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Geography 105: World Regional Geography: Getting Started

Using This Course Guide

  • Library research guides are a great place to start for your research projects. We have subject guides, which focus on a particular discipline such as Politics, Film Studies or Africana Studies. We also have course guides, which offer research support for courses that are taught at Mount Holyoke. This is a course guide for World Regional Geography. 
  • Look out for the information nuggets called "LITS Tips" that are scattered throughout this course guide. You can find these information nuggets by hovering over the icons for additional tips and tools. There are other "LITS Tips" that don't have the information icon so make sure to look out for those as well. 
  • The "Check Your Knowledge" boxes provide definitions of library and academic terminology that are useful for understanding important terms that will aid in deciding which library resources you will use along with determining the most suitable practices for conducting research.

Course Description

Geography 105: World Regional Geography (Fall 2018)

This course surveys the major geographic regions of the world in terms of environmental features and resource distributions, economic mainstays, population characteristics, cultural processes, social relationships, and patterns of urbanization and industrial growth. In addition to these topical foci, we use various subfields of geography to animate different regions. This approach provides a sense of depth while we also pursue a breadth of knowledge about the world.

Holistic Synthesis: Connecting Knowledge Across Academic Disciplines

Geography is an interdisciplinary field comprised of two branches: physical and human/cultural geography (and many sub-disciplines) that integrate various academic disciplines from the social sciences and the natural sciences. The idea is to think across space and place through a variety of scholarly lenses, including but not limited to, gender studies, critical social thought, Africana studies, gender studies, environmental studies, and many others. You will conduct interdisciplinary research in World Regional Geography for your research project. 

Using Library Guides To Conduct Interdisciplinary Research

As mentioned, geography is an interdisciplinary field so it is beneficial to utilize course and/or subject guides to make those cross-discipline connections. For example, if you are interested in how pride parades function as potential safe and celebratory spaces for the LGBTQIA community, the gender studies guide would be a useful resource. Click on the links below to find the interdisciplinary connections through other subject guides. The additional guides will connect you to links for locating maps, accessing news articles, and finding images. 

Subject guides: 

Environmental Studies 

Gender Studies 

Africana Studies 

Latino/Latina/Latinx Studies 

Asian Studies 

International Relations 

Economics

Additional guides: 

Map Guide

News Sources Guide 

 

Course Terms and Core Concepts

Geo-graphy 

Space

Place

Scale 

Time/Temporal 

Interdependence 

Imaginative geographies 

Cultural apparatus 

Critical/counter cartography 

Local

Global

Spatial diffusion 

Orientalism (latent and manifest)

Maps (general purpose and thematic)

Map projections 

Map distortions 

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Place Attachment 

Manifest destiny

Settler colonialism 

Origin narratives 

Internal migration 

Authors

This guide was created through the collaborative work of April L. Graham FP'18, Caro Pinto, Julie Adamo, Mary Stettner, Dr. Mary Glackin, and Dr. Serin D. Houston. 

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