Advanced Topics in Cultural Geography

Learners are encouraged to select one or two tracks aligned with their interests rather than attempting to complete all tracks.

Mobilities, Transnationalism, and Border Geographies

This track investigates how physical movement, spatial infrastructures, sovereign borders, and carceral systems produce uneven experiences of velocity, displacement, and global power.

The New Mobilities Paradigm and Mobility Justice: On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Tim Cresswell / Routledge) - Establishes the theoretical framework for analyzing mobility as a produced social relation differentiated by velocity, access, and power.

Borders, Externalization, and Sovereign Encampment: Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson / Duke University Press) - Examines borders not as static territorial perimeters, but as active spatial devices that fragment and filter human labor and sovereign rights.

Carceral Geographies and Spatial Incarceration: Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration (Dominique Moran / Routledge) - Analyzes the spatial architecture, sensory environments, and boundary regimes of prisons and detentive spaces.

Critical Tourism Geographies and Staged Authenticity: The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (John Urry & Jonas Larsen / SAGE Publications) - Canonical investigation into how consumer travel constructs visual expectations, commodifies local place-identities, and stages authenticity.

More-Than-Human Geographies and Cultural Political Ecology

This track explores multi-species spatial entanglements, Indigenous territorial ontologies, and the political-economic struggles over resource extraction and environmental justice.

More-Than-Human and Multi-Species Spatialities: Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces (Sarah Whatmore / SAGE Publications) - De-centers the human subject in geographic analysis by applying actor-network theory to ecological networks and animal-human encounters.

Cultural Political Ecology and Resource Frontiers: Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Paul Robbins / Wiley-Blackwell) - Unpacks the dominant narratives of environmental degradation, conservation enclosures, and uneven resource distribution across global frontiers.

Environmental Justice, Law, and Spatial Inequity: Environmental Justice Law and Policy (MIT OpenCourseWare) - An advanced university syllabus and reading course examining structural environmental racism, toxic facility siting, and legal spatial remedies.

Indigenous Geographies and Decolonial Ontologies: Indigenous Canada (University of Alberta / Coursera) - A comprehensive open course exploring Indigenous histories, relational worldviews, and environmental stewardship across Turtle Island.

Indigenous Geographies and Decolonial Ontologies: As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson / University of Minnesota Press) - Develops an Anishinaabe framework of land-as-pedagogy and reciprocal spatial relationships that resist colonial land dispossession.

Critical Heritage, Memoryscapes, and Spatial Politics

This track examines how collective memory, national identities, and ideological conflicts are inscribed onto the built environment through monuments, preservation regimes, and industrial ruins.

Commemorative Landscapes, Street Naming, and Public Iconoclasm: The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place (Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek H. Alderman, & Maoz Azaryahu / Routledge) - Examines the cultural politics of toponymic commemoration and the ideological battles over naming and renaming urban streets.

Commemorative Landscapes, Street Naming, and Public Iconoclasm: Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Sanford Levinson / Duke University Press) - Explores the legal, political, and spatial dilemmas surrounding contested public monuments and confederate statues.

Critical Heritage Studies and Authorized Heritage Discourse: Uses of Heritage (Laurajane Smith / Routledge) - The foundational monograph that theorized Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), demonstrating how institutional preservation sanctions certain pasts while suppressing others.

Ruination, Post-Industrial Hauntings, and Curated Decay: Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (Caitlin DeSilvey / University of Minnesota Press) - Challenges traditional preservation mandates by developing an ethic of heritage care that accommodates material decomposition and ecological succession.

Ruination, Post-Industrial Hauntings, and Curated Decay: Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Tim Edensor / Berg) - Analyzes how derelict industrial architectures disrupt orderly urban aesthetics and generate alternative material memories.

Affective, Sensory, and Non-Representational Geographies

This track investigates pre-reflective everyday practices, bodily sensations, acoustic soundscapes, and emotional atmospheres that exceed textual and representational analyses of space.

Non-Representational Theory and Embodied Spatial Practice: Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Nigel Thrift / Routledge) - The defining monograph articulating a geography of practices, embodied movement, performativity, and pre-cognitive spatial encounters.

Emotional Geographies and Affective Atmospheres: Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Ben Anderson / Routledge) - Develops rigorous conceptual frameworks for tracking collective feelings, public moods, and affective environmental atmospheres in political life.

Sensuous Geographies and Sensory Ethnography: Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (Paul Rodaway / Routledge) - Systematically analyzes haptic, auditory, and olfactory spatial perceptions to challenge the visual bias of traditional cultural geography.

Sensuous Geographies and Sensory Ethnography: Doing Sensory Ethnography (Sarah Pink / SAGE Publications) - A practical methodological guide for conducting fieldwork that documents multisensory experiences, rhythms, and place-making practices.

Spatial Humanities, Digital Geographies, and Counter-Cartographies

This track focuses on critical GIS, platform software spatiality, deep mapping, and grassroots counter-cartographic methodologies that challenge dominant spatial representations.

Critical GIS, Spatial Power, and Counter-Mapping: New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map (Matthew W. Wilson / University of Minnesota Press) - Bridges technical GIS practices with spatial critique, demonstrating how quantitative mapping interfaces with surveillance and social control.

Critical GIS, Spatial Power, and Counter-Mapping: Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS (Jeremy W. Crampton / Wiley-Blackwell) - Traces the biopolitical histories of mapmaking and provides theoretical groundings for counter-hegemonic cartographies.

Digital Spatiality, Algorithmic Governance, and Code/Space: Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Rob Kitchin & Martin Dodge / MIT Press) - Theorizes how automated computer software and algorithmic systems actively produce and regulate contemporary physical environments.

Spatial Humanities, Deep Mapping, and Applied Spatial Methods: The Programming Historian (Open-Access Repository) - Peer-reviewed, open-access tutorials teaching self-directed learners how to implement Historical GIS, spatial data processing, and open-source QGIS workflows.

Spatial Humanities, Deep Mapping, and Applied Spatial Methods: Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, & Trevor M. Harris / Indiana University Press) - Explores how multifaceted historical narratives, folklore, and spatial humanities approaches are embedded into complex deep-mapping platforms.