Unit name | Journeying: Discovering the World, Creating Ourselves |
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Unit code | GEOG16002 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | C/4 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Professor. Mayhew |
Open unit status | Open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | School of Geographical Sciences |
Faculty | Faculty of Science |
This unit is a panoramic survey of the most remarkable journey in history: that of human cultures from the earliest hominids to our modern complex societies. The focus is on the interrelationship between humans exploring their world and the ways in which the resultant knowledge of the world has shaped human societal developments, both positive and negative. Positively, we have moved from being driven by environmental forces in early, autarchic societies to being able to traverse, describe and control the world and our social structures in modern societies. Negatively, there has been a massive price to be paid for the expansion of our geographical and societal horizons in terms of social surveillance and repression, of resource depletion, and of the domination and destruction of cultures through communication.
On completion of this unit students should be appraised of the massive transformations in human knowledge of the globe over the long run and be able to critically judge the successes and the costs of these transformations. Students should also see the close interconnections between travelling of space, describing what is discovered and the construction of social structures. On completion of this unit students should be able to:
The following transferrable skills are developed in this Unit:
20 lectures; 5 open unit tutorials/drop-in sessions
Unseen Written examination (1 ½ hours)
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2006). ISBN: 978-0-19-929590-5 Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009). ISBN: 978-0-262-51240-4 S. Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: the peopling of the world. (Robinson Publishing, 2004) ISBN 978-1-841198941Mark Monmonier, Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy (Chicago University Press, New edition, 2004). ISBN: 978-0-226-534282. David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Polity Press, 2007). ISBN: 978-0-745- 635927