COURSES BY INITIATIVE

The following courses were developed with support of the Center and Center Faculty Associates.

CULTURE & HUMANITIES

Course Number: ENGL 112
Title: Literatures of Global Culture
Description: This course focuses on representative writers and filmmakers who constitute a world culture of interacting diversity, telling stories that journey away from home towards new encounters, new ways of seeing, and new ways of thinking about self and others. These artists from England, America, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean raise questions about inequities of power and development in an interdependent global economy, while raising the possibility of new forms of agency and community. We will ask how new identities and nations are constructed, contested, and challenged in the process of forming a globalized culture.

Course Number: GEOG 106
Title: Geographies of Globalization
Description: A survey of major world regions by systematically considering five themes: environment, population and settlement patterns, cultural coherence and diversity, geopolitical fragmentation and unity, and economic and social development. While examining the persistence of unique regions, the course will both scale up to global linkages and scale down to place-specific impacts of globalization processes.

Course Number: HIST 100
Title: Global History
Description: The course begins by looking at six common features that determined how and where and why civilizations prospered and declined from earliest times (agriculture, trade, disease, labor, ideology, and energy). Then we'll have the global interconnections within these same features and the repercussions of an 18th-century challenge to the eastern, Chinese global hegemony by a growing western, Atlantic hegemony. This will bring us to 20th and 21st century versions of our six features: global issues of food politics, industrial tariffs, morphing viruses, migrating labor, the religion of nationalism, and competition over oil.

Course Number: RELST 110
Title: World Religions
Description: A survey of the major religions of the world: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Special attention also to the methods employed in the study of religion, the religion of the American Indians, common features in religious imagery and ritual, religious themes with philosophical implications, and methodology for comparing religions.

EDUCATION

Course Number: In Development
Title: Internationalization of Curriculum

Course Number: EPS 530
Title: Globalization and Educational Policy
Description: Analyses of the role and functions of education in social, political, and economic development with particular reference to new and developing countries.

GLOBAL INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION

Course Number: ANTH 103
Title: Culture and Globalization
Description: This course will give students clear ideas of how major economic variables--economy-wide income, unemployment, inflation, interest rate, and exchange rate--affect our personal and business activities. Students will also learn what factors drive these variables. The goal of this course is to enable the students to make basic assessments of the global economic environment in which they will be living and working. We consider how difference in government policies and political, social, and cultural rules and norms explain the substantial differences in economic performance across countries and over time. We also emphasize the central role played by the global connections among economies.

Course Number: HIST 162
Title: Global Environmental Change

HOMELAND AND GLOBAL SECURITY

Course Number: HIST 399
Title: Terrorism: A Historical Inquiry

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

Course Number: ACE 231
Title: International Food and Agribusiness Management

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

Course Number: ARAB 210
Title: Colloquial Arabic: Spoken Syrian Arabic
Description: Development of conversational fluency in one of the major colloquial dialects.

SOCIAL & POLICY SCIENCES

Course Number:
Title: Development Theories and Policies

Course Number: SOC 160
Title: Global Inequality & Society
Description: Introduces sociological concepts of poverty, inequality, and social change within a global context. Themes explored include basic food security, poverty and hunger, population and resource distribution, foreign aid and development institutions, and social policies and movements for change. Course approach is historical and transnational and typically includes case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States.

Course Number: PS 282
Title: Governing Globalization: The Pursuit of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy
Description: Course introduces students to the historical, socio-economic, political, and moral dimensions associated with the rise of a global society and its governance.

Course Number: ECON 103
Title: Macro Economic Principles and Global Economy
Description: This course will present the foundational areas of anthropological analysis through a series of cases that emphasize social and cultural relations in global contexts. It will direct attention to the anthropological history of global empires, colonial states, and contemporary new-liberal networks. We shall study transnational family and kinship relations and the exchanges that sustain them. We'll consider the cultural formations entailed in the development of modern nation-states and track the transformations such states undergo as both poor and rich countries retract services and rearrange the social and cultural experiences of their citizens. We'll examine these changes through case studies of religious fundamentalism, medical emergency, racial injustice, ecological crisis, changing musical and artistic practices, and ethnic violence in a variety of world areas.