Bachelor of Arts - Critical Geography, Political Economy, and Globalization Studies

Geography, a word derived from the Greek for “earth writing,” is the study of the biosphere and the human and nonhuman forces that have shaped the Earth’s diverse terrestrial environments through time.

A discipline with roots in classical antiquity, geography has been called “the Mother of the Sciences,” an epistemic claim derived from the close relationship between exploration, mapping, and the production of knowledge. Critical geography is the continuing pursuit of geographic knowledge combined with the analysis of power dynamics in the production of spatial knowledge and the experiences and practices that constitute space and place in everyday life. Given the central role of exploration, mapping, and “earth description” in imperial and colonial enterprises, critical geographers interrogate sociocultural linkages between conceptions of nature, the body, human populations, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, the human and nonhuman, the appropriation of natural resources, the state and governance, war and peace, and competing conceptions of the spatialities of modernity and civilization. Political ecology explores these subjects with emphasis on the politics of ecological relations, how such relations are characterized, by whom, and for what purposes.

Globalization studies encompasses a particular set of assumptions regarding international interconnectedness, as well as challenges to those assumptions, and draws from all disciplines of the social sciences.