Teaching diversity at UNC-CH Geography and Environment
Attention to diversity runs through our pedagogical practice at UNC-CH Geography and Environment, and current scholarship on issues related to diversity is highlighted in nearly all of our courses. See below for a list of programs, courses and resources with a focus on these topics.
Minor in Environmental Justice: The minor in Environmental Justice focuses on the intersections of inequity, the environment, and justice.
Courses with special attention to these topics:
Geog 56 First-Year Seminar: Local/Global World
An examination of the relationship between globalization and localization in order to think about how we, as individuals and groups, can make a difference in the world.
Geog 67 First-Year Seminar: Politics of Everyday Life
This course examines the ways that politics, especially contests over territory, are part of our day-to-day life. We will explore a range of cases, from immigration policy and rhetoric in the United States, to popular representations of geopolitics in film, to the politics of family planning in India.
Geog 121 People and Places
This course examines places and the connections between places to build critical understandings of the role of human geographies in global economic, political, social, and cultural systems.
Geog 123 Cultural Geography
How population, environment, and human culture as expressed in technology and organization interact over space and time.
Geog 125 Cultural Landscapes
Explores how everyday culture helps create the landscapes and places in which we live and what these landscapes tell us about ourselves.
Geog 130 Development and Inequality
An introduction to historical and contemporary ideas about practices and meanings of development. Students will explore “development” in a global landscape of poverty, power, and struggles over inequality.
Geog 225 Space, Place, and Difference
Gender, race, and class are examined in terms of the spatial patterns of everyday life, regional patterns, and global patterns.
Geog 240 Introduction to Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is about social equity and its relationship to the environment. This course provides an introduction to the principles, history, and scholarship of environmental justice. It traces the origins of the movement in the US and globally and its relationship to environmentalism. Students will use case studies and engagement to become familiar with environmental justice concerns related to food systems, environmental health, climate change, and economic development.
Geog 424 Geographies of Religion
This course considers the theoretical and empirical dimensions of religion from a geographical perspective. The course introduces the key theories linking space, place, and religion and helps students apply these new theoretical tools to examine some of the pressing issues in the contemporary study of religion.
Geog 428 Global Cities: Space, Power, and Identity in the Built Environment
This course addresses questions of power, politics, and identity in the urban environment, with a focus on the emergence of key selected global cities and the processes that both created them historically and which are currently transforming them locally and globally.
Geog 429 Urban Political Geography: Durham, North Carolina
An interdisciplinary exploration of urban social problems, bridging the literature on urban geography with that on urban politics. Students will be required to complete 30 hours of service for an organization that works on an urban social issue.
Geog 435 Global Environmental Justice
This advanced course brings geographical perspectives on place, space, scale, and environmental change to the study of environmental justice. In lectures, texts, and research projects, students examine environmental concerns as they intersect with racial, economic and political differences. Topics include environmental policy processes, environmental justice movements, environmental health risks, conservation, urban environments, and the role of science in environmental politics and justice.
Geog 448 Transnational Muslims
Examines modern Muslim geographies that are created by transnational flows, connections, and imaginaries that cross national and regional boundaries across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and beyond.
Geog 452 Migration Geographies
This course explores the contemporary experience of migrants. Various theoretical approaches are introduced, with the emphasis on a political-economic approach.
Geog 457 Rural Latin America
This course explores a systems and cultural-ecological view of agriculture, environment, natural resource, and rural development issues in Latin America. It serves as a complement to Urban Latin America.
Geog 468 Environmental Justice in Urban Europe
While much attention has been given to Europe’s “green” cities and the region’s examples of sustainable development, less attention has been given to the ways in which the uneven distributions of environmental degradation have social and spatial ramifications within and beyond the region. This course will provide an overview of environmental justice in urban Europe to consider the key concepts, topics, debates, and trends shaping people and places there.
Geog 470 Political Ecology
Examines foundational concepts and methods and their relevance for understanding nature-society relationships. Discussions on environmental change and conflict and how nature is bound up with relations of power and constructions of identity.
Diversity-focused teaching resources:
A Guide to Researching Campus Monuments and Buildings, UNC Libraries
Antiracist Toolkit, UNC Department of Asian Studies
Anti-Racism Resources, UNC Diversity and Inclusion
Anti-Racism Resources for All Ages