GEO Challenge

Course goals

Content

Ready to step outside the classroom and into action? Excited by the idea of working together during fieldwork on regional challenges? Are you looking for more depth and breadth within your bachelor’s programme?  Do you want to discover where your interests and strengths fit with students from the other GEO bachelor programmes?

GEOchallenge is a 15ECTS elective course spanning period 1 and 2, designed for students from all GEO bachelor programs ((NW&I, SGPL, GSS, AW) who want to explore, collaborate, and create: together. This course will challenge you to discover how human geographers, earth scientists, sustainability scientists, and environmental and innovation scientists tackle the same challenge differently.

GEOchallenge explores how students from different BSc programmes contribute to understanding and addressing regional challenges related to resilience, risk and vulnerability, for example with stakeholders in the province of Zeeland. 

Resilience is the ability to withstand shocks, adapt to change, recover and continue functioning in the face of various social and environmental challenges. Studying resilience means you have to understand what social, economic and environmental risks and vulnerabilities are within a region or case study. How have these developed over time? Can they be analysed at different scales, and how are they different over space?  

From a human geography perspective, you might study competing claims for space in a region, lived experiences and local knowledge of diverse groups of residents, spatial inequalities and planning policies. Earth science students might examine physical processes, long‑term environmental change, geomorphological and hydrological dynamics. Global Sustainability scientists might think in terms of integrated systems, governance and sustainable pathways, using interdisciplinary perspectives to motivate local action. From an innovation management science perspective, you might focus on strategic decision‑making, the role of science, technological innovation, and governance.

It is necessary to bring these perspectives together to truly understand a regional challenge, which many of GEO graduates and professionals have to do throughout their career.

By means of individual and collaborative assignments, you reflect on the role of your own educational background, and that of your peers. You examine how disciplinary strengths, assumptions, and methods contribute to both opportunities and challenges in interdisciplinary teamwork. You engage with multiple perspectives to examine how temporal and spatial scales shape interpretations of pressing societal and environmental challenges.

A key part of this course is fieldwork, at the start, middle and end of the two periods. This allows you to directly observe what is happening on the ground, engage with local stakeholders.

Another central component of the course is the creation of future regional scenarios. You integrate different GEO perspectives and insights from guest lectures and fieldwork to imagine resilient futures. You communicate these scenarios creatively in an accessible format to a broad audience, such as an exhibition.

Prerequisites and entry requirements
You must have completed at least 45 EC of your major courses
You must be enrolled in a bachelorprogramme at the Faculty of Geosciences

There is space for a maximum of 55 students. If you are interested, you need to send a short motivation letter (max. 300 words) in which you answer the following questions:

1. What do you hope to learn, academically or personally, from this course?
2. Describe a situation where you collaborated with people from different backgrounds. What did you learn from that experience? How will you bring those lessons to this course, in which you will work with students from other GEO programmes?

Send your motivation before June 11th 2026 via this form.
You will receive a notification whether you are selected before or on 15 June 2026. Note: if you are selected, Student Affairs will register you for this course before the enrolment deadline for period 1 (26 June 2026). 

Selection is based on motivation and a balanced representation from all GEO bachelor programmes.