GEOGRAPHY (UNIT A)

Course title: Sense of place.
Men and women are always, directly or indirectly, producers of geographical space. The space “produced” depends on the sense that men, as individuals and as societies and cultures, attribute to places, on the ways in which places are perceived, on the values with which they are invested. The practice of geography today does not mean merely describing places and geographical phenomena; rather, it means entering into the processes that have shaped them in order, if necessary, to correct them. Geography, insofar as it represents knowledge of the world, has the power to change it. Taking its cue from these statements, the course emphasises, in the vast scope of the subject, an approach which is more interpretive than descriptive, precisely because the aim is to provide students with the necessary tools for learning about their own space and that of others, in its tangible and intangible components and about the mechanisms that have created and continually recreate it. Module A (5 learning credits): the language of geography (the word and the drawing); knowledge and interpretation of geographical phenomena; cartography.