Bachelor of Geography at University of California, Berkeley

All human activity takes place on a geographic stage of great diversity and constant transformation. For more than a century, the Geography Department at Berkeley has been a leading center of scholarship about earth's landscapes and human relationships to the environment. Our inquiries encompass a wide range of topics, from the economies and cultures of cities and built landscapes, to tropical climates and the flow of polar ice sheets. We combine rigorous empirical work with deeply conceptual theoretical analyses, always recognizing the importance of both spatial processes and accumulated histories. We use geographic analyses to illuminate the abiding problems of the modern world.

UC Berkeley's Geography Department provides a broad-ranging perspective on humans as inhabitants and transformers of the face of the earth. The search for this kind of understanding involves thorough study of (a) the interlocking systems of the natural environment (climate, landforms, oceans, biota) and the evaluation of natural resources; (b) those diverse historical, cultural, social, economic, and political structures and processes which affect the location and spatial organization of population groups and their activities; and (c) significant geographical units, whether described as cities, regions, nations, states or landscapes, where integrated interpretation can be attempted, and a variety of problems thereby better understood.

As geographic theory and research has expanded their horizons over the past quarter-century, five research focuses have emerged to define Geography at Berkeley: 

Earth System Science

Earth System Science is the study of the interconnected components of our environment"the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere"and how they interact to produce an integrated whole. It utilizes the fundamental disciplines of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology and applies them in the context of human activities and landscapes to understand the Earth, at scales ranging from single watersheds to the entire globe. The complex system of interactions is investigated to address questions about current and future sustainability, how environmental changes affect society, and how society influences the environment.

Racial Geographies

Racial Geographies represents an insurgent geography that critically engages with questions of race, drawing from, and contributing to, an intellectual history rooted in anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. We are concerned with how geography is explicitly and implicitly implicated in the construction and deconstruction of race and its symptoms.

Critical Environments

Critical Environments attends to the complex relations that constitute the material and social dimensions of the modern world. We explore lives and ecologies that emerge together with histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and sexuality.

Geospatial Representation

How peoples and cultures represent space and time are central to understanding the world, shaping the possibilities - and the limits - of our thinking, knowing, and being. We work towards cross-cultural geospatial representations in service to understanding and collaboration across communities. We also encourage antiracist and anticolonial geospatial representation in the service of planetary decolonization, to literally remake the maps and other representational forms that reinforce our divided planet.

Political Economies

Political Economies cuts across metropolitan and Global South/ postcolonial perspectives on contemporary questions concerning capitalist and imperialist dynamics. Berkeley Geography explores political-economic processes through urban, agrarian, and oceanic studies, emphasizing the dynamics of past, present, and future. Berkeley Geography interrogates capitalism, as well as its articulations with other forms of value and devaluation of places and people, through racial, gendered, sexual, and colonial relations. Berkeley Geography also explores human-environment relations and questions concerning social natures and political-ecological processes through the lens of critical political economy.

Bachelor of Arts in Geography

UC Berkeley's Geography B.A. is unusually broad and diverse, including the study of cultural, economic, political, historical, biophysical, urban and regional geography as well as cartography, quantitative methods, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing and fieldwork. Backgrounds in the natural and social sciences, history, and statistical methods may be useful to the Geography major, with the mix and emphasis depending on the student's particular interests. Completing a major in Geography requires the satisfactory completion of three lower-division courses and eight upper-division courses. Lower-division requirements ensure that all students gain a broad understanding of the discipline, while upper-division requirements are structured to allow students to specialize in the areas of their greatest interest.

Geography students are expected to have diverse interests and independent thought. The department welcomes students from a variety of backgrounds, including those with professional experience who wish to deepen their education. Students are encouraged to roam freely through the curriculum and to follow their inspiration where it leads while working in tandem with faculty and staff advisers. 

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Learning Goals for the Major

1. Spatial, holistic thinking at the intersections of society, space, and nature
   1. Phenomena in place: Explain the spatial dimensions (location, place, landscape, region, and territory) of human life and the global environment"how human and earth science phenomena "take their place" on the surface of the earth.
   2. Earth systems: Comprehend how the Earth functions as a complex system of interacting components and how this system applies to and is affected by humanity.
   3. Scales of space and time: Understand processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales in the earth system and in human histories.
   4. Nature and society: Recognize natural resource flows through human systems and identify social constructions of nature and vulnerabilities to natural disasters.
   5. Interdisciplinarity: Combine insights from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to better understand the problems of the increasingly interconnected and ecologically fragile world.
2. Addressing diversity in both human and physical geography
   1. Peoples and places: Discuss, interpret, and explain differences of wealth, power, health, and well-being between and within societies, and the processes that create these patterns.
   2. Physical processes: Discuss, interpret, and explain the diversity of"and the processes responsible for"the landforms, climates, and ecosystems that constitute our planet's physical landscapes.
   3. Reading landscapes: Deduce questions and hypotheses through clues in material landscapes.
3. Analysis and application for students interested in human geography
   1. Role of Space: Understand the function of boundaries, territories, places, networks, and other spatial forms in the workings of human societies.
   2. Power and landscapes: Understand the projection, protection, and contestation of power through the production of ideas, cultures, empires, and spatial forms.
   3. Roles of cities: Grasp the roles and forms of cities as records and motors of modern life, and the interactions of urban areas with hinterlands and global networks.
   4. Food systems: Compare and contrast agrarian and industrial food supply systems around the world.
   5. Society-environment interactions: Understand the mutual influences and ramifications of biophysical and social processes in the dynamics of societies at scales from the local to the global.
4. Analysis and application for students interested in physical geography
   1. Earth system science: Analyze interconnected environmental systems with process-based geophysical, geochemical, and biological sciences in the context of current social environmental problems.
   2. Modeling: Construct models of the earth as a system of interconnected components, highlighting forcings and feedbacks.
   3. Experiments: Formulate and apply scientific hypotheses and devise tests for them.
   4. Science and society: Analyze and evaluate the role of science in shaping social forces, and being shaped by them.
5. Application of basic skills in research, knowledge of literature, analysis, and communication
   1. Write clearly: Demonstrate ability to focus and elaborate on chosen topics.
   2. Read critically: Critically analyze and assess arguments in professional journals, public media, and advocacy literature.
   3. Empirical plus theoretical: Produce work with robust empirical research (that locates, interprets, and puts together relevant and reliable sources of information) as well as intellectual and theoretical rigor.
   4. Use of mapping: Understand the production, interpretation, and use of mapping in all its forms and scales.
   5. Applying quantitative skills: Apply basic quantitative skills such as statistics, algebra, and interpreting graphs.
   6. Analytical ability: Demonstrate analytical ability: including the ability to identify questions, differentiate descriptions from explanations, make connections between empirical observations and arguments, and differentiate between competing explanations of a given phenomenon.
6. Lifetime skills
   1. Continuing concern: Show continuing concern, curiosity, and zeal for geography and for applying geographical understanding.
   2. Representing geography: Represent the usefulness of geography and geographical points of view to"depending on the circumstances"prospective employers, educators, policy makers, resource managers, developers, engineers, the public, and acquaintances.