Winter 2023 Graduate Geography Timetable

The below timetable is subject to change.  

Geography & Planning students have priority enrolment for courses. Course enrolment for students from other departments is available online via Acorn on August 25, 2022. The department does not require any forms from students outside the department – if space is available students are welcome to enroll using ACORN. If space is not available, students can add themselves to a waitlist (if there is no waitlist in Acorn it means the course is not open to students outside Geography & Planning).  

Courses marked with an asterisk (*) are offered through affiliated departments. Please contact the host department for enrolment instructions. 

Students can access course materials on Quercus. 

Building locations can be found on the STG campus map. 

Courses marked as room “TBD” are expected to be delivered in person/on campus. 

Winter session courses begin on January 9, 2023. 

Course Descriptions 

GGR1218H Open Course Methods in Physical Geography 

Quantitative research in physical geography and the earth sciences has increasingly relied on custom, open-source coding solutions in programming languages such as R and MATLAB in order to efficiently mine large datasets and analyze and visualize spatiotemporal phenomena. This course provides hands-on, workshop-based training in two of the most widely used programming languages in the geosciences, R and MATLAB. The workshops will focus on applications of data mining, exploration and management; working with self-describing, multi-dimensional data formats (e.g., NetCDF); publication-quality figures and data visualization; statistical analysis; linear regression modelling; time-series and signal processing; and mapping. Students will complete four assignments to hone their coding and problem-solving skills, and a final project that applies these skills to their research. This course is specifically aimed at students with little to no coding experience. Students interested in taking this course are strongly encouraged to contact the professor before the start of the semester to discuss your motivations in taking the course and research interests so that lessons can be customized to the broad interests of the class as much as possible. 

GGR1816H Geography of Secularism and Islam 

Secularism is a key principle of Western modernity and an epistemic framework that shapes our understanding of the political legitimacy of bodies, spaces, nations, and borders in the contemporary world. While rooted in the social and political legacies of Enlightenment philosophy, secularism has become more contested in relation to the heightened visibility of Islam, Islamist politics, identities and cultural practices in the second half of the 20th century. In this course we critically explore the geographies of secularism and the key debates around concepts of secularity, religion and secularization from feminist, post-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives with a focus on Islam and the Islamic world. This course will examine the genealogy of secularism, its relationship to Western colonialism and Orientalist thought, and its discursive currency in some non-Western contexts as a fixture of Western modernity. It will question the assumed neutrality of the separation between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ in the context of Muslim identities and cultural practices and examine secularism’s gendered, racialized and historically specific constructions of subjectivity, space and politics. The course will have an interdisciplinary perspective that will draw from studies in geography, political science, security studies, anthropology, literature, and gender studies. It will bring in case studies primarily from the Middle Eastern context as well as through the experience of xenophobia and Islamophobia of Muslim populations in Europe and North America. We will consider questions such as: what is the relationship of secularism to the global resurgence of Islamic movements? Whose “values” are in the Quebec charter of values? How has secularism shaped the designation of women’s bodies and spaces in the context of hijab and burqa debates in the West? How can we understand concepts of freedom, rights and agency in the context of Muslim women’s activism? How does secularism designate security and risk to Muslim identities in the context of global war on terror? The course will be in seminar format and course evaluation will be based on weekly reading reflections, a final research paper and an in-class presentation in a conference panel format on the last day of class. 

GGR1912H Advanced Remote Sensing 

This is an advanced remote sensing course emphasizing the quantitative approaches for the analysis of satellite remote sensing data. Examples of topics that may be covered include preprecessing of remote sensing data, bio-physical parameter extraction, linear feature extraction, conventional and object-oriented image classification, mapping uncertainty assessment, spatial statistical methods, change detection, and spatial-temporal modelling. For each of these topics, focus will be on the algorithms and technical details on how these image processing capabilities are implemented. After taking this class students will be able to actually implement the advanced remote sensing techniques to their own research, rather than just understanding the fundamentals.. Exclusion: GGR337H (STG), GGR437H (UTM), GGR1911H. 

JPG1400H Advanced Quantitative Methods 

Spatial Analysis consists of set of techniques used for statistical modeling and problem solving in Geography. As such, it plays an integral role in the detection of spatial processes and the identification of their causal factors. It is therefore a key component in one’s preparation for applied or theoretical quantitative work in GIScience, Geography, and other cognate disciplines. Space, of course, is treated explicitly in spatial analytical techniques, and the goal of many methods is to quantify the substantive impact of location and proximity on human and environmental processes in space. 

JPG1428H Greening the City: Urban Environmental Planning and Management 

This course focuses on the recent efforts to ‘green the city’ by integrating vegetation and other green infrastructure into the built environment, including emerging research supporting such initiatives. We will examine greening goals associated with ecosystem service provisioning, individual and community well-being, environmental justice, and urban resiliency in light of climate change. The role of urban planners, municipal policy, private property owners, and other key actors will be examined in-depth. Throughout the course, issues associated with bridging knowledge gaps between the social and natural sciences, unique characteristics of urban ecosystems, and the role of specific decision-makers will be considered.  

JPG1429H Political Ecology of Food and Agriculture 

Agrifood systems, connecting production and consumption, markets and various types of agrarian labour, are undergoing profound social and ecological change. Among these developments are large-scale land grabs, the financialization of food and farming, challenges to settler agriculture and the resurgence of indigenous food systems, the emergence of robust ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ alternatives to industrial and colonial agriculture. In trying to make sense of these changes, and the various social movements that have emerged in their wake, this course deploys the related paradigms of agrarian political economy and political ecology to analyze the forces and social relations that define land-based and food-focused transformations, both historically and in the contemporary moment. The course examines the often forgotten roots of contemporary debates in political ecology and food, that is, the enduring agrarian question.  The agrarian question examines the extent to which capital has transformed agricultural production and the degrees to which producers have been able to resist dispossession and the industrialization and capitalization of agriculture. The course starts with foundational perspectives on the agrarian question from the early 20th century before discussing the renaissance of these debates in the 1970s and 1980s and the emergence during this time of political ecology as a critical approach to the study of food and land-based practices.  Updating these earlier debates the course tackles a number of defining contemporary developments, as noted above, that are reshaping the meaning and character of land and food. 

JPG1502H Global Urbanism and Cities of the Global South 

In this course we will critically examine “global urbanism” while paying explicit attention to how cities of global South have been studied, understood and depicted in global urban research. In the past two decades, influential policymakers have promulgated the “global cities” paradigm, which frames 21st century urbanism in global terms. According to the “global cities” paradigm “global” cities of the North, such as New York, London and Tokyo are at the pinnacle of globalization.  In contrast, cities of the global South are consistently portrayed as “mega” cities that are disorderly, polluted, chaotic, ungovernable, and marked by infrastructure collapse. In short, cities of the global South are mega cities with mega problems. In this course we will begin by examining policy-oriented as well as academic literature 

JPG1504H Institutionalism and Cities: Space, Governance, Property & Power 

This course focuses on the role of institutions in shaping processes of urban change, governance and planning. The premise of the course is that cities are extraordinarily densely institutionalized spaces, and that the formal study of institutions, and processes of institutional continuity and change will be productive for both planners and urban geographers. The course reviews the New Institutionalist literature in Political Science, Sociology, Economic Geography, and Planning Studies, with a focus on Historical Institutionalist concepts, and develops a conceptual framework for the application of institutionalist theory to urban space. The claim is that an understanding of institutions is revealing of power dynamics in urban governance, is valuable for understanding urban governance and planning in international comparative perspective, and provides a valuable perspective on urban property systems. 

JPG1522H Production of Space 

This seminar investigates articulations of aesthetic, technological and political forces in the production of space—understood as the triad of ‘conceived space’, ‘perceived space’ and ‘lived space’, following Henri Lefebvre’s influential theorization in The Production of Space. With reference to intellectual resources drawn from several strands of critical theory, space figures here as something radically contested, and dialectically related to social relations. The work of artists, architects, planners, geographers, scientists, technocrats and politicians, along with influential conceptions such as ‘modernism’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘culture industry’, ‘spectacle’, ‘alienation’, ‘governmentality’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘ideology’, ‘decolonization’, ‘utopia’ and ‘revolution’ will feature prominently in this course, in order to theorize how space and society are co-produced, and why various political projects—capitalist, nationalist, fascist, colonial, socialist, feminist—are also spatial projects. As such, the prime objective of this course will be to develop critical-theoretical as well as conjunctural awareness of aesthetic, technological and political mediations of the socio-spatial dialectic--with special attention to the work of architects, urban designers, planners and geographers in the context of subaltern citizens pursuing their ‘right to the city’. 

JPG1615H Planning the Social Economy 

What would it take to build a ‘social economy,’ an economy rooted in the principles of social justice, democratic governance and local self-reliance? What are the progressive and regressive implications of such an undertaking? JPG 1615 will explore these questions both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, with recourse to some canonical and more recent writings about the interface between ‘society’ and ‘economy’. Practically, the course will look at what role municipal governments could and do play in building the social economy. The case of social housing in the GTA serves as an example—as well as a context for learning about key tools in local economic development. The course will also consider how communities and neighbourhoods are growing increasingly active in developing alternative economic institutions, such as cooperatives, participatory budgets and community development financial institutions in order to institutionalize the social economy at the local scale. 

JPG1813H Social Planning and Policy 

"The world is seeing a clear resurgence of the urgency of directly and explicitly addressing the needs of equity deserving groups in a way that builds on but goes beyond the remit of identity politics. We now have a much richer understanding of the socially structurally and institutionally embedded nature of identity politics -- rather than simply the false assignation of identity as constituted through biology, movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, CRIP and MAD movements, etc., have brought a deeper understanding of how policy planning and practice perpetuate structures of inequality. Key to a justice approach to social policy and planning is understanding how policy shapes a landscape of inclusion and exclusion and how ordinary people come to be “read”, rightly or wrongly, as particular subjects based on the prescriptive aspects of policy.    

We are now at a moment when diverse social movements are beginning to take upon themselves the reimagining or promotion of much more ambitious alternative modes of governance, which would replace rather than simply amend existing structures.  This can be found in widespread calls the redesign of institutional landscapes, from defunding of the police to expansive programs of truth and reconciliation. This course in social policy and planning calls upon us to rethink participation, consultation, experiential knowledge and our engagement as planners with existing power structures – this is not the moment to abandon social planning, but the time to reinvent it." 

JPG1814H Cities and Immigrants 

Globalization processes and changes in immigration laws in recent decades have led to an upsurge in cross-border movement of people and ushered in sequential waves of immigration from various regions of the world to Canada and the U.S. Cities and their adjoining metropolitan areas are the biggest beneficiaries of these changing dynamics where immigrants are important contributors to economic growth and social reinvigoration. This course will examine the dynamics and changing patterns of immigrant integration in cities and urban locations. Topics of focus will include theories of immigrant integration, socio-spatial patterns of immigrant settlements in cities, labour market participation, socio-cultural identity formation and transnational engagements. The course will rely on contemporary examples and case studies to provide a deeper understanding of how immigrants are shaping dynamics within cities. 

JPG1825H Black Geographies of the Atlantic 

"Beyond a physical region, the Atlantic can be understood as a site through which techniques for the exploitation of land, people and the environment emerged, with enduring implications for world trajectories. This course traces a genealogy of contested spacetimes spanning the colonial state, the plantation, and urban neighborhoods and streets. We learn about representations of Blackness as they are made and remade through time such as: the “dangerous Blacks” of the Haitian revolution; the British West Indian ex-slave “unwilling"" to work; a sanitized version of the Black small farmer; the anti-colonialist land invader; and the “illegal squatter” who is no longer recognized as a descendant of Black refusal. Among the traditions we explore are rebellion, revolution, and quotidian acts of place-making through farming, fishing, street vending, beauty services, taxi operation, masquerade, and dwelling. Through these representations and practices we explore the epistemologies of this ongoing encounter and also work to uncover the gendering of complex racial formations. 

The course is formed through the lens of Black Geographies, an interdisciplinary approach that acknowledges (1) the spatial and cultural productions of Black people as significant and coherent critiques of dominance and injustice; (2) the visions of alternate futures for the world within these critiques; and (3) the centrality of Black geographies to the way the world works—not at the margins, but as co-producers of space." 

JPG1909H Advanced GIS Data Processing 

This course will complement the existing data analysis and quantitative methods courses currently being taught in the department. It will strengthen and broaden both the theoretical basis and skillsets available to graduate students in geography and urban planning for advanced data analysis in GIS. By introducing both the theory and application of up-to-date data analysis techniques and the state of art of GIS data processing, this course will fill a significant gap in our curriculum.   

JPG2150H Special Topics: Qualitative Data Analysis - Coding, Interpreting, and Writing Qualitative Research 

This course will train students to analyze qualitative data and write up findings from their research. It is designed for students who have already taken a qualitative methods course that provides training on data collection, such as interviewing, ethnographic observation, conducting focus groups, or discourse analysis. Our course will focus exclusively on the data analysis and writing phase and will help students to work with and interpret their data. Students should come to the course with original data they will work with over the span of the semester. This can be Masters students working with their thesis data, or PhD students who would like to work with or publish from their Masters research. Students can also come to the course with data from a pilot project that they are conducting in advance of their dissertation fieldwork, or from a project they are working on as a research assistant. Sources of original qualitative data include: individual interviews, focus group interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, or textual materials (such as news articles, policy documents, or online content). This course will introduce qualitative data analysis as a collaborative process that happens through intensive engagement, sharing, and revising of one’s ideas and arguments. Thus, the class will involve a series of workshop and writing activities. Students will comment on each other’s work in class and through written peer-review exercises. Conceptualizing qualitative research as a community effort, we will spend significant time learning how to provide and receive helpful feedback and build peer support networks while in grad school. 

EES1126H Hydrology and Watershed Management 

This course focuses on the use of various isotopes and chemical factors for furthering our understanding of complex environmental problems, ranging from the characterization of freshwater resources to contaminant transport in aquatic systems. Particular focus will be placed on how chemical and isotope tracer studies can be coupled with physical measurements to understand complex problems in hydrology, biogeochemistry, and contaminant transport. This course will cover fundamentals of environmental tracer chemistry through to recent case studies, advanced models and applications. This course is offered through the Department of Physical & Environmental Sciences. 

JSE1708H Sustainability and the Western Mind 

This course will examine how attitudes towards human nature and non-human nature have changed over the period from Mesolithic times until the present, in Western society. By reading and discussing historical arguments and contemporary documents we will attempt to uncover the underlying assumptions about the world that were characteristic of different periods in the history of Western culture. The underlying question is whether contemporary concerns about sustainability require fundamental changes in the way we conceive of ourselves and our environment.