GEOG 2782 — Health Geography (Fall 2024, Fall 2025)
This course explores the relationship between geography and health. We begin with the historic development of health geography as subdiscipline and proceed to examine the various ways in which place and space interact with human health and different scales - from global patterns of health and disease to the ways in which local neighbourhoods shape our health and behaviours. Throughout, we discuss the theoretical underpinnings and methodologies employed by health geographers embedded in interdisciplinary research including public health, epidemiology, and urban planning. Topics covered include global and local health disparities, the influence of built environments on health, the social determinants of health, and emergent health threats such as climate change and infectious disease.
GEOG 3782 — Healthy Cities (Spring 2025)
This course examines how urban environments shape population health, highlighting cities as both resources for well-being and contributors to health risks. Through perspectives from geography, public health, epidemiology, sustainability, and urban planning, we explore how cities have developed in ways that impact health, touching on historical patterns like industrialization, segregation, and urban sprawl that create diverse and often unhealthy landscapes. Through the interdisciplinary lens of health geography, students will investigate health trends and disparities in cities and learn about how policies and interventions influence whether cities support health or pose risks.
GEOG 2990 — Quantiative Methods in Human Geography (Spring 2026)
From census and geospatial datasets to surveys of social factors and health, numbers offer powerful ways to understand how people and places are connected, but they never speak for themselves. This course introduces students to the data and statistical tools geographers use to describe, test, and explain spatial and social relationships. We will explore how quantitative evidence reveals patterns and inequalities in neighborhood exposures, urban density, and access to resources; how it helps test ideas about migration or neighborhood change; and how it can both illuminate and obscure relationships between humans and their environments.