Summer 2025

This course engages with topics on spatial thinking, resource extraction, conflict, climate disasters, forced displacement, and migration within the context of Africa and the continent's relationship with the rest of the world. Through social, political, and geographic analysis, the course examines and interrogates forces of displacement and migration within Africa, and how they are reproduced by global forces of neoliberalism, colonialism, and racialization, as well as climate change-related disasters. The course draws on interdisciplinary scholarship including films, interactive online maps, creative literature, and guest speakers, as well as more traditional academic mediums to explore the intricacies and intimacies of forced displacement and migration. In addition, the course introduces students to geospatial reasoning and mapping with ArcGIS StoryMaps. Through data visualization techniques, students will learn to map out geographies and stories of displacement as well as the resettlement of displaced communities.