Society and Environment Concentration in Geography (MA)
University of Washington, Seattle
Description
The Master’s Degree Program in Geography enables students to gain greater familiarity with the richness and rigor of advanced study in the discipline of Geography. Students use coursework to develop familiarity with the discipline and their chosen subfield(s), and use an original research project to develop skills in data gathering and analysis. Students may write either a thesis or two high-quality research papers as part of their degree requirements.
The Society and Environment Concentration focuses on examination, analysis and interpretation of the complex inter-relationships between social dynamics and environments. The areas of focus include cultural and political ecology, health and the environment, global environmental modeling and GIS methods and applications. Research themes primarily involve questions of scale in analyzing social and environmental change at the local, regional, and global levels, and on analyzing, understanding and explaining the interactions among ecological processes, environmental transformation, and social processes and transformations in affluent and impoverished societies. Related aspects of medical geography include such topics as the ties between global environmental change and the (re)emergence and spread of contagious disease, as well as how political, social, environmental, and biological factors come together to both create and structure health vulnerability and risk management.