Geography Departmental Web-Page
Geography Programmes
Geography 1000/2000 Series
Geography 3000 Series
Geography 4000 Series

The Department of Geography offers courses in both Geography and Geoscience. The Department offers a Major and a Minor in Geography and provides many courses, especially in Geoscience, that are integral to the Environmental Studies and Sciences programmes at Mount Allison.

Geography is about the study of ‘place’ at various spatial and temporal scales. An understanding of ‘place’ involves questions about the physical and environmental, social, cultural, economic, and political processes that have acted together to shape the complex ‘place’ structures that exist on our landscape. Geographers are particularly concerned with the linkages that bind ‘places’ together. These questions can be investigated at a variety of scales; local, regional national, and global, and they can be assessed from both contemporary and historical perspectives.

Geoscience is concerned with the study of the planet Earth; its history, composition and structure, and the physical processes that shape it are considered. Because Geoscience embraces the realms of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology, it is one of the most wide-ranging of the sciences. The earth is the ‘stage’ upon which all biologic activity takes place, including human activity, thus an understanding of Geoscience is fundamental to Geography and Environmental Studies or Sciences Programmes.

Through a system of intensive semester length courses, the Geography programme at Mount Allison aims to expose students to the approaches and substance of the academic disciplines of Geography and Geoscience. Teaching approaches integrate lab work, field study, library and archival searching, as well as the employment of computer technologies as research tools. The Department of Geography is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences and its programmes connect very well with the disciplines in this group (Economics, Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology, and Commerce). There are also strong links to disciplines in other Faculties including Biology, History, and Religious Studies, as well as to the interdisciplinary programmes in Environmental Studies and Sciences. In addition, students interested in Area Studies (e.g., American Studies, Canadian Studies, Hispanic Studies, French Studies, Japanese Studies, International Relations, etc.) will find it useful to explore Geography as a foundation for understanding these ‘places’.

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