Hocbigg - Cultural Geography
Path to a free self-taught education in Cultural Geography!
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Introduction
Cultural geography investigates the reciprocal relationship between human culture and geographic space. Rather than treating space as an empty, neutral container or landscape as a mere backdrop to history, the discipline examines how human beliefs, social structures, power dynamics, and everyday practices actively construct landscapes—and how physical and built environments, in turn, shape human experience and identity. Studying cultural geography equips you with analytical frameworks to read the built environment, interrogate the spatial dimensions of social inequality, and understand how places acquire meaning, memory, and contestation.
This curriculum is designed for self-directed learners. It assumes no formal background in geography, cartography, or social theory. The readings and courses selected favor conceptual clarity and direct real-world applicability over insular academic jargon, providing an accessible yet rigorous university-level foundation.
Scope
This document is strictly a core undergraduate curriculum. It focuses on the fundamental concepts, canonical debates, and interpretive methods that every student of cultural geography needs to understand, while deliberately excluding specialized technical methods (such as GIS programming, quantitative spatial modeling, or formal archival field methods).
Once you have completed these foundational subjects, you can explore the other guides in this series to broaden and deepen your study:
- Move to Advanced Topics to explore specialized frontiers, including critical heritage studies, the mobilities paradigm, multi-species spatialities, and non-representational theory.
- Consult Readings for a curated bibliography of field-defining monographs, essays, and landmark texts.
- Explore Courses for full-length recorded lecture series, open courseware, and audio programs from university faculties.
Curriculum Structure
The curriculum is structured into twelve foundational subjects that build from conceptual tools to empirical topics, critical spatial politics, and contemporary applications:
- Theoretical Foundations: Begin with the first three subjects (Spatial Foundations, Evolution of Cultural Geography, and Nature, Culture, and Cultural Ecology). These establish the non-negotiable spatial vocabulary of the discipline—differentiating abstract space from lived place, clarifying scale, and charting the historical shift from Carl Sauer’s material landscape morphology to the relational "cultural turn."
- Empirical Expressions of Culture: Once the foundational vocabulary is established, proceed through the empirical pillars of cultural geography: Cultural Landscapes, Geographies of Language and Toponymy, Geographies of Religion and Sacred Space, and Mobility, Migration, and Cultural Diasporas. These explore the concrete media through which human groups organize territory, impart identity, and create hybrid spaces across borders. While listed in a logical order, these four subjects can be studied flexibly according to your interests.
- Power, Difference, and Spatial Politics: Next, engage with critical spatial theory through Critical Cultural Geography, Race and Racialized Space, Gender and Feminist Geographies, and Postcolonial and Decolonial Geographies. This cluster examines how spatial arrangements enforce social hierarchies, police boundaries, and distribute environmental burdens, while also analyzing spatial forms of subaltern resistance.
- Applied Spatial Practice: Conclude with Urban Cultural Geography, Public Space, and Everyday Life, which synthesizes the theoretical and critical tools developed earlier to analyze contemporary struggles over gentrification, privatization, and consumer spaces in global cities.
Communities
- Subreddits:
- r/geography (active discussions on human, cultural, and physical geography topics)
- r/AskGeography (Q&A focused on geographic concepts, including cultural aspects)
- Discord servers:
- The Geography Discord (community focused on social/human geography, history, politics, and related topics)
- Other:
- AAG Cultural Geography Specialty Group (professional network for scholars via American Association of Geographers; includes forums and events)
- AAG Communities Platform (member discussion forums for geography specialty groups, including cultural)
- You can also interact through GitHub issues. If there is a problem with a course, or a change needs to be made to the curriculum, this is the place to start the conversation. Read more here.
Curriculum
Spatial Foundations: Space, Place, Landscape, and Scale
This subject introduces the foundational spatial toolkit of geography, examining the distinctions between abstract space and lived place, the morphology of landscapes, and how spatial scale operates.
Crash Course Geography: What is Geography? & What is Human Geography? (CrashCourse / PBS) - A low-friction video primer that pairs well as an introductory visual overview before reading the textbooks.
Introduction to Human Geography (David Dorrell & Joseph Henderson / Open Textbook Library) - An open-access introductory textbook covering basic spatial distributions, map interpretation, and core geographical concepts in chapters 1 and 2.
Place: An Introduction (Tim Cresswell / Wiley-Blackwell) - A complementary conceptual study that goes deeper into the philosophical evolution of place versus space for learners wanting textual depth.
Exploring Humans' Space: An Introduction to Geographicity (EPFL / edX) - An alternative multimedia university course covering spatiality, mobility, and spatial justice for learners who prefer a structured lecture format over self-paced reading.
Evolution of Cultural Geography: Sauer to the Cultural Turn
This subject traces the discipline's trajectory from Carl Sauer's material landscape morphology through the critique of environmental determinism to the 1980s "cultural turn" that treats culture as dynamic, contested, and socially constructed.
Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (Jon Anderson / Routledge) - The primary comprehensive textbook tracing how cultural geography evolved from Sauerian landscape morphology to contemporary social theory.
Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (Peter Jackson / Routledge) - A seminal canonical text to be read alongside Anderson to understand how the British cultural turn reframed culture as a site of social contestation.
Doreen Massey: Space, Place and Politics (The Open University / OpenLearn) - A complementary audio-lecture series providing accessible spoken reflections on how space and place are relationally constructed.
Nature, Culture, and Cultural Ecology
This subject explores how human societies conceptualize, modify, and socially construct the natural environment, moving from cultural adaptations to critical political ecology.
Crash Course Geography: Human-Environment Interaction (CrashCourse / PBS) - A concise visual primer to watch alongside Cheung to build intuition around ecosystems and human modification of landscapes.
Fundamentals of Human Geography (Wing Cheung / Open Textbook Library) - The core open-access textbook reading, detailing cultural adaptations and human-environment interaction models in geography.
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (William Cronon / W. W. Norton) - A complementary reader that builds on the textbook models by critically deconstructing the cultural invention of "wilderness" and pristine nature.
Cultural Landscapes, Folk, and Popular Culture
This subject examines material culture, vernacular architecture, and spatial diffusion patterns to read built environments as expressions of cultural values and commodified modern life.
Crash Course Geography: Race, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Landscape (CrashCourse / PBS) - An introductory visual overview that illustrates how distinct cultural groups mark physical space with visible architectural and landscape traits.
Fundamentals of Human Geography: Folk and Popular Culture (Wing Cheung / Palomar College) - The primary open-access textbook chapter introducing sequent occupancy, material culture, and the diffusion of folk and popular practices.
The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (D.W. Meinig / Oxford University Press) - A seminal reader that provides the foundational field methods for deciphering ordinary vernacular environments, including Peirce Lewis's classic axioms for reading landscapes.
Geographies of Language and Toponymy
This subject analyzes the spatial distribution and diffusion of language families, the politics of linguistic landscapes, and how place-naming (toponymy) asserts territorial identity and cultural memory.
Crash Course Geography: How Does Language Move? (CrashCourse / PBS) - A quick audiovisual primer that illustrates language family diffusion and place-naming power to watch before diving into either text.
Fundamentals of Human Geography: The Geography of Language (Wing Cheung / Open Textbook Library) - A foundational open textbook chapter explaining language hearths, dialect geography, and the spatial politics of language policy.
Introduction to Human Geography: Language (Dorrell & Henderson / GALILEO Open Learning) - An alternative open-access textbook chapter covering similar ground with an emphasis on toponymic case studies and map exercises.
Geographies of Religion and Sacred Space
This subject explores the geographic origin, hearths, and diffusion pathways of universalizing and ethnic religions, along with the spatial construction of sacred sites, pilgrimages, and territorial religious landscapes.
Crash Course Geography: How Did Religion Spread Along the Silk Road? (CrashCourse / PBS) - A short visual case study showing how trade networks and imperial expansion spread religious traditions across space.
Fundamentals of Human Geography: The Geography of Religion (Wing Cheung / Open Textbook Library) - The core introductory reading covering the spatial diffusion, cultural hearths, and landscape impacts of major world belief systems.
Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion (Chris C. Park / Routledge) - A deeper, comprehensive textbook option for learners who want to explore sacred space, pilgrimage routes, and religious topographies beyond the introductory chapter.
Mobility, Migration, and Cultural Diasporas
This subject investigates how voluntary migration, forced displacement, and transnational diaspora networks reshape spatial identities, create hybrid spaces, and redefine senses of home.
Crash Course Geography: Where and Why Do People Move? (CrashCourse / PBS) - An introductory visual companion explaining spatial interaction models, refugee corridors, and modern border dynamics.
Introduction to Human Geography: Population and Migration (Dorrell & Henderson / GALILEO) - The core foundational reading on push-pull factors, migration streams, and demographic modeling.
Understanding Cultural Geography: Place and Mobility (Jon Anderson / Routledge) - Builds directly on the basic migration models by exploring how bodily movement, transnational diasporas, and transit corridors actively construct place-identity.
Critical Cultural Geography and Spatial Politics
This subject introduces critical spatial theory, examining how power, ideology, hegemony, and capital accumulation produce uneven geographies and contested spatial boundaries.
Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Don Mitchell / Wiley-Blackwell) - The primary foundational textbook introducing Marxist spatial theory, ideological hegemony, and the landscape as an instrument of social control.
Race, Ethnicity, and Racialized Space
This subject explores how racial and ethnic hierarchies are produced and enforced through spatial mechanisms like residential segregation, redlining, colonial land zoning, and the formation of ethnic enclaves.
Fundamentals of Human Geography: Ethnicity and Race (Wing Cheung / Open Textbook Library) - The introductory open-access textbook baseline explaining segregation indexes, ethnic enclaves, and spatial patterns of assimilation.
Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (Rashad Shabazz / University of Illinois Press) - A complementary empirical monograph demonstrating how urban planning, policing, and containment architectures actively produce racialized space in American cities.
Race and Cultural Diversity in American Life and History (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign / Coursera) - An alternative structured video course exploring the historical and institutional construction of racial segregation and cultural diversity.
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Geographies
This subject investigates how gender roles and sexual identities are spatially produced, examining the public-private divide, bodily spatial scales, and marginalized queer spaces.
Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Linda McDowell / Polity) - The core foundational textbook, pedagogically organized across expanding geographic scales from the body and home to the city and nation.
Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Gillian Rose / Polity) - A seminal theoretical critique to read after McDowell, examining how geographical knowledge historically excluded feminine and embodied spatial experience.
Postcolonial and Decolonial Geographies
This subject evaluates how historical imperialism and cartography established unequal global structures, while highlighting Indigenous geographic systems and practices that dismantle colonial spatiality.
Crash Course Geography: Colonialism (CrashCourse / PBS) - An introductory visual primer outlining imperial cartography, colonial land partition, and spatial reorganization.
Postcolonialism (Key Ideas in Geography) (Tariq Jazeel / Routledge) - The primary student textbook explaining postcolonial spatiality, Orientalist representations, and subaltern geographical knowledges.
Voices from the Global South: Confronting Climate Coloniality (The Open University / OpenLearn) - A complementary contemporary lecture series exploring situated Southern perspectives, climate debt, and spatial resource extraction.
Urban Cultural Geography, Public Space, and Everyday Life
This subject analyzes cities as key arenas of cultural diversity, public space struggles, gentrification, and commodified everyday environments shaped by globalization.
Crash Course Geography: How Are Cities Organized? & What is Urban Planning? (CrashCourse / PBS) - An introductory visual primer on classical urban spatial models, zoning, and urban morphology.
Introducing Human Geographies: People, Place, and the City (Paul Cloke, Philip Crang, & Mark Goodwin / Routledge) - The primary textbook reading covering public space contestation, gentrification, and spaces of consumer culture.
Cities are Back in Town: Urban Sociology for a Globalizing Urban World (Sciences Po / Coursera) - A complementary structured lecture course examining global urban governance, social inequality, and urban development across international metropolises.