Doctor of Philosophy in Geography - Nature and Society

Geography as a discipline has always interested itself in society-nature (or human-environment) interactions. Geographers at the U of M have a history of pursuing such questions by combining insights and tools from the biophysical, human and GI science legs of the discipline. The new generation of Minnesota geographers have also pursued the profound philosophical, political, ethical and scientific implications of the increasingly unsettled boundary between nature and 'society or human and animal. What happens when the human and more than human bleed into each other in unprecedented and unimagined ways (for example, through climate change or molecular engineering or the proliferation of new diseases such as BSE and SARS or the entrenchment of deeply politicized urban ecologies that make nature available in vastly different ways to different sub-populations) How do we account for the potency of nonhuman entities in a more-than-human world How does the push to commodify everything go about recruiting nonhuman entities What do we mean by environmental governance, and in what ways and to what ends is biological lifeincluding our own biological existencemade part of political projects today And what role does science play in resolving public controversies over social and environmental change.

Undergraduate degrees need not be from a program in geography. However, students whose previous work is not in geography may be asked to complete specific courses that do not provide graduate credit.
Preferred undergraduate GPA -3.5
TOEFL - Total - Preferred Score
100
TOEFL - Reading - Preferred Score
22
TOEFL - Writing - Preferred Score
24
IELTS - Total - Preferred Score
7
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) - No
Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)- No