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Department of Geography Strategic Plan 2021-2026

Department of Geography Strategic Plan 2021-2026

To support generative and creative science, the department prioritizes a culture of mutual respect, collaboration, and co-learning. The department strives to be a place where ideas can be exchanged and new ideas sparked through dynamic teaching and mentoring, a robust speaker series, and regular social interaction. The department welcomes and promotes diversity in its composition and scholarly remit, which it considers fundamental to stimulate and support robust and meaningful knowledge creation. The department recognizes the importance of ethical outward-facing science as an essential means to recruit new generations of scholars and to ensure that our insights contribute to addressing the world's social and environmental challenges.

The undergraduate programs of study in the department reflect a range of perspectives across human, physical and geospatial geography. Overall, our pedagogical program is intended to educate students as critical thinkers capable of being flexible in their career paths, whether it is in academia, private industry, the public or non-profit sectors.

The graduate program in the Department of Geography offers critical education leading to Master’s and PhD degrees in areas of specialization that include: GIS and spatial analysis, physical and human-environment geography, and atmospheric sciences. Specific areas of faculty research strengths include transportation geography and mobility studies, climate science, economic geography, social and political geography, land-systems science, urban geography, public health, critical data studies, political ecology, remote sensing, geovisualization and analytic cartography, and geographic information science. Key conceptual approaches are poststructuralist, feminist, decolonial, Marxian, spatial analysis and modeling. We make us of qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods.

The Department of Geography seeks to identify, synthesize and enhance our existing research strengths, foster collaborative scholarship, facilitate greater engagement across the university and beyond, and promote inclusive excellence in our research, service and teaching endeavors.