SEMINAR IN GLOBAL THOUGHT

INQUIRIES INTO AN INTERCONNECT

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 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Kevin Funk
  h-index: 6 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 them based in Latin America, an

• 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.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Kevin Funk
  h-index: 6 Info
• Instructor: Vishakha Desai
  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.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ramona H Bajema
  Info
• 3 points