Population Geography

Catalog description

This course examines key demographic characteristics of the U.S. population and how they are distributed in space. At the same time, we will look at how individuals come to be part of a population and with what implications. The course will focus on the U.S. with a special emphasis on where people live in U.S. cities. Given this focus we will spend significant time on issues of segregation, gentrification, health disparities, environmental justice, and migration. The class includes a significant lab component and students will have the opportunity to conduct empirical analyses that are common in the fields of planning, epidemiology, social work, and other cognate professional fields. This course meets the social and behavioral components of the BA field. The first goal of this seminar is to prepare students to think critically about the way demography and policy interact to produce outcomes that vary within and across populations and across space. Many of the most critical policy debates of our time hinge on an understanding of subgroups delineated by gender, age, race, and/or immigration status. Students will learn to identify the role of history, economics, culture and geography in shaping the contexts in which these policy debates now exist and will gain the critical capacity to evaluate changing conditions in the world around them.The second key goal of this course is to train students in some of the basic techniques for analyzing populations. Being able to devise and execute a project that answers basic questions about the distribution of a population is a foundational skill for many careers that geographers might choose to follow, and can be powerful for engagement in the policy process. The emphasis here will be on applying statistical and GIS skills learned elsewhere to the messy world of real-life data. Students will achieve a better understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls of quantitative analysis of demographic information.