Geography

UC Berkeley Geography is at the forefront of addressing the world’s most pressing crises. From the intensifying climate emergency and widening racial and economic inequalities to the global rise of authoritarianism, the degradation of ecosystems, and the housing crisis, our department uses geography not only to understand the world but to reshape it — toward justice, sustainability, and collective belonging.

Berkeley's undergraduate program in Geography is uniquely broad and diverse, giving students a comprehensive understanding of the discipline while allowing them to specialize in their areas of greatest interest. As a truly interdisciplinary major, Geography covers everything from cultural, economic, political, and historical geography to biophysical, urban, and regional studies, alongside crucial skills like cartography, quantitative methods, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, and fieldwork. We encourage our students to explore opportunities beyond the classroom, including study abroad, internships, and field research.

Our faculty are as varied and interesting as their courses, and they eagerly work directly with students on independent research projects. Our graduates go on to make a real difference in the world, with alumni working as geospatial data scientists, transportation and housing policy managers, and environmental planners at places like NASA, Google, and the City and County of San Francisco.

As geographic theory and research has expanded its horizons over the past quarter-century, five research areas have emerged to define UC Berkeley Geography: 

Earth System Science investigates the interconnected components of our environment—the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere—and how they interact to produce an integrated whole. Research in this area examines how human activities, from global climate change to land-use patterns, influence these interconnected systems and impact the resilience of natural and human communities. It applies interdisciplinary expertise across diverse global environments to address critical questions concerning environmental sustainability, societal impacts of change, and responsible planetary stewardship.

Political Economies takes a geographical approach to ‘the economic’ as intertwined with power relations, social and historical processes, and forms of consciousness. It critiques the ways in which differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other forms of social and spatial difference shape political-economic processes. Using urban, agrarian, and oceanic studies, this research area interrogates the formative and ongoing violence of contemporary capitalism, as well as its articulations with other forms of value and devaluation of places and people. It encourages radical reimaginations to think otherwise about capitalism, value, and our planetary future.

Racial Geographies is concerned with how geography is implicated in the construction and deconstruction of race and its symptoms. This research area interrogates the processes that have given rise to the differentiation of the built environment (segregation, redlining, restrictive covenants, gated communities) and the subjugation of racialized populations, while also highlighting how racialized communities actively create empowering and anti-racist places. It seeks to challenge racial hierarchies and white supremacy by exploring the historical struggles and persistent impacts of racism in conjunction with power, capitalism, gender, and inequality.

Critical Environments explores lives and ecologies that emerge together with histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and sexuality. It asserts that nature, science, and difference are not simply inert objects, methods, and identities. Instead, they are vibrant and contested elements of critical and justice-oriented geography. Its research unsettles assumptions about the environment as a field outside of politics and questions the uses of nature to depoliticize cultural life. It suggests that ways of seeing and understanding that inform environmentalism today are themselves complicit in the problems they purport to diagnose and address. 

Geospatial Representation seeks to comprehend and communicate a broader range of lived experiences, environmental systems, and wicked problems from starting points that are anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal. How peoples and cultures represent space and time are central to understanding the world, shaping the possibilities - and the limits - of our thinking, knowing, and being. Working toward cross-cultural geospatial representations in service to understanding and collaboration across communities, this research area brings better worlds into being by asking the ever crucial question: who gets to represent the world and how?