SEMINAR IN GLOBAL THOUGHT

This course on global thought will consider the ways in which we think about, debate, and give meaning to the interconnected world in which we live. In thematically focused collaborative teams, students will examine how the flows of people, things and ideas across national borders both connect our world and create uneven consequences within and among communities. We will locate ourselves in these processes, suggesting we need go no further than our closets, tables, and street corners to consider the meanings of globalization and our roles in the world today. This course has been approved to partially satisfy the Global Core requirement.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Laura L Neitzel
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

Global New York

“Wall Street is a disaster area”—so declared a real estate lawyer in a 1974
New York Times
story on the pitiful state of lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center had been inaugurated in 1973 as a beacon of global capitalism with a mandate to lease only to international firms. A year later, much of the Twin Towers went unoccupied. Some eight million square feet of financial district office space sat empty, brokerage houses were shuttering at a rate of more than one per day, and the surrounding city was hurtling towards a full-blown fiscal crisis. The New York of the mid-1970s did not appear destined to become the model global city we know today. Within a decade, however, the city had transformed into a central node—arguably
the
central node—in the ballooning global financial industry and its accompanying class and cultural formations. But this outcome was never guaranteed. How did New York go from “Fear City” to “Capital of the World”? What historical structures, contingencies, and policy decisions produced Global New York?

This course examines New York City’s long history as a site of globalization. Since European colonization, New York has served as a hub in world-spanning networks of capital, goods, and people.

At the same time, the city’s reinvention in the late-20th century as a “global city”—defined in large part by its deep embeddedness in world financial markets—represented a fundamental shift in the city’s economy, governance, demography, cultural life, and social relations.

We will interrogate how this came to be by exploring New York’s historical role in global business, culture, and immigration, with attention to how local and national conditions have shaped the city’s relationship to the world. While critically analyzing how elites both in and outside New York have wielded power over its politics and institutions, readings and discussions will also center the voices of New Yorkers drawn from the numerous and diverse communities that make up this complex city.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Sarah A Miller-Davenport
  Info
• 3 points

Global Latin America

Within the Global North social-science mainstream, Latin America (like other parts of the Global South) has often been conceptualized as a region of analytical interest due to its complex
internal
dynamics (relating, for example, to recurring authoritarian rule, democratization, transitional justice, “modernization” and economic development, and social mobilization). Yet until recently, these have infrequently been conceptualized as
global
processes in which Latin America plays a substantive role. To be sure, various
external
forces—namely, colonialism, imperialism, interventionism, and their legacies—are of course widely understood to have shaped Latin American in myriad ways. However, the notions that Latin America exercises agency (or at least matters) in world affairs, is more than a generally passive recipient of global flows, and is meaningfully connected to other regions (including through migratory, political, economic, and cultural linkages), have only recently begun to resonate within the Northern academy.   

 

In contrast to the “methodological nationalism” (or “regionalism”) that has long characterized outside analysis of Latin America, this course foregrounds the region’s global embeddedness and world-making potential—as a protagonist in the generation, adaptation, and diffusion of diverse border-crossing flows, frameworks, and imaginaries. These include: global discourses concerning modernity, postmodernity, liberalism, and postcolonialism; global understandings of race, class, gender, and the intersections between them; global policy frameworks related to human rights, democracy, and economic development; historical and contemporary globalizing relations with distant parts of the world, including the Middle East and Asia; and global alternatives to a world order based on exclusion, extractivism, and environmental degradation.     

 

Throughout, we will highlight the agency of state and non-state actors throughout “Latin America”—itself a homogenizing, Eurocentric label imposed from the outside—as constitutive forces in creating the world that we all inhabit, contributing to the problems that confront us, and helping to generate solutions. To do so, we will engage with a series of texts and materials produced by diversely situated interdisciplinary scholars, writers, artists, and political figures—many of t

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Kevin Funk
  h-index: 6 Info
• 4 points

MA SEMINAR IN GLOBAL THOUGHT

This course explores the challenges of understanding the global world in which we live, a world that demands new conceptual approaches and ways of thinking. The objectives are:

To examine multidisciplinary approaches to key global issues through readings, class discussions, and conversations with select CGT faculty members as guest speakers. This will take place through multi-week modules that center on a critical issue, asking students to familiarize themselves with key questions and context, engage with an expert on the topic, and apply their insights to a specific case or question.

To develop a focused and feasible research project and hone the practices of scholarly data collection, analysis, and communication through workshops and assignments. This work begins in the fall and continues to completion in the spring semester of the seminar. The perspectives and skills developed in M.A. Seminar will support students in the development and completion of their thirty-five page M.A. essays, which they will present to each other and to CGT faculty at the Spring Symposium.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Laura L Neitzel
  CULPA: 1 Info
• Instructor: Reinhold Martin
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Art in Protest-Protest in Art

ART IN PROTEST-PROTEST IN

All art is political, but some art is made as a form of protest or to incite an audience to protest. Most often it is both. This course – though far from exhaustive in its coverage – will present a sample of genres (music, plastic arts, theater, dance, installation, photography) in a variety of locations and times to understand how art and artists have engaged in protest. Much of modern art is conceptual, using installations and performance, to communicate. Therefore, we will start the class by turning to T. J. Clark, the preeminent art historian, for his answer to the question, when did modern art begin? This question will lead us to explore the debate on the purpose of art. We will then move to how artists responded to moments of crisis in the early 20th century - world wars, economic depression, and the rise of fascism – because the art that emerged informs much of what we see today. Based on these foundational questions, the class will turn to case studies from around the globe.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Ramona H Bajema
  Info
• 3 points

Local/Global Worlds: Place-based Invest

Local / Global Worlds

Even in the midst of resurging nationalism, we continue to live in an intensely interconnected world where distant protests trigger local action, local pathogens seed global pandemics, international maneuverings cause local wars, faraway wars bring migrants and refugees to one’s community, global finance reshapes cityscapes, and a mounting climate crisis creates new living conditions everywhere. While studies of “globalization” often take a birds-eye view of the impacts of global interconnectivity, this course focuses also on regions, localities, and our own communities, as we seek to make sense of how the spaces that exist all around us are implicated in, and generative of, various kinds of global flows, ranging from capital, goods, and people to ideas, cultural products, and aesthetic preferences. Our broader aim, then, is to understand how the mutual imbrication of the local and the global generates tendencies that simultaneously flatten space and accentuate disparate socio-spatial dynamics and inequalities. In turn, we will also hone methodologies for investigating the complex and uneven ways global phenomena continually reshape communities and individual lives.

This course is timely and urgent as the world confronts challenges that require coordination and collaboration at and between the local, regional, national, and global levels. This moment requires us to think locally and globally at the same time, as we endeavor to understand, define, and address global problems. To this end, students will collaborate on group research projects to develop comparative, transdisciplinary, and contextual perspectives on how global issues resonate across different geographical scales and to explore ways to address the challenges that confront the world.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Kevin Funk
  h-index: 6 Info
• 3 points

GLOBALIZATION&THE PROBLEMS OF WORLD ORDE

We are currently living through a significant transformation of some of the core features of the international system, or what is more broadly often referred to as, “world order.” Several recent events have highlighted and impacted this sweeping change. The first is the failure of multilateral institutions (such as the UN, WHO or even the G-7 countries) to meet the challenge of the 2020 Covid pandemic. The failure of international collective action is also an obstacle to tackling the effects of global warming. In both cases narrow national interests trumped transnational values.  The second is the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine which highlights the failure of multilateral institutions (such as the UN Security Council) to protect the independence of territorial nation-states, a principal unit of the international system since 1945. Narrow national interests continue to outweigh the commitment to the long-standing norm of territorial integrity of nation-states as the foundation for the modern post-imperial international order. Nationalism remains the most powerful force in international affairs. Third, the optimism of the post-Cold War (post-1989) era that economic globalization would lead to the liberalization of China and Russia has now almost entirely faded. The current moment is marked by the rise of these authoritarian states (together with Iran and others) which are seeking to overturn the Western liberal international order  that was established after 1945. This Western order consists of three components: capitalist market economics, democratic self-rule and universal human rights, and peaceful diplomacy as the preferred way to manage inter-state conflicts. In its stead we are seeing in major parts of the world the persistence of socialist command economies, the rise of illiberal authoritarianism, and a return to 19th century patterns of war and conquest. Finally, the era of expanding globalization, driven by capitalist economic integration across the globe, appears to be over. The world is de-globalizing.

This course will examine some of the key institutional challenges and most vexing conceptual controversies in the current rethinking, some might say turmoil, over global governance and competing forms of world order. These debates reveal at least two key features. First, a depth of disagreement about the shape of the international system which is arguably unprecedented in the last seventy years. Almost every dimension of global government and governance is today the subjec

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kian Tajbakhsh
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points