GEOG 103 – Cultural Geography

Distance Education

Community College of Philadelphia

Hello!

Welcome to the Community College of Philadelphia’s distance education course in Cultural Geography (GEOG 103)

This semester we will be exploring the spatial aspects of a variety of topics including religion, immigration, ethnicity, nationalism, and colonialism on a worldwide scale. This course is organized by region, so we will be investigating how these topics interrelate with the each other within and between geographic realms and regions. We will be focusing on how people interact and react with each other and with the physical environment. In particular, you will find this class illuminating several themes of significance to our modern world and how we all get along – or not – with each other. These themes include colonialism, supranationalism and devolution, ethnicity/race/nationality/religion, and others. Along the way, some concepts from physical geography will be raised, however we will not be particularly concerned with the physical environment itself. If you were hoping to learn about earthquakes, volcanoes, weather, mountains, oceans, and similar topics, you should be taking Geog 101: Physical Geography.

This class has an excellent, and interesting!, textbook. I strongly encourage you to take full advantage of all the resources provided by the College, by the text and its publisher, and by me as well. The publisher provides an informative website companion to the text you will find interesting to explore as well as helpful in your studies. I encourage you to contact me by the means you find most comfortable and/or convenient, a variety of methods are detailed below and on the syllabus. Email, either through WebStudy or outside it, is the most effective and rapid way – I try to answer email within 24 hours. I am very willing to discuss any of the topics with you and to help you get as much as you can from this class. I enjoy teaching, and I enjoy geography, so please take advantage of the opportunity to learn from me as well as from the texts and each other. In many ways, this class can be as interactive as you want it to be.

I look forward to working with all of you!

Sincerely,

Carol A. Nickolai

Anthropology and Geography CNickolai@ccp.edu

Community College of Philadelphia CNickolai@gmail.com