Place and Society: Local to Global This course is an introduction to how geographers view the world and contribute to our understanding of it. Where do the phenomena of human experience occur? Why are they there? What is the significance? These questions are fundamental for explaining the world at different scales from the global to the local. Throughout, we will focus on the spatial basis of society, its continual reorganization through time, and how various human and environmental problems can be usefully analyzed from a geographic perspective.

Border Geographies We live in an age of intense globalization with near instantaneous transfers of information and unprecedented movements of goods and people across the world. At the same time, there are more walls constructed between countries today than ever before.  How do we explain this paradox of increasingly restrictive borders in an age of globalizing flows?  In this course we will trace the history of political borders, critically evaluate theories in the scholarly literature about borders and flows, and investigate strategies, experiences, and imaginaries that produce different border-scapes and representations. Students will be actively engaged in unraveling the paradox of walls and flows through group research projects on specific border regimes around the world.

Seminar in Political Geography: Radical Geographies  Geography has always been associated with the exercise of power and came into being as an academic discipline because it supported imperialism, nationalism, and war. However, the field of geography also has a lesser-known emancipatory tradition that emphasizes social justice, empowerment, and resistance to oppression. Early radical voices—anarchists, socialists, and pacifists—were silenced and often forced into exile.  It was only in the context of the protest culture of the 1960s that radical geographies started to find an audience.  In this seminar we will examine how geography and geographers have engaged in revolutionary activism, education for justice, social mobilization, and theorizations of alternative models of society.

Geopolitics of Europe The course examines what is arguably the most influential region in the world from a geographic perspective. First, we will chart the complex geopolitical dimensions of Europe in an attempt to understand what unites this highly differentiated region. Next, we will critically evaluate the main European political body, the European Union. Then we will analyze the political, social, economic, and environmental challenges that threaten to destabilize Europe. Finally, we will try to assess the degree to which political power in Europe has acquired a "European" dimension at the grassroots level by investigating political activism across borders of individual countries. Students will be actively involved in this study through a research project that culminates in a conference on the Future of Europe at the end of the semester.

Guntram Herb

The class was overall fairly interesting. Herb does a great job of being a fair grader who makes class and labs worthwhile, but he'll also make you work for it. Try and get a good group of friends or acquaintances for the final project, it will make to final presentation easier to work on. 

This was a pretty intense course and the labs meant I spent a few nights of the semester up super late working, but that was also my own doing. It’s interesting to have a class that has so many different topics because you don’t get to go as in-depth but it also doesn’t get boring. Guntram likes to teach a lot of theory and geographic vocabulary which some people find annoying but I do appreciate having the class rooted in a list of concepts. He can seem tough but is open to supporting you when you need it. I had to ask for lots of extensions, sometimes even the night before it was due, and he was very understanding. This class inspired me to declare geography in my very first semester, although I was only in the class because I wanted to do ES but couldn’t get into any classes. 

This was by far the class I’ve learned the most from so far. Guntram’s lectures are so well organized and interesting. The class does have quite a few readings which aren’t super long but it was always very obvious who had or hadn’t done them. He would mix it up between lectures and circle discussions, so we didn’t always know if we needed to prepare. He assigned ArcGIS story map projects and they were a bit intimidating but our presentation dates were self assigned so we could plan around other midterms. Overall, he’s a very fair professor and it always open to giving accommodations when asked in advance. 