GEOG 392: Latin America: Culture and Environment
This course is designed for the general student. It explores the cultural, political, economic, and ecological geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean. The class is broadly divided into two units, historical and contemporary. The first half of the class begins with a geography of the environmental processes (geologic, climatic, and ecological) and the landscapes these processes work to produced in Latin America and the Caribbean. From an environmental history perspective, the class investigates social ecologies as they relate to pre-Columbian landscapes, particularly in Amazonia, the Andes, and in Central America. Through literary and academic readings, lectures, films, and discussions we examine the legacies of pre-Columbian societies and ecologies as they were colonized and mixed with new Iberian and later British and French societies.
These historical geographies are brought together in an exploration of contemporary conditions in these regions, including rural modernization; the rapid growth of cities and migration; the role of identity and women; dynamics of free-trade globalization, and the various relationships between these regions and the wider world.
This class aims at developing a geographic perspective focused upon the particularity of human-environment relations and social patterns that students can apply broadly to critical inquiry throughout their lives.
Learning Objectives for the Geography Major:
#1. Understand the basic processes of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere, and how those physical processes shape the patterns of the Earth's surface
#2. Understand the origins, characteristics, processes, and distribution of the world's major economic and political systems, and culture areas
#3. Understand how a region's economic, political, cultural, demographic, and environmental processes intertwine within a region, between regions, and across scales to create the Earth's complex human-environment mosaic, and its rural and urban landscapes
#6. Understand how human actions modify the physical environment and how the physical environment impacts human systems
#7. Oral and Written Communication Skills