A collaboration between students at
University of Texas at Austin and University of Newcastle, New South Wales

Taught by: Jason Cons & Duncan McDuie-Ra

This course asks students to think critically and differently about the landscapes around them. Often, we think about landscapes as either aesthetic (things to be appreciated or reviled) or as stages upon which social interactions happen. But what if we understood landscapes differently—as things that, in and of themselves, shape and are shaped by the social interactions that unfold within and around them. This course invites students to engage with landscapes using qualitative observations. It is a field-based course that will ask students to enter into and engage with and think through the relationships of power that emerge in and can often be read upon the landscapes around them. In doing so, it will focus on different ways to see, to listen to, to read history and ecology in, to think about inequality through, and to write about landscape. In doing so, it introduces students to both different ways to think about research and new ways to think through the social and ecological worlds in which we live.

This course is a "Global Virtual Exchange" (GVE) course to be taught in conjuncture with a similar course at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. Texas and New South Wales share similar climates, similar colonial histories, similar industries, and, thus, similar landscapes. Students in each university will conduct independent and group field research in and on landscapes in their home cities and regions. They will share this work with peers in the opposite institution. Through this, students will engage in a broader dialogue about the differences and similarities between these two remote but historically similar places.

Click here to download the full syllabus for the University of Texas course.

Dr. Duncan McDuie-Ra explores a verticle landscape in Newcastle

Dr. Jason Cons explores a riparian landscape in Bangladesh