Brown
For the past ten thousand years, agriculture has been the primary driver in the rise and fall of human civilizations. Today agriculture has once again emerged as a key driver of social and environmental change, but this time on a global scale, radically reshaping the very surface of our planet and all the species that live there. This course examines the contemporary geographies of global agriculture, unpacking how sweeping changes over the past century to the way we practice agriculture has transformed global societies and environments, how this in turn has contributed to the planetary polycrisis, and what we can do about it both individually and societally. The first four weeks of class make up a “core” series of seminars that will provide historical context and establish a theoretical grounding in the study of global agricultural systems. For the remainder of the course explores a range of emerging problems and contemporary issues in global agriculture chosen by the students.
“This course is really about using agriculture as a lens for digging into the bigger and arguably the most important question of our time ‘how did the world get to be the way it is today and what we can do about emerging planetary polycrisis?’. It is about making connections starting with ecology and how life works on our planet, how we have come to manipulate these ecologies so that we can grow plants and raise animals of the kind and in the amounts that are useful to us, how this in turn both shapes, and is shaped by, wider technological and social processes, and finally how all of this has come together to transform the surface of our planet, and indeed all known life in the universe. It is also about finding those places within this planetary system where we can exert some leverage, where we can intervene in order to bring about real and significant change, where we can ‘hack’ the system.”
Credi: Ernest Withers, TitIe: I Am A Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis 1968
GEOG 446B-101: Black Approaches to Capitalism and Racism
Winter Term 1 | Wed 2-5pm
Taught by Peter Hudson
What is the nature of the geographical and historical relationship between capitalism and racism? This course examines this question through the work of Black thinkers and the Black experience from the era of New World slavery to the dawn of neoliberalism. Topics may include the role of slavery in the emergence of capitalism, the relationship between race and class, the gendered nature of racism, the political economy of white supremacy, and globalization and Black geographies. Readings will include works by African Canadian, African American, African, and Caribbean geographers, historians, and philosophers.
“As tariff trade-wars, and attacks on diversity and immigration dominate today’s headlines, we might ask: what binds these issues together? The short answer: capitalism and racism. This course concerns the longer answer”
Credit: JD Edwards, beside grain field, Amber Valley, Alberta
545B-201: Approaches to Black Geographies
Winter Term 2 | Mon 2-5pm
Taught by Peter Hudson
“If you are interested in engaging with cutting edge research —by Black scholars — on the nature of race and place, this course is for you”
Over the past decade, “Black Geography” has emerged as an exciting and dynamic intervention within the discipline of Geography. Interdisciplinary in approach, it has drawn on the diverse methodologies of Black Studies to explore how, on one hand, people of African descent have engaged with, critiqued, and produced particular places, landscapes, and ecologies, and on the other, how social forces have contributed to the social and political economic production of space through which Black identity has been shaped historically.
This graduate seminar will consider the question of “Black Geographies” through an intensive reading of the rich interdisciplinary literatures which have informed this emergent field through an examination of Black approaches to identity, consciousness, history, archive, text, labour, and place.
