Master of Arts Program
The Department of Geography and Environmental Studies offers programs of study and research in geography leading to the degree of Master of Arts. Research on a wide variety of topics is possible.
Whatever a student’s primary field of interest, the Carleton M.A. program promotes an integrative conception of Geography and encourages the crossing of inter- and intra-disciplinary boundaries. It also seeks to foster openness to a variety of philosophical and methodological approaches to geographical inquiry.
Research themes
The following summarizes thematic areas in which M.A. research has been, and is currently being conducted. Additional possibilities exist depending on student interests and supervisory capacity.
Human geography covers a wide range of inter-relationships between people and natural or built environments at household to global scales. There is particular emphasis on the political economy of geographical change, including geopolitics, economic and community restructuring and sustainability; political ecology and social movements; cultural and political dimensions of people’s attachment to place; the use and cultural reappraisal of urban environments; and the geography of social well-being. The significance of gender and diversity is explicitly recognized in research in many of these fields.
Land and natural resource use, management, and appraisal research embraces many types of human interaction with the environment, including contemporary rural land-use and management issues; agricultural settlement and vulnerability/adaptation to climate change; the values and geographical consequences of modern environmentalism, environmental impact assessment, and conservation management issues.
Geographic information systems (GIS), cartography, and remote sensing are key geo-spatial tools used in many of the applications listed above. In addition, research is conducted explicitly in cybercartography to develop new means of spatial-temporal data representation, interaction and analysis.