This upper-level seminar will explore how water has shaped human experience. It will explore water landscapes, the representation of water in legal and political thought, slave narratives, and water management in urban development from the 16th century. Using case studies from South Asia and North America we will understand how affective, political and social relations to water bodies are made and remade over time.

Same as HISD54H3

This course explores the transnational connections and contexts that shaped ideas in modern Asia such as secularism, modernity, and pan Asianism. Through the intensive study of secondary sources and primary sources in translation, the course will introduce Asian thought during the long nineteenth-century in relation to the social, political, cultural, and technological changes. Using the methods of studying transnational history the course will explore inter-Asian connections in the world of ideas and their relation to the new connectivity afforded by steamships and the printing press. We will also explore how this method can help understand the history of modern Asia as a region of intellectual ferment rather than a passive recipient of European modernity.

Same as HISD55H3

A study of major cultural trends, political practices, social customs, and economic developments in late imperial China (1400-1911) as well as their relevance to modern and contemporary China. Students will read the most recent literature and write a substantive research paper.
Same as HISD58H3

A seminar course on Chinese legal tradition and its role in shaping social, political, economic, and cultural developments, especially in late imperial and modern China. Topics include the foundations of legal culture, regulations on sexuality, women's property rights, crime fictions, private/state violence, laws of ethnicities, prison reforms and modernization.
Same as HISD59H3

This course explores our globalized world through a geographic lens, examining how space, place, and scale shape human relations, politics, and culture. Through critical spatial thinking and a historical perspective, we analyze issues like colonialism, capitalism, racism, and geopolitics to understand ongoing colonial wars, social inequalities and the impending climate crisis. In doing so, we explore how geographic knowledge helps us to imagine a better world.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; People, Place and Power

Cities are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, yet they will be vital in fighting the climate crisis. They are major engines of global economic growth, but they are also sites where poverty, substandard housing and food insecurity are concentrated. This course asks: why do cities look and function the way they do, and how can we envision more sustainable and just urban futures? Students will learn a range of concepts that allow them to make sense of cities and urban life, including urbanization, smart cities and digital space, urban agriculture and urban environmental justice.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; Urban Sustainability

Students learn fundamental concepts concerning the structure and effective uses of geographical data and practical skills that will help them to find and apply geographical data appropriately in their studies. Hands-on exercises using a variety of software allow students to gain experience in finding, processing, documenting, and visualizing geographic data. Lecture topics introduce students to the opportunities and challenges of using geographical data as empirical evidence across a range of social science topics.

Scarborough is a place of rapidly changing social geographies, and now contains one of the world’s most extraordinary mixes of people. What do these changes mean, how can we understand and interpret them? This course introduces Human Geography as the study of people, place, and community through field trips, interviews, and guest lectures.

Many of today's key debates - for instance, on globalization, the environment, and cities - draw heavily from geographical thinking and what some have called the "spatial turn" in the social sciences. This course introduces the most important methodological and theoretical aspects of contemporary geographical and spatial thought, and serves as a foundation for other upper level courses in Geography.
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power

In this course, students explore writing as practice, reflect on and develop their own authorial voice, and consider the ways in which the world (our cities, streets, nations, etc.) shapes and is shaped by ideas and texts. Topics include: the political economy of publishing, studying within the neoliberal university, positionality and reflexivity, and the materialization and contestation of discourses in space and place.
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power

This course will develop an understanding of the geographic nature of urban systems and the internal spatial patterns and activities in cities. Emphasis is placed on the North American experience with some examples from other regions of the world. The course will explore the major issues and problems facing contemporary urban society and the ways they are analyzed.
Area of Focus: Urban Sustainability

An introduction to the role of geography in shaping categories of social difference. The course focuses on race, class, gender, and sexuality as lived in different kinds of places through recent events. Difference is examined for both its role in oppression, and for its liberatory potential.
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power

Introduces students to the geography of Indigenous-Crown-Land relations in Canada. Beginning with pre-European contact and the historic Nation-to-Nation relationship, the course will survey major research inquiries from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Students will learn how ongoing land and treaty violations impact Indigenous peoples, settler society, and the land in Canada.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; People, Place and Power
Same as ESTB02H3

This course explores the assumption that ecological change is always profoundly political. Political ecology at its core is about the interconnection between social and ecological change and the relations of power therein. Students consider central approaches to political ecology, including perspectives focusing on population, political economy, environmental racism and justice and feminist perspectives on gender and nature. The course examines defining environmental issues of our time, including the preservation of wilderness spaces, Indigenous movements regarding land, climate change and the Green New Deal and the prospects of urban agriculture.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change

Why do infectious diseases discriminate along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other forms of difference? This course explores patterns of infectious diseases while emphasizing the broader contexts that shape them, including histories of colonialism, structural adjustment policies, stereotypes about “Africa,” uneven development, and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. Attention will be given to flu, COVID, TB and especially HIV/AIDS.
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power

This course provides a practical introduction to digital mapping and spatial analysis using a geographic information system (GIS). The course is designed to provide hands-on experience using GIS to analyse spatial data, and create maps that effectively communicate data meanings. Students are instructed in GIS methods and approaches that are relevant not only to Geography but also to many other disciplines. In the lectures, we discuss mapping and analysis concepts and how you can apply them using GIS software. In the practice exercises and assignments, you then learn how to do your own data analysis and mapping, gaining hands-on experience with ArcGIS software, the most widely used GIS software.

This course builds on GGRB30 Fundamentals of GIS, continuing the examination of theoretical and analytical components of GIS and spatial analysis, and their application through lab assignments. The course covers digitizing, topology, vector data models, remote sensing and raster data models and analysis, geoprocessing, map design and cartography, data acquisition, metadata, and data management, and web mapping.

The course introduces core concepts in cultural geography such as race and ethnicity, identity and difference, public and private, landscape and environment, faith and community, language and tradition, and mobilities and social change. Emphasis will be on cross-disciplinary, critical engagement with current events, pop culture, and visual texts including comics, photos, and maps.
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power

An independent supervised reading course open only to students in the Major Program in Human Geography. An independent literature review research project will be carried out under the supervision of an individual faculty member.

An examination of the geographical dimension to human population through the social dynamics of fertility, mortality and migration. Themes include disease epidemics, international migration, reproductive technologies, and changing family structure.
Area of focus: People, Place and Power

Examination and discussion of current trends and issues in social geography, with particular emphasis on recent developments in concepts and methods. This course is a unique opportunity to explore a particular topic in-depth; the specific content will vary from year to year.
Area of focus: People, Place and Power

Examines global urbanization processes and the associated transformation of governance, social, economic, and environmental structures particularly in the global south. Themes include theories of development, migration, transnational flows, socio-spatial polarization, postcolonial geographies of urbanization.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability

Examination and discussion of current trends and issues in urban geography, with particular emphasis on recent developments in concepts and methods. This course is a unique opportunity to explore a particular topic in-depth; the specific content will vary from year to year.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability

Transportation systems play a fundamental role in shaping social, economic and environmental outcomes in a region. This course explores geographical perspectives on the development and functioning of transportation systems, interactions between transportation and land use, and costs and benefits associated with transportation systems including: mobility, accessibility, congestion, pollution, and livability.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability

Geographical approach to the politics of contemporary cities with emphasis on theories and structures of urban political processes and practices. Includes nature of local government, political powers of the property industry, big business and community organizations and how these shape the geography of cities.
Area of focus: People, Place and Power

Given the importance of the management of data within geographic information modelling, this course provides students with the opportunity to develop skills for creating, administering and applying spatial databases. Overview of relational database management systems, focusing on spatial data, relationships and operations and practice creating and using spatial databases. Structured Query Language (SQL) and extensions to model spatial data and spatial relationships. Topics are introduced through a selection of spatial data applications to contextualize, explain, and practice applying spatial databases to achieve application objectives: creating data from scanned maps; proximity and spatial relations; vehicle routing; elementary web services for spatial data. Students will complete a term project applying spatial data to study or model a topic of their choosing.

Examination and discussion of current trends and issues in environmental geography, with particular emphasis on recent developments in concepts and methods. This course is a unique opportunity to explore a particular topic in-depth, the specific content will vary from year to year.
Area of focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change

This course asks what counts as nature, for whom and when, and asks how environments are made in specific moments in time, for particular groups of people. Responding to these questions, the course examines children’s books, film, art, video games and even pets, to interrogate the cultural politics that accompany representations of nature and entanglements with non-human life. Through examining the social claims at play in what is considered ‘natural’, or not, students make sense of the non—innocence of nature and discuss creative ways for constructing more just environments.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; People, Place and Power

Land reform, which entails the redistribution of private and public lands, is broadly associated with struggles for social justice. It embraces issues concerning how land is transferred (through forceful dispossession, law, or markets), and how it is currently held. Land inequalities exist all over the world, but they are more pronounced in the developing world, especially in countries that were affected by colonialism. Land issues, including land reform, affect most development issues.
Area of focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change

This research-intensive course examines how environments, resources and infrastructure projects are governed and contested. Through instruction on research design and methods, and a survey of literature examining the political economy of nature and Indigenous perspectives on land, students develop a term-long research project examining a key piece of infrastructure (for example, a pipeline, dam, or mine). The course provides robust training in the research process, including research design, questions, methods, and writing, equipping students to critically interrogate the governance of environments.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change