2022-2023 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Courses
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GART 240 - Interactive Media Advanced Drawing
This course is designed for advanced level undergraduate Interactive Media students, as well as those students from a fine and applied arts background looking to further their knowledge and skill in the various categories of drawing as it applies to the creation of digital art concepts and assets. The course will build upon the foundation of knowledge that Principles of Drawing and Life Drawing courses provide, while allowing the student to experiment with various new media and to focus on an area that is geared toward their career goals and interests. Examples of drawing projects and tracks included in the course could be: advanced traditional drawing, digital drawing, investigation into character concept design and environmental concept art/design for games. The student will develop a body of work consistent with her/his/their interests, while at the same time learning about contemporary approaches and methods, practices and standards commonly found in the interactive media industry. May be repeated once (taken a total of two times).
Prerequisites: GART 100 or GART 235
Course Designation/Attribute: AP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies
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GART 299 - Directed Study
Undergraduates, typically juniors & seniors, construct an independent study course on a topic approved & directed by a faculty member. May be repeatable for credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: as needed
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GCPT 010 - Computer Programming I
Introduction to Programming, this course introduces principles of programming in an object-oriented environment. Topics include design and implementation of programs that use a variety of data structures, functions, and conditionals. Students will be expected to design, implement, and debug programs.
Course Designation/Attribute: SP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall & Spring
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GCPT 020 - Computer Programming C++
This course will improve upon existing object-oriented programming skills and introduce new concepts in programming. Topics covered are classes/objects and constructors, overloading operators, strings, pointers, namespaces, encapsulation, and reading and writing files.
Prerequisites: GCPT 010 - Computer Programming I or CSCI 120 - Introduction to Computing
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall & Spring
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GCPT 110 - Data Structures
Manipulation of character strings and data (searching, sorting, etc.) file processing, program segmentation, linearly linked lists, matrices, trees and graphics, stack and queues will be covered using the language of C++.
Prerequisites: GCPT 020 - Computer Programming C++ or CSCI 120 - Introduction to Computing
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall & Spring
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GCPT 299 - Directed Study
Undergraduates, typically juniors & seniors, construct an independent study course on a topic approved & directed by a faculty member. May be repeatable for credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: as needed
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GEOG 016 - Introduction to Economic Geography
This course is built on the assumption that we live in a world whose societies, cultures, governments, and environmental relationships are most significantly shaped by the mechanisms and influences of global capitalism. A fuller understanding of the dynamics of the world economy requires that we not isolate them from the political, cultural, social, and ecological contexts through and within which they are situated. Deeper contextual understandings are what economic geographers seek to achieve and this course surveys these perspectives with a focus on the locations and distributions of economic activities and the flows, interconnections, and drivers of uneven development in the global economy.
Course Designation/Attribute: GP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 017 - Environment and Society
Relationships between human societies and the natural environment are central to the discipline of geography. Geography 017 introduces students to these relationships and to the analysis of them, integrating perspectives from the natural and social sciences. We examine questions such as: how do environments shape societies; how do societies transform environments; are there environmental limits to economic growth; how does culture shape our relationships with our environments; and what sorts of human-environment relationships are sustainable and just? We examine these questions at many different geographic and temporal scales: from pre-history up to the present, from very local cases to the entire planet, and from pre-industrial or rural landscapes to suburban and urban ones. Cases and discussions will span the entire globe, but will include examples from the Americas, the United States, and New England in order to ground our discussions in the places we know best. One weekly discussion section.
Course Designation/Attribute: GP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 019 - Geographies of Israel and Palestine
This course will present students with a deep appreciation of the history, politics, and geography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while simultaneously offering students an introduction to different approaches and subfields within human geography. Approaching the conflict from different geographical perspectives allows us to reevaluate the way that the Israel, Palestine, and the conflict are represented in generic media and political analyses. For instance, we will ask such questions as, how do the colonial geographies of the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate determine much of the spatial politics in Israel and Palestine today? What are the contradictory cultural and political identities of the people who live in Israel and Palestine? How are borders created and how do they affect mobility and access? How do different flows of money and labor show how porous these borders are in reality? Why is the natural environment so central to cultural ideas of nation and belonging? How does the built environment of an urban space like Jerusalem speak to the ongoing conflict? How do Israeli and Palestinian feminists understand the myriad ways that the conflict specifically affects women and their livelihoods? These are just some of the questions we will delve into over the course of the semester. Class materials will vary between academic articles on different aspects of the conflict, to nonfiction writing, to graphic novels, to sitcoms, in order to show the multiple facets of life in Israel and Palestine.
As a First Year Intensive (FYI), the course will also help introduce you to academic life at Clark, as well as reading, writing, and research within geography and the social sciences. We will spend approximately 1/3rd of each class meeting discussing ways to be successful academics, covering everything from how to write a paper, to ways to manage our time, to pointers on how to give good presentations, and more. We will also spend time in two class sessions reading each other’s work in order to learn how to peer review. Meetings will include some brief lectures but will be centered on class discussion.
Course Designation/Attribute: FYI
Anticipated Terms Offered: annually
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GEOG 020 - American Cities: Changing Spaces, Community Places
This course examines the history and contemporary processes of urbanization, primarily in the North American context, with particular attention to the geography of these processes, which results in the differentiation of space and the creation of distinct places. The course covers a range of topics relevant to cities, including historical development, governance, social patterns, economics, planning, contemporary problems and the linkages among all of these. We examine the geography of urbanization at several scales, ranging from the development of the North American urban system to the experiences of neighborhoods within cities. A core course in Globalization, Cities and Development in the geography major.
Course Designation/Attribute: HP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 052 - Global Change, Regional Challenges
Applies a regional perspective to explore important questions related to our planet and its people including: What are the key challenges facing communities, environments and societies in different regions of the world today? Is the world becoming more culturally homogenous or more fragmented? Why is the global distribution of wealth so uneven and how might poorer regions “catch up” to wealthier regions? How does the physical and human context of a region influence its ability to benefit from globalization? What factors are driving regional conflicts and how might peaceful resolutions be achieved? Focuses on eight regions - Europe, Russia/Central Asia, Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and South/Southeast Asia. One or two significant issues will be focused on in each region such as gender equality, human rights, environmental sustainability, political change, economic development, public health, and/or human rights.
Course Designation/Attribute: GP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 102 - Weather and Climate
Understanding controls of weather: insolation, evaporation, wind, and topography; the climates that result; and how they influence human activities. Students are also introduced to fundamentals of scientific inquiry and knowledge with exposure to observational methods, data analysis, and forecasting.
Course Designation/Attribute: SP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 104 - Earth System Science
This course introduces the structure and function of the earth system, with a focus on how the Earth system sustains life. Topics include (1) connections among terrestrial surface, oceans, and atmosphere and (2) how these connections create and sustain climates, biomes, and ecosystem services.
Course Designation/Attribute: SP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year.
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GEOG 106 - Water and the City: A Socio-Hydrology of Worcester and its Environs
The course offers a historical and contemporary exploration of the social relationships between our city-region and its water (as lifeline, right, cultural and ecological resource, economic engine, waste, and central to politics, regulation, management and future climate vulnerability and resilience). We draw widely from the academic literature on urban nature, urban development and change, planning, environmental justice, and climate and environmental history, as well as from popular literature and periodicals (newspapers, regional watershed-related blogs and websites, policy briefs). This scholarship is used to establish a foundational framework of urban socio-hydrology. We strongly integrate our academic work with field experiences in Worcester, the Blackstone River Valley and the Central New England region as a living laboratory, in order to witness key moments and features that have shaped regional history as well as current issues in water (and wastewater) management, conservation, and planning. We will undertake visits to sites such as the Clark campus rain garden and public parks and locations throughout Worcester, the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester Historical Museum, the Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park and the Millville Lock, regional watershed associations, the Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, The Harvard Forest Fisher Museum and the City of Worcester Water Treatment Plant. These experiences of regional land use, watershed change and urban water management will be threaded through and complement our academic investigation of urban socio-hydrology.
Course Designation/Attribute: VP, POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 109 - Forests in the Anthropocene
Forests are critical to human well being and to the functioning of the Earth system that sustains life on our planet. Yet during the Anthropocene (the current period during which most of the Earth is affected by human activity), forests are increasingly affected by fires, insect outbreaks, and logging, with dramatic effects on many ecosystem services. At the same time, forests are understood to be integral to addressing the ongoing climate crisis. This First-Year Intensive seminar explores primary literature and other sources to expose students to how forests work, how they are changing, and why.
Course Designation/Attribute: SP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Occasionally
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GEOG 116 - Forest Ecology
Understanding how ecosystems function and how they change in response to human activities and normal Earth system fluctuations are important themes in contemporary natural sciences. Beyond having inherent scientific value, such knowledge has become integral to national and international policies and practices of ecosystem management. This course provides a foundation in forest ecology by considering the function, structure, and composition of forest ecosystems. Topics include forest succession, long-term ecological variability, disturbance ecology, ecological resilience, and the influence of climate and environmental heterogeneity on forest patterns and dynamics.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 119 - The Arctic in the Anthropocene
The Arctic is currently experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth. The most profound environmental changes that will occur in your lifetime are undoubtedly those resulting from climate warming in the Arctic: loss of Arctic sea ice, melting of glaciers/ice caps/ice sheets, thawing of carbon-rich permafrost, extinction of species, among numerous other impacts. However, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic - these changes have far-reaching implications across the planet. For instance, loss of arctic snow and ice exacerbates global climate warming, thawing of arctic permafrost carbon contributes vast quantities of greenhouse gases to the global atmosphere, and the melting of land ice in the Arctic is the largest contributor to expected global sea level rise over the next century. Furthermore, climate warming in the Arctic has significant implications for native communities and subsistence hunting activities, fisheries, oil and gas exploration, and shipping routes. This course focuses on understanding the Arctic as a system, including land-atmosphere-ocean-ice-human interactions. Topics include arctic hydrology, climatology, biogeochemical cycling, permafrost, glacier/ice sheet dynamics, terrestrial and marine ecology, sea ice, physical oceanography, and human-environment interactions.
Course Designation/Attribute: SP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 140 - Race and Urban Space
This course is about the ways in which race and racial difference have been central to the production of cities and everyday life in urban contexts. Ultimately, our goal is to gain a broader understanding of the relationship between social difference, space and power. Across our course readings there is a particular focus on Black urban life. However, given that race is inextricably linked to other categories of difference - gender, sexuality, class-our course attends to how people who inhabit multiple axes of difference both experience life in the city and produce new definitions of urbanity. Formely GEOG 240
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: bi-annually
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GEOG 156 - Getting to Zero: Clean Energy for a Climate-Safe Future
This course focuses on scalable solutions for carbon neutrality. The goal of this course is to learn about, and apply, a quantitative approach to sizing up the technical potential of a range of clean energy technologies that could support the transition to a low carbon society. Students will explore clean energy solutions applicable for electricity supply, heating and cooling, transportation and more. In parallel, students will investigate climate change mitigation policies and actions being pursued in Massachusetts, in New England, in the U.S., and around the world. Students will also their emerging understanding of clean energy solutions to the case of Clark University to examine what Clark University might do to achieve carbon neutrality. This course satisfies the Formal Analysis requirement by emphasizing quantitative analysis as a basis for critical reasoning about of the opportunities of various technologies for meeting the clean energy challenge, including symbolic equations used for quantitative assessments and for modeling alternative outcomes.
Course Designation/Attribute: FA
Anticipated Terms Offered: every 4 years in fall
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GEOG 157 - Psychogeography and Cultural Spaces
Human are forever inscribing themselves in the landscape; whether it be particular architectural forms or certain crop formations, the result is a complex palimpsest that records social life. Cultural geographies have unpicked this record, studying how and why grandiose monuments signify social status and, conversely, why other groups have been resigned to a ghostly presence. And yet these complex and intriguing geographies too often become buried underneath daily routines and multimedia bombardment. Psychogeographers look to reignite our awareness and engagement with the human environment; as one of its founders stated, psychogeography is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. This course continues on in this tradition. It does not simply look to engage with questions of how to identify and examine cultural geographies, rather it enlists students in an attempt to interact with the shaping of landscapes; recognizing how daily routines make our world and how critical understandings of cultural geographies can help effect social change. After an introduction to the psychogeographical and cultural geography literatures, students will engage in their own urban explorations and interactions; navigating Worcester via Berlin, partaking in “urban drifting” and constructing their own “detourements”. The course will therefore provide a foundation in cultural geography and connect classroom to outside world through the practice of psychogeography.
Course Designation/Attribute: VP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 0170 - Environment and Society
Relationships between human societies and the natural environment are central to the discipline of geography. Geography 017 introduces students to these relationships and to the analysis of them, integrating perspectives from the natural and social sciences. We examine questions such as: how do environments shape societies; how do societies transform environments; are there environmental limits to economic growth; how does culture shape our relationships with our environments; and what sorts of human-environment relationships are sustainable and just? We examine these questions at many different geographic and temporal scales: from pre-history up to the present, from very local cases to the entire planet, and from pre-industrial or rural landscapes to suburban and urban ones. Cases and discussions will span the entire globe, but will include examples from the Americas, the United States, and New England in order to ground our discussions in the places we know best.
Course Designation/Attribute: GP (summer only)
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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GEOG 186 - Special Topics:
Devoted to a specific topic unique for each semester and instructor. FALL 2018 TOPIC: GEOGRAPHIES OF POVERTY & INEQUALITY
The gap between the rich and poor is growing, prompting concerns about what intensifying inequality and poverty might mean for society. This course will provide students with an opportunity to think deeply about the diverse causes, consequences and experiences of inequality and poverty. We will focus primarily on the United States, but we will also look at historical and global examples for context. Throughout the semester, we will move through a series of inquiries to explore how housing, food, transportation, health, the environment, and work and wages are related to course themes. We will use academic articles, maps, videos, short stories, reputable news sources, policy briefs, art and in-class discussion to help us identify and analyze the underlying structural causes and consequences of poverty and inequality so we might envision alternatives.
May be repeateable for credit.
Course Designation/Attribute: VP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Occasionally
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GEOG 190 - Introduction to Geographic Information Science
This course introduces Geographic Information Science (GIS) as a powerful mapping and analytical tool. Topics include GISc data structure, map projections, and fundamental GISc techniques for spatial analysis. Laboratory exercises concentrate on applying concepts presented in lectures and incorporate two widely used GISc software packages - IDRISI (created by Clarklabs) and ArcGIS (created by ESRI). These exercises include examples of GISc applications in environmental modeling, socio-demographic change and site suitability analyses. Although the course is computer-intensive, no programming background is required. A formal-analysis course. Counts as skills course or core course in mapping sciences/spatial analysis in geography major.
Course Designation/Attribute: FA
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every semester
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GEOG 196 - Development and Environment in Latin America: Difficult Questions, Creative Responses
This first-year intensive, run as a seminar, will ask students to consider deeply difficult questions about the relationships between economic development, human rights, cultural difference and the environment. We address these dilemmas for the case of Latin America, and will interact with professionals and activists primarily from Latin America who work on these issues every day and seek to develop creative responses. The course will focus on the complex relationships among natural resource extraction, large-scale agriculture, large-scale infrastructure, community-based development, and human and indigenous peoples’ rights. As such, the seminar also introduces students to on-going research being conducted at Clark University and in which they may later wish to become involved.
Course Designation/Attribute: VP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-anually
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GEOG 205 - Introduction to Hydrology
Overview of what governs the hydrological cycle’s major components of precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, surface water, and groundwater. Core principles of physical hydrology will be introduced including rainfall-runoff processes, surface and subsurface storage and flows, and land-atmosphere exchange. Students will also learn about human influences on the water cycle, and consider management of water resources at field to watershed scales. Upon completion of this course, students will:
- Understand the essential elements of hydrological processes and how these govern the distribution of water in the earth system.
- Be able to solve the surface water balance and analyze its controls in different environments.
- Have the basic skills needed to explore water resource issues, such as quantitative understanding of the likelihood of extreme rainfall and flooding events, flow directions and rates in surface and ground waters, or land use/land cover effects on hydrological processes.
- Have new appreciation for fundamental tools and terms used in the field of hydrology including mass balance, steady-state, flux-gradient relations, continuity, dimensional analysis, and probability.
RECOMMEND GEOG 104 or GEOG 102 . A background in one or more of the following courses would also be helpful: physics (PHYS 110 /PHYS 111 ), calculus (MATH 120 /MATH 121 ), or statistics (GEOG 110 ). Three of the lab sessions will require extended hours.
Prerequisites:
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall
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GEOG 216 - Field Methods for Environmental Science
The collection and analysis of field data is central to research and other work in the environmental sciences. In this field-based course students learn key methods used in environmental science, especially forest ecology. Students also work with the scientific method and learn to formulate and test hypotheses. Most class meetings involve field trips to nearby forest ecosystems to collect field data. Occasional class meetings are in the classroom to discuss methodological approaches.
Prerequisites: The successful completion of or concurrent enrollment in GEOG 116 or consent of the instructor is a prerequisite for GEOG 216.
Course Designation/Attribute: SP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 220 - Property and the Global Environment
Property relations are among the most powerful and pervasive institutions in human societies. Fundamental rules governing and legitimating who can do what, and where, shape and reveal interactions between human societies and physical environments. This course explores these dynamics with a particular focus on their implications for environmental politics and regulation. It addresses debates over common property; the benefits and dangers of privatization of environmental goods and services; distinctions between formal and informal property rights; the development of zoning and other regulation of private property; and contemporary debates over novel forms of property rights in nature (e.g., intellectual property rights, tradeable pollution permits, etc.), as well as relationships among trade, property rights, and environmental quality. At least 6 credits of prior coursework in geography or another relevant discipline (e.g., political science, economics, history, or ID) or permission of the instructor subsequent to discussion regarding the student’s level of preparation is required.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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GEOG 222 - Why Global Warming Matters
Climate change (a.k.a. “global warming”) is the single greatest problem facing the planet today. Or is it? In this course students will peel away the rhetoric surrounding global climate change, so that they may be able to understand why this issue matters not only to international policy makers but also to individuals and their daily lives. Topics for exploration will focus on the causes and consequences of climate change and justification (and options) for action. The breadth of areas the climate-change issue intersects - including but not limited to ecology, politics, economy, ethics - suggests that global warming is a crucial integrating theme for the discipline of geography and, more importantly, the intellectual foundation of a well-rounded student. Students will engage in quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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GEOG 225 - Environmental Politics
This course examines the development of environmental governance, with a primary focus on the United States. It explores how we conceive of the environment, multiple approaches to environmental governance and protection, and the many dimensions of environmental politics. It reviews both the history of environmental movements and regulation, and contemporary issues and debates in environmental governance, with particular attention to issues of scale, justice, institutional forms, and the effects of social movements. Each iteration of the course will focus on a specific example, after building a common historical and analytical foundation (e.g., climate change, genetically modified organisms, pollution control, conservation of biodiversity, etc.).
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 226 - Critical Environmental Histories of the US: Race, Indigeneity, and Nature
This course will critically look at how ideas of “race” and “indigeneity” are intertwined with “nature” in a U.S. American context. Nature is often imagined as external to human society and culture. However, many social scientists and humanities scholars criticize the Eurocentric separation of nature and culture and of environment and society. We will focus in particular on environmental histories and ideas of nature that are entangled in settler-colonialism, racial oppression, eugenics, pollution, catastrophe, and health. At the same time, this course will present critiques of how nature is mobilized in the service of empire in the United States and will present alternative conceptualizations of nature from selected indigenous studies and critical race scholarship.
This course will complement other advanced undergraduate Geography courses, serving as an elective for majors, especially in the Human-Environment Geography Concentration. It will count towards the Geography Major/Minor as well as the Global Environmental Studies Major/Minor.
Course Designation/Attribute: GP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: every fall
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GEOG 228 - Hydroclimatology
This course is a general introduction to climatology and the interaction between earth’s climate and the hydrologic cycle. We will emphasize the essential controls of weather and climate, patterns and dynamics of the global climate (including insolation, temperature, evapotranspiration, precipitation, and atmospheric circulation), and the drivers of climate and hydrologic change. We will examine large-scale modes of climate variability (such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation), as well as hydroclimate extremes (droughts, floods). Finally, the course will have a focus on developing a deeper understanding of how climate data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated, and how models have become important tools to improve our understanding of these systems.
Prerequisites: GEOG 104 or GEOG 102
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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GEOG 232 - Landscape Ecology
Considers the relationships between spatial patterns in landscape structure (physical, biological and cultural) and ecological processes. Role of ecosystem pattern in mass and energy transfers, disturbance regimes, species’ persistence, applications of remote sensing and GIS for landscape characterization and modeling are examined. Prerequisite: GEOG 190 - Introduction to Geographic Information Science . GEOG 116 - Forest Ecology is strongly recommended.
Prerequisites: GEOG 190
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 242 - Everyday Urban Life (Urban Ethnography Lab)
This course is about exploring everyday urban life through the use of ethnographic methods. The course brings together ethnographic fieldwork with readings in critical ethnography and urban studies. In this course, the city serves as a laboratory for understanding matters of space, place and power. Alongside engaging critical literature, and fieldwork, students will gain experience with a range of tools and methods from creating ethnographic toolkits and interviewing, to mapping and visual ethnography, to coding and analysis. The course invites participants to think critically, both about the role of ethnography in creating urban fictions, and also about the possibilities of using ethnography for engaging questions about difference and power, for mapping and imagining a diversity of urban life, for ethically approaching communities and collaborators, and for creating just urban futures. The primary course objectives are (1) to familiarize students with ethnographic methods, (2) to orient students towards employing ethnography in the study of space and place, and (3) to engage critiques of and critical approaches to using ethnography to examine urban life. Satisfies Geography major skills requirement.
Prerequisites: Any one of the following: GEOG 020 , GEOG 141 , GEOG 140 , GEOG 248 , GEOG 252 , or GEOG 258
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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GEOG 245 - Problems & Practices in Environmental Stewardship
This course focuses on concepts, challenges and practices surrounding the stewardship of natural resources and landscapes globally and locally, using Worcester and central Massachusetts as a natural laboratory. Across urban, rural, woodland and wildland regions, land stewardship and sustainability efforts target the protection of a large range of ecosystem services. Course includes field trips.
We will draw on foundational and contemporary geographic and interdisciplinary readings in environmental stewardship and earth system governance, exploring issues of social representation, meaning, participation, access, and exclusion in nature. To ground these academic insights in place, we will collaborate with local conservation institutions and conduct site-based work. We will learn, understand and engage with specific stewardship strategies and histories in response to environmental challenges in our local communities, including policies, programs, regulations, and civic engagement, and how they can address goals related to building greater diversity, equity and inclusion.
Prerequisites: A 100- or 200- level course in Human Environment Geography (e.g.,GEOG 017 GEOG 106 GEOG 118 GEOG 220 GEOG 225 GEOG 259 GEOG 280 )
Course Designation/Attribute: POP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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GEOG 247 - Intermediate Quantitative Methods in Geography
Intermediate Quantitative Methods in Geography extends the concepts of introductory statistics to multivariate regression, principal components, spatial statistics, and additional intermediate methods. The course uses the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software, which works as a spreadsheet with dropdown menus. Students learn how to select a method and interpret its output in a practical manner that avoids common misconceptions. Students apply the concepts to group projects based on student interest.
Prerequisites: Introductory statistics course, such as GEOG 110 / GEOG 311 Intro to Quantitative Methods, or high school Advanced Placement Statistics
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every spring
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GEOG 248 - Social Justice and the City
Cities today face unprecedented challenges. Migration, rapid urbanization, growing inequality, authoritarian governments, racial tensions, terrorism, climate change, and the list goes on. This course examines the concept of social justice in light of contemporary philosophical debates and explores its various relations to the city and urban development, using a geographical perspective. After engaging various dialogues on social justice, the course turns its attention to the ‘urban question’. It asks what is distinctive about the issue of social justice in an urban context and whether we need a more geographically-informed viewpoint from with to deploy our positions on social justice. In the final section of the course, various urban issues and problems are explored using developed understandings of social justice.
Course Designation/Attribute: VP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 252 - Urban Design Research Lab
At present, over half the world’s population live in cities. Yet we have no stable idea of what makes a good city. As society changes, so does what it is we demand of our cities. We therefore must understand the city as constantly in a state of becoming. As a consequence we require a critical understanding of what types of processes cause the city to change over time. This course seeks to unite this realization with the concerns of urban practice. Throughout the 20th century, urban geographers examined the ways in which urban planners, architects and urban designers shaped the city. Conversely, early urban planners such as Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes were deeply concerned with geographical problems. In this course we bring an understanding of contemporary urban problems to the study of urban design and practice. The course requires students to select a topical concern and research what geographers and urbanists have concluded about it. With this understanding, students must collectively draw upon social and urban theory to develop an urban design scheme to respond to the topical issue. Throughout the course students will work in groups to develop a design scheme.
Prerequisites: One of the following is required: GEOG 020 , GEOG 157 , GEOG 172 , GEOG 241 , GEOG 248 , GEOG 258
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 258 - Utopian Visions, Urban Realities: Planning Cities for the 21st Century
Although utopia literally means “no place” and utopias do not exist in any concrete sense, utopian thinking exerts a powerful hold on our imagination and continues to inspire a lot of approaches to urban policy, design and planning today. This course explores this thinking and will attempt to come to grips with various ideas about what utopias should be, how they have animated our thinking about city form and function, and how they have achieved certain material expressions in the twentieth-century urban context. It will also examine the contradictions and unintended consequences of utopian thinking in planning. Amongst other things, the course will grapple with questions of order versus disorder in the city, heterogeneity versus homogeneity, openness versus closure, and individual freedom versus collective necessity. It will draw upon geographical sources as well as a diverse array of other materials.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 259 - Global Change, Food and Farming Systems
This course explores issues in global, regional and local systems of food production, consumption, and sustainability, emphasizing the linkages of those systems to global environmental and economic change. We will explore interactions between agriculture and human societies (past and present), and consider the role of adaptation in agricultural innovation, decision-making, diffusion and change. The origins of agriculture (overview, major food crops in use today) will preface our analysis of contemporary farming systems. Themes such as demographic change, political economy and environment-development policy will be explored in depth throughout the course. Particular attention will be directed to the implications of changing land use systems, climate regimes, and economic liberalization and globalization for food security and food justice. We will study the implications of industrialization, urbanization, sociodemographic shifts, and institutional change for the diversity, supply, distribution and future of food, and for the broader sustainability of agro-ecosystems.
Prerequisites: GEOG 017 Environment and Society ; OR PERM
Anticipated Terms Offered: fall & spring
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GEOG 260 - GIS & Land Change Models
GIS & Land Change Models examines computerized models that simulate land change. Such models are important because land change influences socioeconomic development, biodiversity conservation, water resources, energy use, greenhouse gasses, and many other factors. Examples are in Massachusetts to extrapolate suburbanization and in the tropics to Reduce Emissions due to Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Students learn fundamental concepts such as calibration, extrapolation, validation, and sensitivity, along with technical aspects of TerrSet’s Land Change Modeler and Geomod. Students apply the concepts in group projects.
Prerequisites: Prerequisite is Intro to GIS, listed as GEOG 190 or IDCE 310 .
Course Designation/Attribute: POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every fall
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GEOG 263 - The Climate System and Global Environmental Change
In order to understand and predict the Earth’s current and future climate, it is imperative to know the forces that can drive both natural and anthropogenic climate change. This course will utilize an Earth Systems approach towards climate science, meaning rather than simply cataloging the Earth’s history of climate change, we will focus on understanding the climate system’s response to both external and internal drivers. We will examine the interactions between atmosphere, ice, ocean, land surface, and vegetation, allowing us to touch on the fields of geology, ecology, paleobotany, glaciology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeochemistry, climate modeling, atmospheric chemistry, and hydrology, among others. The goal of the course is to provide the scientific background that is necessary for understanding global environmental change-related issues as well as providing a basis for addressing the critical social and policy questions that cascade from these issues.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 274 - Africa’s Development in Global Context
Explores, in detail, the economic geographies of Sub-Saharan Africa; both their historical development and their contemporary manifestations in commodity chains, business practices, production systems, gender and environmental relations, entrepreneurial and innovative behavior, and rural and urban livelihood strategies. Emphasis is placed on examining how African economies relate to the rest of the world, how globalization is influencing the prospects for growth, autonomy, and sustainability in Africa, and how Africans actually produce, innovate, succeed, and struggle in their business activities. Confronts stereotypes about “backward” economic practices in Africa and encourages students to view Africans as capable agents of economic change not simply as passive victims of global or historical inequalities.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 279 - GIS & Map Comparison
GIS & Map Comparison investigates metrics that scientists use and abuse focusing on applications to Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science with raster data. Methods compare two variables of the same phenomenon, such as comparison of an initial time versus a subsequent time, or comparison of predictions versus observations. Students learn how to compute and to interpret metrics such as Hits, Misses, False Alarms, Mean Deviation, Mean Absolute Deviation, Area Under the Total Operating Characteristic curve, among others. Students apply and develop the concepts in group projects. The professor wrote the book, literally.
Prerequisites: Prerequisite is Intro to GIS, listed as GEOG 190 or IDCE 310 .
Course Designation/Attribute: FA, POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every fall
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GEOG 280 - Urban Ecology: Cities as Ecosystems
Explores ecology and the social and physical geography of cities as systems built and inhabited by people, and constantly changed by social, biological and physical processes. This class of ecosystem is often neglected except in studies of pollution, yet it is home to many of the world’s people and to a surprising number of plant and animal species as well. Readings, lectures, discussion and written work combine landscape and systems ecology with physical and urban geography and environmental justice to broaden our understanding of city environments, both present and possible. In addition to our in-class academic meetings, field trips in Worcester and the surrounding Blackstone River Valley will offer a deep dive into the challenges of regional and historical land use, urban green and blue space management, and socio-hydrology; a $100 fee is charged to students at time of registration to cover administrative and transportation costs. Book costs for the course are minimal. Registration is by Permission only for undergraduates (email: rroychowdhury@clarku.edu).
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 281 - Special Topics: PoP in Geography
The “Special Topics POP in Geography” course offers students, usually sophomores and juniors, an opportunity to engage a real-world problem of practice related to geography. Students will work in teams and in consultation with faculty and community experts to address various dimensions of the problem of practice. They will learn and apply research skills and develop speaking and writing experience and expertise. May be repeated for credit when topic is different.
Spring 2022 Topic - WHAT & HOW TO REMEMBER: 100 YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY AT CLARK
The Graduate School of Geography marked its 100-year anniversary in Fall, 2021. In Fall 2022, the School will engage in a more formal set of events to mark this centennial. But what should we remember of these 100 years? How should we mark them? The Graduate School of Geography (GSG) at Clark is renowned many things, both today and over its century of existence. For example, it is known for having granted more PhD degrees than any other department in the country, a significant number of them to women. It is also associated with the racist theory of environmental determinism from the early 20th century. It has had five of its faculty members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. What do these facts reveal, and what do they hide or ignore? In this class, we will research some of the history of the department, and identify ways to celebrate its history, acknowledge its gaps and weaknesses, and mark its present trajectory. Students will work in teams to develop materials and programming for the Fall celebration events, developing and refining their skills in archival and interview research, web and graphic presentations, and writing.
Prerequisites: Any 000 or 100 level Geography Course
Course Designation/Attribute: POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: unknown, likely bi-annually
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GEOG 282 - Advanced Remote Sensing
Application of remote sensor systems in earth science and other disciplines; interpretation of multispectral scanner, RADAR and thermal imagery, classification, postclassification analysis, special transformations, multitemporal data analysis for change detection, the study of spectral characteristics of vegetation, soils, water, minerals and other materials. The specific objectives of the course are to acquaint the student with the physical principles underlying remote sensing systems and the primary remote-sensing data-collection systems; introduce the student to methods of interpreting and analyzing remotely sensed data; provide some insight concerning the applications of remote sensing in various discipline areas; and provide hands-on experience in digital image processing using software packages available in the computer lab.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 283 - Terrestrial Ecosystems and Global Change
Explores ecosystem responses to global environmental changes and how they feedback on the earth system. Students will learn about biophysical controls on energy, water, and carbon cycles, and how biogeography, vegetation physiology, and local to global climates influence surface-atmosphere exchanges, which then feedback on biogeography and climate. The course introduces the theory, remote sensing, and computational modeling of biophysical, biogeochemical, and ecosystem dynamical processes active in shaping the terrestrial biosphere. Students will be exposed to methods of land surface and ecosystem process modeling through computer tutorials with numerical simulation, and will train some basics of writing computer code. Can fulfill the Geography or Earth System Science Capstone.
Prerequisites: GEOG 104 or GEOG 116 or GEOG 119 or GEOG 205 or GEOG 232 or GEOG 263 or BIOL 216
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 286 - Special Topics
Devoted to a specific topic unique for each semester and instructor. May be repeatable for credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall and Spring
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GEOG 287 - New Methods in Earth Observation
Understanding the Earth System depends on observing observations of socioeconomic and environmental patterns and processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. These scales span seconds to decades in time, and centimeters to millions of square kilometers in space. Earth Observation (EO, also known as remote sensing) is the only feasible means for providing this range of perspectives, but our ability to collect data across all necessary scales is currently limited by inherent tradeoffs between the extent, duration, frequency, and resolution of observation. This suggests the possibility that there may be important, but currently unknown, phenomena that exist within our observational blind spots. Some of this blindness is imposed by physics (there are only so many photons reflected from the Earth, and these are proportional to wavelength), but many are due to engineering or economic constraints (some sensors are too expensive to use more than once or over a large area). These latter hurdles are falling, however, as new “big data” analytical techniques emerge, and combine with increasingly available, high quality, low-cost data made possible by a host of new innovations, including cheap satellites, unmanned aerial systems, inexpensive cellphone enabled field sensors, and the availability of a large pool of internet-enabled workers who can interpret these data in ways that computers cannot. This course provides students hands-on experience working with these new EO technologies.
Prerequisites: GEOG 293
Basic programming experience required.
Undergraduate students by instructor permission only
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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GEOG 293 - Introduction to Remote Sensing
This course is designed to introduce the students to the principles and analytical methods of satellite remote sensing as applied to environmental systems (e.g., land-cover classification, vegetation monitoring, etc.). Lectures will cover principles of remote sensing, sensor types, as well as the processing and analysis of multispectral satellite images (e.g. Landsat and SPOT). A series of hands-on lab exercises will complement students’ understanding of lecture material and also helps students to become familiar with image processing functions of the IDRISI image analysis software. Particular emphasis will be placed on final group project that brings a real world perspective to the learning process.
Prerequisites: Vector GIS or Introduction to GIS, and must register for Lab. Introduction to GISc and Introduction to Quantitative Methods desirable.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year.
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GEOG 296 - Advanced Raster GIS
This course builds on Introduction to GIS by delving deeper into raster GIS. Topics include time-series analysis, uncertainty assessment, multi-objective decision making, land-change modeling, and spatial statistics. Concepts in lectures are illustrated using the Idrisi software. Final project is required. This is a prerequisite for the fifth year Masters program in GIS and is a requirement for the GISDE masters program. Open to JRS & SRS.
Prerequisites: GEOG 190 or IDCE 310 and GEOG 293/383.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every spring
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GEOG 297 - Honors
Students receive variable credit for advanced research & readings in the honors program.
Anticipated Terms Offered: ES
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GEOG 298 - Internship
Academic experience taking place in the field with an opportunity to earn credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: ES
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GEOG 299 - Directed Study
Undergraduates, typically juniors & seniors, construct an independent study course on a topic approved & directed by a facutly member. Offered for variable credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: ES
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GEOG 302 - Climate Dynamics Seminar
Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and the field of climate dynamics is rapidly evolving. There are many issues being debated within the scientific community, as well as in public arenas, that are not covered in textbooks. The goal of this seminar course is to provide students with a fundamental knowledge of climate dynamics and to expose them to emerging topics in the literature. Specific topics may include climate change detection and attribution; large-scale modes of climate variability (e.g., ENSO, PDO) and teleconnections; atmospheric circulation; tropical climate change; earth system models; downscaling methods; extreme events; methodological advances in climate research; climate adaptation and mitigation. Open to doctoral and master’s students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: annually
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GEOG 305 - Introduction to Hydrology
Overview of what governs the hydrological cycle’s major components of precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, surface water, and groundwater. Core principles of physical hydrology will be introduced including rainfall-runoff processes, surface and subsurface storage and flows, and land-atmosphere exchange. Students will also learn about human influences on the water cycle, and consider management of water resources at field to watershed scales. Upon completion of this course, students will:
- Understand the essential elements of hydrological processes and how these govern the distribution of water in the earth system.
- Be able to solve the surface water balance and analyze its controls in different environments.
- Have the basic skills needed to explore water resource issues, such as quantitative understanding of the likelihood of extreme rainfall and flooding events, flow directions and rates in surface and ground waters, or land use/land cover effects on hydrological processes.
- Have new appreciation for fundamental tools and terms used in the field of hydrology including mass balance, steady-state, flux-gradient relations, continuity, dimensional analysis, and probability.
The course assumes an introductory background in earth and environmental sciences. A background in one or more of the following courses will also be helpful: physics (PHYS 110 /PHYS 111 ), calculus (MATH 120 /MATH 121 ), or statistics (GEOG 110 ). Three of the lab sessions will require extended hours. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Prerequisites:
Corequisites:
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall
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GEOG 309 - Trends in Forest Ecology
Understanding the ecology of forest ecosystems is central to understanding and addressing many contemporary environmental issues. In this doctoral and masters student seminar, we will read the primary literature, which provides the foundation for contemporary ecological understanding, as well as recent primary literature, which illustrates recent trends in forest ecology research.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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GEOG 310 - Qualitative Research Methods, Skills and Applications
Examines the purpose, scope and procedures of qualitative research, especially as applied to human geography. Emphasis is on epistemologies underlying various approaches to qualitative research. Readings will draw on a variety of work in the social sciences, especially anthropology, geography, sociology and women’s studies. We examine a range of qualitative methods, including interviews, participant and nonparticipant observation, ethnography, action research and discourse analysis. Through case-study readings, we examine how scholars employ these methods in different research contexts, with particular attention to the ethical and practical considerations of doing so. The course will engage theoretical debates relevant to qualitative research by addressing questions such as: How does qualitative research challenge the practice of social “science” and the search for “universal truths”? How do we represent the world or multiple understandings and perspectives of it? What are the implications of using qualitative data for the researcher, the research product and the “researched”? How do we interpret qualitative data and present it to scholarly audiences? Includes an occasional lab that meets about 6 times throughout the semester to practive specific research methods. See Comments for schedule. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 314 - Research Proposal Writing in Geography
Covers major topics in empirical social science research design, including problem definition, research strategies, sampling, data-collection and data analysis methods, and budgeting. Docotral students only.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 315 - Applying Deep Learning to Earth Observation
Focusing on convolutional and recurrent neural networks, this course will provide an in-depth overview of key machine learning algorithms and their application to satellite imagery (especially for the task of semantic segmentation), including the full workflow required to acquire and process imagery, develop and train a model, and make and critically evaluate the resulting maps. The course will be strongly hands-on, and emphasize the use of programming (python), open image archives and EO analytical platforms (e.g. Google Earth Engine), and tools for creating open and reproducible workflows (git and GitHub).
Prerequisites: students must have sufficient background in GIScience and enough programming experience.
GEOG 383 and at least one of DSCI 305 or DSCI 304 or CSCI 301
Determination regarding whether prerequisites can be waived or satisfied by other means may also be made by the instructors.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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GEOG 317 - Research
This is a variable unit graduate course for students engaged in research at the PhD level.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every Semester
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Geog 326 - Critical Environmental Histories of the US: Race, Indigeneity, and Nature
This course will critically look at how ideas of “race” and “indigeneity” are intertwined with “nature” in a U.S. American context. Nature is often imagined as external to human society and culture. However, many social scientists and humanities scholars criticize the Eurocentric separation of nature and culture and of environment and society. We will focus in particular on environmental histories and ideas of nature that are entangled in settler-colonialism, racial oppression, eugenics, pollution, catastrophe, and health. At the same time, this course will present critiques of how nature is mobilized in the service of empire in the United States and will present alternative conceptualizations of nature from selected indigenous studies and critical race scholarship.
Anticipated Terms Offered: every fall
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GEOG 327 - The Politics of Sensing
This course contends that proliferating environmental sensors (e.g., camera traps; smartphones) and scientific retheorizations of the human/animal senses (sight, hearing, touch) are together refiguring human-environment relations - with consequence to core disciplinary debates. It operates as a survey course, pursuing work that deliberates on the roles that sensors and “the senses” are playing in contemporary environment-making: from animal studies, political ecology, and political geography to black geographies and media studies. In pursuing an analytical ‘cut’ across these seemingly disparate areas - “the politics of sensing” aims to equip students with new tools for pursuing cross-disciplinary synergies and establishing points of engagement within an ever-widening geographical project.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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GEOG 328 - Hydroclimatology
This course is a general introduction to climatology and the interaction between earth’s climate and the hydrologic cycle. We will emphasize the essential controls of weather and climate, patterns and dynamics of the global climate (including insolation, temperature, evapotranspiration, precipitation, and atmospheric circulation), and the drivers of climate and hydrologic change. We will examine large-scale modes of climate variability (such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation), as well as hydroclimate extremes (droughts, floods). Finally, the course will have a focus on developing a deeper understanding of how climate data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated, and how models have become important tools to improve our understanding of these systems.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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GEOG 332 - Landscape Ecology
Considers the relationships between spatial patterns in landscape structure (physical, biological and cultural) and ecological processes. Role of ecosystem pattern in mass and energy transfers, disturbance regimes, species’ persistence, applications of remote sensing and GIS for landscape characterization and modeling are examined. Prerequisites: GEOG 190 OR IDCE 310 . GEOG 116 Forest Ecology is strongly recommended. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Prerequisites: GEOG 190 - Introduction to Geographic Information Science OR IDCE 310 - Intro to Geographic Information Science
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 333 - Terrestrial Ecosystems and Global Change
Explores ecosystem responses to global environmental changes and how they feedback on the earth system. Students will learn about biophysical controls on energy, water, and carbon cycles, and how biogeography, vegetation physiology, and local to global climates influence surface-atmosphere exchanges, which then feedback on biogeography and climate. The course introduces the theory, remote sensing, and computational modeling of biophysical, biogeochemical, and ecosystem dynamical processes active in shaping the terrestrial biosphere. Students will be exposed to methods of land surface and ecosystem process modeling through computer tutorials with numerical simulation, and will train some basics of writing computer code. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 336 - Wildlife Conservation GIS Research Seminar
The course will follow a workshop-seminar and laboratory format in collaboration with research staff at Clark Labs and the Wildlife Conservation Society based in New York City. Students will work in small groups (i.e., no larger than three) for the semester on collaborative conservation projects in Rwanda, Guatemala, Cambodia, and other countries. Students will apply GIS and remote sensing skills to achieve explicit conservation goals related to land change assessment, hydrologic modeling, and ecosystem services valuation/modeling. Work will be performed in close collaboration with Wildlife Conservation Society research staff. Project results will be presented by student teams at the end of the semester to Wildlife Conservation Society staff. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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GEOG 338 - Current Research in Geography
This course will expose students to cutting-edge research across the range of geography and cognate disciplines, primarily via close engagement with a series of visiting speakers and their works. It will complement the other required courses for first year doctoral students in the department, Geography 368 (The Development of Western Geographic Thought) and Geography 318 (Explanation in Geography): where they provide historical and conceptual approaches to the development and content of the discipline, Geography 328 will have students engage with specific, grounded, and current examples of geographic research and the ongoing development of the discipline, with particular attention to full coverage of its breadth. The course, run in conjunction with the department’s colloquium series, will include required attendance at each of the lectures by speakers in the series; readings of selected articles or other works by visiting scholars prior to their visits; and class sessions with visiting scholars to discuss the works read, the lecture, and current research in the visitors’ areas of expertise. Students will write papers critically analyzing the talks and papers in terms of both content and presentation, and situating them within both the discipline and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry.
The course is required for first-year doctoral students in geography, and open to masters students and senior undergraduate geography majors with permission of the instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: offered every year fall and spring semesters
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GEOG 340 - Graduate Seminar in Critical Mobilities
This course is a graduate reading seminar on the field of mobilities studies. In this seminar we trace genealogies, explore major debates in the field, and examine how various strands of critical theory have shaped the study of mobility. Our readings analyze not only the practice and experiences of mobility, but also the complex networks and infrastructures that engender and prohibit the movement of people, information, capital and material objects. Our course goals are (1) to develop a thorough understanding of how scholars have approached questions of movement and stasis (2) to think about opportunities for geographers to critically intervene upon and expand mobilities studies in the present. This course is open to graduate students only.
Anticipated Terms Offered: bi-annually
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GEOG 343 - Foundations and Frontiers in Land System Science
Global environmental changes involve worldwide transformations of land, oceans and atmosphere, driven by human activities interwoven with natural processes. Changes in land use at multiple scales have dramatic cumulative impacts on the Earth System, that feedback on ecosystem services, human well-being, and vulnerability to future climatic and political-economic shocks. Land change is a key concern across different scientific, policy and practitioner communities, and multiple international programes and stakeholders. The interdisciplinary field of Land System Science focuses on the study of land systems and their change, and the co-design of solutions for global sustainability. This advanced seminar examines the foundations of land system science from an initial focus on monitoring and modeling land use/cover change and its drivers, to emphasizing the feedbacks between social and environmental systems and the co-design of sustainable transformations. We will employ an interdisciplinary approach bridging biophysical, social, and geospatial analysis to examine complex challenges in: landscape change and sustainability across urban-rural gradients; telecoupled land in a globalized world; land change and conflict; land-climate interactions; tradeoffs in biodiversity and ecosystem services; the food-energy-water nexus; emerging infectious diseases; advances in land monitoring and modelling; knowledge co-production and stakeholder engagement, and land governance. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: every other fall
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GEOG 345 - Problems & Practices in Environmental Stewardship
This course focuses on concepts, challenges and practices surrounding the stewardship of natural resources and landscapes globally and locally, using Worcester and central Massachusetts as a natural laboratory. Across urban, rural, woodland and wildland regions, land stewardship and sustainability efforts target the protection of a large range of ecosystem services. Course includes field trips.
We will draw on foundational and contemporary geographic and interdisciplinary readings in environmental stewardship and earth system governance, exploring issues of social representation, meaning, participation, access, and exclusion in nature. To ground these academic insights in place, we will collaborate with local conservation institutions and conduct site-based work. We will learn, understand and engage with specific stewardship strategies and histories in response to environmental challenges in our local communities, including policies, programs, regulations, and civic engagement, and how they can address goals related to building greater diversity, equity and inclusion.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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GEOG 347 - Intermediate Quantitative Methods in Geography
Intermediate Quantitative Methods in Geography extends the concepts of introductory statistics to multivariate regression, principal components, spatial statistics, and additional intermediate methods. The course uses the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software, which works as a spreadsheet with dropdown menus. Students learn how to select a method and interpret its output in a practical manner that avoids common misconceptions. Students apply the concepts to group projects based on student interest.
Prerequisites: Introductory statistics such as GEOG 110 /GEOG 311 or high school Advanced Placement Statistics
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every spring
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GEOG 350 - Global Political Ecology
This seminar examines the field of political ecology from a global perspective and with emphasis on the role of critical human and physical geography in its development. We read “classic” books and influential articles that provoked debates and shaped the field over the past several decades, as well as more recent texts in the cutting edge of the field. We also study non-Anglophone political ecologies, and the “Clark School of Political Ecology” to which we ourselves belong.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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GEOG 356 - Utopian Visions, Urban Realities: Planning Cities for the 21st Century
Although utopia literally means “no place” and utopias do not exist in any concrete sense, utopian thinking exerts a powerful hold on our imagination and continues to inspire a lot of approaches to urban policy, design and planning today. This course explores this thinking and will attempt to come to grips with various ideas about what utopias should be, how they have animated our thinking about city form and function, and how they have achieved certain material expressions in the twentieth-century urban context. It will also examine the contradictions and unintended consequences of utopian thinking in planning. Amongst other things, the course will grapple with questions of order versus disorder in the city, heterogeneity versus homogeneity, openness versus closure, and individual freedom versus collective necessity. It will draw upon geographical sources as well as a diverse array of other materials. Open to doctoral students only.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 359 - Global Change, Food and Farming Systems
This course explores issues in global, regional and local systems of food production, consumption, and sustainability, emphasizing the linkages of those systems to global environmental and economic change. We will explore interactions between agriculture and human societies (past and present), and consider the role of adaptation in agricultural innovation, decision-making, diffusion and change. The origins of agriculture (overview, major food crops in use today) will preface our analysis of contemporary farming systems. Themes such as demographic change, political economy and environment-development policy will be explored in depth throughout the course. Particular attention will be directed to the implications of changing land use systems, climate regimes, and economic liberalization and globalization for food security and food justice. We will study the implications of industrialization, urbanization, sociodemographic shifts, and institutional change for the diversity, supply, distribution and future of food, and for the broader sustainability of agro-ecosystems.
Anticipated Terms Offered: fall & spring
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GEOG 360 - GIS & Land Change Models
GIS & Land Change Models examines computerized models that simulate land change. Such models are important because land change influences socioeconomic development, biodiversity conservation, water resources, energy use, greenhouse gasses, and many other factors. Examples are in Massachusetts to extrapolate suburbanization and in the tropics to Reduce Emissions due to Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Students learn fundamental concepts such as calibration, extrapolation, validation, and sensitivity, along with technical aspects of TerrSet’s Land Change Modeler and Geomod. Students apply the concepts in group projects.
Prerequisites: Prerequisite is Intro to GIS, listed as GEOG 190 or IDCE 310 .
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every fall
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GEOG 363 - The Climate System and Global Environmental Change
In order to understand and predict the Earth’s current and future climate, it is imperative to know the forces that can drive both natural and anthropogenic climate change. This course will utilize an Earth Systems approach towards climate science, meaning rather than simply cataloging the Earth’s history of climate change, we will focus on understanding the climate system’s response to both external and internal drivers. We will examine the interactions between atmosphere, ice, ocean, land surface, and vegetation, allowing us to touch on the fields of geology, ecology, paleobotany, glaciology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeochemistry, climate modeling, atmospheric chemistry, and hydrology, among others. The goal of the course is to provide the scientific background that is necessary for understanding global environmental change-related issues as well as providing a basis for addressing the critical social and policy questions that cascade from these issues. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 366 - Topics in Urban Geography
Topics in Urban Geography engages a substantive theme within urban geography and cognate disciplines, focusing first on theorizations of the theme, then substantive empirical investigations of it. Over the course of the semester, doctoral students will read a range of scholarly texts and will place them in two regards: first, in the broader historical and conceptual sweep of urban geographical scholarship; and second, in critical engagement with the goals, methods, and contributions of the specific work in the subfield. Since the particular topic in a given semester will vary, doctoral students can take the course more than once for credit, as long as the subtitle is different from a previously taken course. Open for doctoral and masters students. Open to doctoral students, others by permission only.
In the topics seminar subtitled “Urban Politics,” we will consider fundamental contemporary scholarship and debates around urban politics and urban geography. We will interrogate the intersections of urban geography and political geography, focusing on themes related to: citizenship, place identity, state theory, and urban governance. Our overall goal is to understand the ways that scholars, particularly within or in dialogue with urban geography, conceptualize “politics” and citizen-state-subjectivity relations.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall - every other year
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GEOG 368 - The Development of Western Geographic Thought
Examines principal orientations, themes and debates within emergent professional geography communities in the 19th and 20th centuries and the professional structure of the field in research, educational and applied contexts. Required for, and open only to, first year geography doctoral students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 369 - Relational Political-Economic Geographies
Relationality - the notion that the world is constituted and transformed by contingent, dynamic, and embedded relationships between people, places, objects, and structures - has emerged as a key concept in human geography. This course interrogates critically the idea of relationality and assesses its significance and possibilities for contemporary thinking in economic and development geography. Participants will read, critique, discuss, and debate a variety of theories about and sub-disciplinary perspectives on relational thinking - from economic sociology, organizational studies, critical realism, phenomenology, actor-network theory, Marxism, feminism, urban-economic geography, and development studies - and evaluate how these works might inform our understandings of contemporary political-economic issues. For doctoral students only.
Anticipated Terms Offered: annually
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GEOG 372 - Seminar on Contemporary Environmental Issues in Forest Ecosystems
Forests are among the most important ecosystems on Earth and they are being greatly affected by climate change and human activities. Understanding how ecosystems function and how they change in response to human activities and fluctuations in the Earth system are important goals of contemporary geographical and ecological research. Beyond having inherent scientific value, such inquiries have become integral to national and international policies and practices of ecosystem management. This graduate-level seminar considers contemporary research themes in the field of forest ecology. The seminar will examine primary literature dealing with topics such as the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems and the causes and consequences of natural and anthropogenic disturbances in forest ecosystems.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 375 - Technology and Sustainability: Perspectives from the Global South
Examines the nature of technologies and their relationships to socioeconomic and environmental change in the developing world. Readings and discussions will address and critique theories on technology change, the role of technologies in development, and their real-world implications (good and bad) for developing regions. Theoretical literature will be linked to empirical case studies of agricultural, energy, financing, information-communication, and/or manufacturing technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South/Southeast Asia. The key objective of the course is to deepen and complicate students’ understandings of the ways in which technologies are developed, diffused, and absorbed and about how these processes influence communities and economies in the Global South.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 377 - Africa’s Development in Global Context
Explores, in detail, the economic geographies of Sub-Saharan Africa; both their historical development and their contemporary manifestations in commodity chains, business practices, production systems, gender and environmental relations, entrepreneurial and innovative behavior, and rural and urban livelihood strategies. Emphasis is placed on examining how African economies relate to the rest of the world, how globalization is influencing the prospects for growth, autonomy, and sustainability in Africa, and how Africans actually produce, innovate, succeed, and struggle in their business activities. Confronts stereotypes about “backward” economic practices in Africa and encourages students to view Africans as capable agents of economic change not simply as passive victims of global or historical inequalities. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year
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GEOG 379 - GIS & Map Comparison
GIS & Map Comparison investigates metrics that scientists use and abuse focusing on applications to Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science with raster data. Methods compare two variables of the same phenomenon, such as comparison of an initial time versus a subsequent time, or comparison of predictions versus observations. Students learn how to compute and to interpret metrics such as Hits, Misses, False Alarms, Mean Deviation, Mean Absolute Deviation, Area Under the Total Operating Characteristic curve, among others. Students apply and develop the concepts in group projects. The professor wrote the book, literally.
Prerequisites: Prerequisite is Intro to GIS, listed as GEOG 190 or IDCE 310 .
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every fall
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GEOG 380 - Urban Ecology: Cities as Ecosystems
Explores ecology and the social and physical geography of cities as systems built and inhabited by people, and constantly changed by social, biological and physical processes. This class of ecosystem is often neglected except in studies of pollution, yet it is home to many of the world’s people and to a surprising number of plant and animal species as well. Readings, lectures, discussion and written work combine landscape and systems ecology with physical and urban geography and environmental justice to broaden our understanding of city environments, both present and possible. In addition to our in-class academic meetings, field trips in Worcester and the surrounding Blackstone River Valley will offer a deep dive into the challenges of regional and historical land use, urban green and blue space management, and socio-hydrology; a $100 fee is charged to students at time of registration to cover administrative and transportation costs. Book costs for the course are minimal. Registration is by Permission only for undergraduates (email: rroychowdhury@clarku.edu).
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 382 - Advanced Remote Sensing
Application of remote sensor systems in earth science and other disciplines; interpretation of multispectral scanner, RADAR and thermal imagery, classification, postclassification analysis, special transformations, multitemporal data analysis for change detection, the study of spectral characteristics of vegetation, soils, water, minerals and other materials. The specific objectives of the course are to acquaint the student with the physical principles underlying remote sensing systems and the primary remote-sensing data-collection systems; introduce the student to methods of interpreting and analyzing remotely sensed data; provide some insight concerning the applications of remote sensing in various discipline areas; and provide hands-on experience in digital image processing using software packages available in the computer lab. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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GEOG 383 - Introduction to Remote Sensing
This course is designed to introduce the students to the principles and analytical methods of satellite remote sensing as applied to environmental systems (e.g., land-cover classification, vegetation monitoring, etc.). Lectures will cover principles of remote sensing, sensor types, as well as the processing and analysis of multispectral satellite images (e.g. Landsat and SPOT). A series of hands-on lab exercises will complement students’ understanding of lecture material and also helps students to become familiar with image processing functions of the IDRISI image analysis software. Particular emphasis will be placed on final group project that brings a real world perspective to the learning process. Open to doctoral and masters students.
Prerequisites: GEOG 190 , Vector GIS or Raster GIS, and must register for Lab.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year.
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GEOG 385 - Proposal Writing
Offered for variable credit to geography doctoral students only who are working on their proposal writing.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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GEOG 386 - Special Topics
Devoted to a specific topic unique for each semester and instructor. May be repeatable for credit.
SPRING 2022 SEC 01 TOPIC: WHAT & HOW TO REMEMBER: 100 YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY AT CLARK –The Graduate School of Geography marked its 100-year anniversary in Fall, 2021. In Fall 2022, the School will engage in a more formal set of events to mark this centennial. But what should we remember of these 100 years? How should we mark them? The Graduate School of Geography (GSG) at Clark is renowned many things, both today and over its century of existence. For example, it is known for having granted more PhD degrees than any other department in the country, a significant number of them to women. It is also associated with the racist theory of environmental determinism from the early 20th century. It has had five of its faculty members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. What do these facts reveal, and what do they hide or ignore? In this class, we will research some of the history of the department, and identify ways to celebrate its history, acknowledge its gaps and weaknesses, and mark its present trajectory. Students will work in teams to develop materials and programming for the Fall celebration events, developing and refining their skills in archival and interview research, web and graphic presentations, and writing.
SPRING 2022 SEC 02 TOPIC: ENERGY GEOGRAPHIES Energy policy is climate policy: we cannot hope to address the climate crisis unless we can understand how our energy systems evolved and function, and plan and enact transitions to profoundly different energy systems. Doing both requires us to look with fresh eyes at nearly every aspect, at every scale, of the geographies we create and inhabit. This seminar will examine the rapidly changing geographies of energy production, distribution, and consumption, with particular attention to their roles in larger patterns of political, economic, and cultural development and change. In particular, we will examine the development and distinctive characteristics of fossil fuel capitalism; the political and economic implications and potential of transitions to renewable energy systems; the geopolitics of energy systems and transitions; the creation and effects of landscapes built around particular energy systems; and the relationships between energy systems and social identities. We will pay particular attention to the question of whether and how transitions towards renewable, low or net-zero carbon energy systems might contribute to movement towards a more just and equitable society - what has sometimes been termed a “just transition.”
FALL 2021 SEC. 1: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST -This course will critically explore the contemporary and historical environmental issues associated with the Middle East in order to understand the relationship between nature, politics, colonialism, culture, and geography. First, the course will interrogate the geographic label, “Middle East,” to understand how American and European literature, politics, and culture created different bodies of knowledge and replicated popular discourses that justify intervention in West Asia and North Africa. Understanding the “Middle East” as a geographical construction also allows us to critically think through how environmental issues are interconnected with the global histories of colonialism, imperialism, and empire, as well as the local political, cultural, and environmental diversity of the contemporary “Middle East,” that is, North Africa, Western Asia, and Mediterranean states.
SEC. 2: RACE AND SPECULATION-Drawing from a range of critical perspectives-anti- and post-colonial, feminist, black, and otherwise radical-we seek to explore two primary questions. The first: how does (capitalist) speculation create architectures of difference (specifically “racial-sexual hierarchies”)? The second: how has speculative thought both opened up ways of understanding human life that go beyond race, and offered ways to imagine more livable worlds?
Anticipated Terms Offered: fall & spring
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GEOG 387 - New Methods in Earth Observation
Understanding the Earth System depends on observing observations of socioeconomic and environmental patterns and processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. These scales span seconds to decades in time, and centimeters to millions of square kilometers in space. Earth Observation (EO, also known as remote sensing) is the only feasible means for providing this range of perspectives, but our ability to collect data across all necessary scales is currently limited by inherent tradeoffs between the extent, duration, frequency, and resolution of observation. This suggests the possibility that there may be important, but currently unknown, phenomena that exist within our observational blind spots. Some of this blindness is imposed by physics (there are only so many photons reflected from the Earth, and these are proportional to wavelength), but many are due to engineering or economic constraints (some sensors are too expensive to use more than once or over a large area). These latter hurdles are falling, however, as new “big data” analytical techniques emerge, and combine with increasingly available, high quality, low-cost data made possible by a host of new innovations, including cheap satellites, unmanned aerial systems, inexpensive cellphone enabled field sensors, and the availability of a large pool of internet-enabled workers who can interpret these data in ways that computers cannot. This course provides students hands-on experience working with these new EO technologies.
Prerequisites: By instructor permission
Anticipated Terms Offered: bi-annually
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