Spring 2026 graduate seminar: Landscape and Built Environment

Spring 2026 Graduate Seminar in Geography

“Landscape and Built Environment” (Geog 804.002)

Prof. Scott Kirsch, Department of Geography & Environment

Tuesdays 3:30-6:30

Whether understood as a place, built environment, scenic painting, or pleasant view, landscape has persisted as a compelling category across the arts and sciences as a means of “holding things together” for representational practices engaging with local settings.  In cultural and historical geography, landscape may be understood as a historically produced way of seeing or a space produced to-be-seen, an area, polity, or scale of activity, or all of these things; what counts as landscape remains an unsettled but fertile terrain.  More than a mere component of landscape, the building can be understood as a geographic scale of its own, offering a peculiar atom of structure and agency, and lived social relations, about which it may be productive to theorize more, reflecting distinctive claims to space and territory and significant sites of social and cultural interaction.  This graduate seminar will use the lens of landscape and built environment to explore questions of materiality, agency, claiming, building and repair, and the production of space in locally-based research.  While rooted in places and localities, however, the seminar does not bracket concerns within a stable local setting but instead, through buildings and landscapes, opens to the intersection of processes occurring at multiple geographical scales.

Drawing on cultural, historical, and critical geographies, urban studies, architecture, historical geographical materialism, and Marxist humanism, the class brings together a readings seminar and research workshop approach that will allow students to pursue their own projects through engagement with course readings and assignments.  Texts will include Dreams of Presence by Mitch Rose and The City After Property by Sara Safransky, along with works by, among others, Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs, Denis Cosgrove, Mona Domosh, Anthony King, Henri Lefebvre, Jovan Scott Lewis, Doreen Massey, Don Mitchell, and Laura Pulido. A number of workshops, mixed media activities, and project assignments will be integrated into the seminar format to emphasize elements of storytelling, research method, and writing practice.  Course requirements include regular participation and either a term paper or two short papers.  Students will also have the opportunity to participate in a collaborative project.

Questions?  kirsch@email.unc.edu

Advanced undergraduate students are welcome to contact me to discuss permission to enroll.