“Culture is what humans do” (J. Anderson, 2010: 3). Cultural geographers are concerned with how meanings become shared among a group of people and the process by which meanings become social and political (Kirsch, 2012). In this course, we will begin by thinking about how different cultural groups make places, then we will survey different topics within cultural geographies (e.g. clothing, body art, music, food, the environment, craft, sport), and also some of the methodologies that cultural geographers can use in their research (e.g. art, landscape analysis, ethnography). The stories we tell about the world and ourselves create the boundaries of what we are able to imagine as possible. Therefore, studying cultural geographies can be one way to think through possibilities for the kinds of worlds we want to build.
This is an online, asynchronous course, with 1-page weekly reflection posts, a Cultural Geography “Bingo” midterm project and a final project.