The Outer Landscape of Culture

Human Geography is the study of the relationship between people, place, and space. Your essay must explore an aspect of Cultural Geography that is about a particular culture (or cultures) and a particular place / cultural landscape (or multiple places / cultural landscapes) and illustrate through argument how you understand the integrative character of not only Human Geography, but of the relationship between people, identity, and the places in which we live.

You are tasked with a three-part goal:

1) WHAT – You must identify a particular issue or topic. There are many we discuss in class, so you can use the lecture topics as your guide for the type of thing you might discuss. For example, you might be interested in Indigenous sovereignty and relationships with land. You might then research and analyze a particular sovereignty issue, such as pipeline construction on traditional Indigenous lands. I also encourage you to choose a topic we do not discuss in lecture. If you are interested in a topic and are not sure if it is eligible or appropriate, please ask Jeff.

2) WHERE – You must identify a particular place / cultural landscape for your study. For example, to continue the above example, you might discuss a particular territory violation such as the ones that continue to happen in Wetsuweten territory near the west coast of Turtle Island around the construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline.

3) HOW In this course we examine the relationship between identity, culture, and places. Consider the various aspects of each of these in your topic and how they might relate to each other. In the above example, the Wetsuweten themselves occupy different identity categories (national, racialized, etc.) and the other people they encounter do too. How do their identities and culture interact in their creation of cultural landscapes?