Politics, culture, and place constitute vital elements in geography’s quest to understand how humans act and interact in ways that produce specific spatial relations. Political geography examines the changing political organization of space and how it affects, molds, and shapes human interactions, social identities, international relations, the course of globalization, and the quality of the natural environment. Cultural geographies study culture’s impact on space and spatial patterns of various cultural institutions.
Emphasizing cultural, historical, and critical approaches, SDSU Geography faculty study such topics as nationalism, territorial conflicts, electoral geography, geopolitics, state relations and state power, world systems, terrorism, material culture, food systems, colonial legacies, biopolitics of water, and cultural production of space and place so that future conflicts can be alleviated.
