Course Description

GEOG 1001 Environmental Systems 1: Climate and Vegetation

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:13:58 +0000

GEOG 1001 Environmental Systems 1: Climate and Vegetation Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 15:13

The objective of this course is to provide you with an introduction to the Earth’s climate system and patterns of world vegetation. We will emphasize the many linkages and feedbacks between the non-living (abiotic) and living (biotic) components of the earth system.

Topics we will cover include radiation, temperature, winds and pressure, the water cycle, climate change, and biomes. This course will prepare you for subsequent, more specialized courses in climatology, hydrology, ecology, and biogeography (ecosystems and cycles). This is a natural science course, and graphs and basic algebra-level math calculations will be used to help understand the concepts covered.

We will move beyond the classroom setting with multiple ecological field trips to nearby locations in Boulder!

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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GEOG 4762 Political Islam

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:10:29 +0000

GEOG 4762 Political Islam Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 15:10

“Political Islam” dominates national and global news with popular revolutions, dictatorships, terrorism, jihad, suicide bombings and beheadings, perpetually in the headlines. The “Muslim World” has become synonymous with war, conflict, crisis and violence. As such “Islam,” particularly after 9-11, has become the definitive ‘Other’ of America, driving both the logics of the National Security State and the broader public imaginary of the enemy.

Therefore a nuanced, methodologically reflexive and critical understanding of this phenomenon is not only topical but also of vital importance for understanding key dynamics of power in the contemporary world.

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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GEOG 4742 Topics in Environment & Society: Geographies of Food and Agriculture

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:07:52 +0000

GEOG 4742 Topics in Environment & Society: Geographies of Food and Agriculture Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 15:07

Audrey Richards, the great British anthropologist, once pointed out that the need to eat is the most basic and important of all human drives. We need food more frequently and more urgently than we need sex. The central place of food in our lives has made food one of the major foci of human existence. How we grow, process, distribute, and consume our food often defines us as a society. In our society, the food system has become the target of enormous critique in the last ten years, and also enormous innovation. How does what we eat define us? What does it mean to eat food made in factories and advertised on television, or to seek out "fresh," local or organic food? How do we use food to define ourselves as men and women, as Americans or punks, or Chinese, as children or adults? What does it mean to eat too much, or too little, and how does it define us as social beings? These are the key questions we'll be asking in this course. This course approaches food from two perspectives. The first is the political economy of food. We will look at food as a commodity, and study where it comes from, how it connects members of different societies and social groups as it travels along the commodity chain, and how it creates social and geopolitical inequalities. We will also study food as culture, including the symbolic meanings of different foods in various world cultures, the role of food in defining gender, national identity, and social class. We'll look at food, memory and place, the relationship between food spaces and gender/race, and the role of food in transnational culture.

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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GEOG 4722 / 5722 Field Methods in Human Geography

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:04:12 +0000

GEOG 4722 / 5722 Field Methods in Human Geography Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 15:04

In this course we will discuss various qualitative methodologies and methods for research in human geography. The readings will provide various techniques and tools for collecting qualitative data. We will discuss the connection between theory and methods and how to critically analyze qualitative research.

This course includes a practical engagement with data collection in order to help students develop a nuanced understanding of various methods. Research ethics will be discussed including the role and importance of ethics for research with populations in various locations in and outside the United States. This will include developing strategies for critical self-reflection at all stages of the research process.

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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GEOG 4501 / 5501 Water Resources and Management of the Western U.S.

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:00:59 +0000

GEOG 4501 / 5501 Water Resources and Management of the Western U.S. Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 15:00

This course is an overview of the human dimensions of water: the law, policy, economics, management, and valuation of water in the western United States.

The West has a completely different legal structure than the East for the administration of water, and a culture that has developed different methods of management and organization around the role of water in our daily lives. We regularly feature working professionals to broaden the range of discussion as we look at the effects of water use, climate change, population, and agriculture on this fascinating, and important, resource.

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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GEOG 4311 Watershed Biochemistry

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 20:56:49 +0000

GEOG 4311 Watershed Biochemistry Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 14:56

This course is a quantitative investigation of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that determine the hydrology and hydrochemistry of headwater catchments (watersheds). A watershed is a natural unit of land from which the surface, subsurface and groundwater runoff drain to a common outlet. In this course, the emphasis is on the movement and storage of water, nutrients, and solutes on and in the context of the watershed. This course provides a process-level understanding of watershed biogeochemistry such that students will be able to understand the consequences of our planned and inadvertent human activities on water flow and quality at the catchment scale.

This course builds on and complements existing courses in Geography, particularly ‘Introduction to Hydrology’. Topics include: hydrography separation, isotopic and geochemical hydrologic tracers, water quality, pollution, geochemistry, nutrient cycling, field experiments, and simulation modeling. These processes will be applied to a range of geographic regions, emphasizing headwater catchments in montane environments.

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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GEOG 4303 / 5303 GIS Programming for Spatial Analysis

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 20:53:51 +0000

GEOG 4303 / 5303 GIS Programming for Spatial Analysis Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 14:53

Do you want to enter the job market as a competitive GIS modeler with programming skills? This course will help you get there. It focuses on the extension of geographic information systems (GIS) through programming as well as on the development of algorithms for spatial analysis and information extraction in vector and raster data. We will cover different concepts, principles and techniques of programming that help you to solve a variety of spatial problems in physical and human Geography. You will learn how to work with Python for Geoprocessing in ArcGIS as well as for spatial programming in gridded data using numpy, scipy and other open source libraries. Furthermore, you will understand the basic ideas of object-oriented and procedural programming. You will develop skills to explore, handle, manipulate, and model spatial data as well as methods development. Lectures will include numerous demonstrations and hands-on examples as well as algorithmic exercises. In labs you will work on solving typical programming and implementation problems that you will encounter in the real world. During the last weeks of the term students will work in small groups on a proposed project to deepen their programming knowledge, improve their GIS proficiency and train their presentation and communication skills.

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GEOG 4110 / 5100 Advanced Remote Sensing

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 20:50:29 +0000

GEOG 4110 / 5100 Advanced Remote Sensing Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 14:50

The context, perspective, and scale provided by remote sensing observations have made them an invaluable source of data for understanding the Earth System. In the prerequisite introductory course, Remote Sensing of the Environment (GEOG/GEOL 4093/5093), students learned some of the basic physical principals underlying remote sensing and were introduced to some of the key remote sensing capabilities and how they work. This class is designed to build on that foundation by delving deeper into the physics of remote sensing and examining image analysis techniques for extracting the maximum amount of information from remotely sensed imagery.

This course will enable in-depth examination of environmental issues and parameters that are generally local in nature, but global in significance.

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GEOG 4100-001 / 5100-003 Earth Analytics: Accelerating discovery with a view from Space

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 20:43:49 +0000

GEOG 4100-001 / 5100-003 Earth Analytics: Accelerating discovery with a view from Space Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 14:43

This course will introduce graduate and undergraduate students to major unanswered questions in Earth science and to the analytical tools necessary to undertake exploration of ‘big data’ from a suite of sensors. This course aligns with Earth Lab, a new initiative of the university’s Grand Challenge efforts to use our expertise in space-based observation and exploration to address our world’s most pressing problems. For 50 years, ��Ƶ-Boulder has been a leader in Earth and Space sciences. We have sent instruments to every planet in our solar system and are among the world's leading public universities in producing astronauts. We explore our own planet from the depths of the ocean to the upper limits of the atmosphere. One new frontier is right at our fingertips, in the data we have already created about our planet and our species.

The course will be structured by cutting-edge topics chosen as initial Earth Lab projects, including active research to better: Understand how fire is changing in the western U.S. over the past two decades (Project Fire); Predict drought for improved management of water resources (Project Drought); Improve risk management and decision-making in land use and hazards mitigation (Project Risk); Determine the sensitivity of permafrost to a warming Arctic (Project Permafrost); Identify how rapid and slow landscape evolution impacts our lives. (Project Erosion); Determine what is driving Colorado forest dieback. (Project Forest); and examine how data at varying resolutions represents Earth System phenomena (Project Data Harmonization). Earth Lab’s mission is to harmonize the wave of Earth observations from aerospace platforms to address scientific challenges in understanding the pace and pattern of global change to help society better manage and adapt. This course offers a unique opportunity to take part in this multi-disciplinary endeavor. Students will be trained to use analytical tools for data management, analysis, and visualization. Students will be expected to choose a topic area of interest to explore throughout the semester, producing a final paper or project that contributes to the analysis and/or theoretical underpinning of a selected Earth system science problem. This is an advanced course that is open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students with an interest in developing Earth Analytics expertise, including students from the natural and social science disciplines.

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GEOG 3742-001 Power, Place, Culture: Biopolitics, War & The State of Exception

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 20:33:25 +0000

GEOG 3742-001 Power, Place, Culture: Biopolitics, War & The State of Exception Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 14:33

Geography in its broadest sense is concerned with understanding the world and our place within it. But this “world” is not simply given; it is fashioned. This course is fundamentally concerned with understanding the process of ‘world-formation’ via a meditation on several abstract and yet essential concepts: Power, Place/Space and Culture/Subjectivity. We spend the bulk of the semester developing the conceptual skills to think through these key terms. We then deploy these new ways of (postmodern) critical thinking towards a concerted meditation on the very concrete problems of violence, war, militarism and exceptionalism. In particular we will explore the concept of biopolitics (biopower) which is concerned principally with the government of life: the relationship between life and power in the modern world. A key emphasis of this seminar in critical geography will also be on the question of what it means to think critically. The primary conceptual grammars with which we shall pry open the crisis of the modern human condition, and through which we shall attempt to disclose something of our future possibilities, are linked to a rethinking of the concept of power. What is power and what dominant forms has power taken in the modern world? Critical geographic thinking is concerned not only with how we inhabit place, but also with investigating, and bringing to light, the very presuppositions that silently undergird our ways of knowing and acting in the world.

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