GEOG 5090 - Health Geography in the Age of Global Pandemics

Graduate students should enroll in GEOG 5090 and will be held to higher standards and/or more work. The increasing population mobility and the worsening environment have led to many global health problems such as the recent outbreak of COVID-19. Understanding and preventing these public health problems require efforts from various disciplines, including Geography. Health geography incorporates concepts and methodologies from the discipline of geography to study population health, disease, and health care. This course will provide a broad introduction to health geography through its coverage of various topics including infectious diseases, health disparities, and healthcare accessibility. It will use COVID-19 and other globally transmitted diseases as examples to illustrate how geographical methods can facilitate the understanding of social-environmental causes and social injustice of health problems. It will review popular quantitative and qualitative methods that are routinely used in public health and epidemiological investigations and demonstrate how the geographer’s toolbox of spatial analysis methods can effectively improve public health. This course applies three main approaches to health geographic research: social/behavioral approaches, ecological approaches which focus on relationships between people and their environment, and spatial epidemiological approaches which apply maps and spatial methods to identify and understand patterns of disease.