AIS 095B: Introduction to Global Studies
FALL 2008
Course Description
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The world in which we live is experiencing an apparently unprecedented movement of money, goods, ideas, information, and people across national boundaries. This movement and the technologies that enable it brings us a lot of the cheap food and goods we consider necessary for our lifestyles, helps us make sense of what is going on elsewhere on the planet, and exposes us to different people and divergent cultural values. It also changes our sense of scale, effectively blurring traditionally-understood lines between "here" and "there." This situation feels so natural that it is easy to assume that everybody around the world is having the same kind of experience, or as Marshall McLuhan famously said, living in the same "global village."
But what does it actually mean to say we live in a global village, and is that metaphor adequate to explain contemporary human cultural, political, and economic dynamics and experiences? The fact is, just as these global flows of goods, ideas, and money feel natural to you and me, they are surprisingly limited in their scope, the result of specific historical processes that are still unfolding in myriad and unpredictable ways. These processes are also experienced and understood differently in other socio-cultural contexts. Depending on how you define globalization and where you stand to observe it, you are likely to see a number of complex, even contradictory, processes and systems at work that do not lend themselves easily to simplistic slogans like the "global village."
Nevertheless, globalization processes touch on so many aspects of so many peoples lives that we cannot ignore their contemporary importance, nor can we ignore debates over the impacts of these processes on local cultures, biological diversity, national security, and economic prosperity, if not the very future of the planet itself. Yet often lost in these debates—where positions typically fall into polarized positions between those who view globalization as inevitable, even a moral imperative, and others who view it as a singularly destructive force—are a number important intellectual and practical problems, around which this course is organized:
As the bumper sticker says, we can "Act Locally." But can we really “Think Globally?”
Hasn’t globalization happened before? What’s so different about the contemporary era?
How does globalization create prosperity for some and inequality and poverty for others?
If the world is not becoming culturally homogenized, what is it becoming?
Are we facing imminent global environmental collapse, and is it possible to avertit?
Is global governance necessary? Is it even possible?
In exploring these problems, the goal of this course is NOT to cover the current state of "the globe" in its entirety. To attempt this is a recipe for tremendous oversimplification. Rather, the goal is to develop a number of useful intellectual tools that will help frame your future learning about global problems and processes. The best way to do this is to take a problem-centered approach.This approach frames learning about global problems and globalization processes as an active process of asking questions about real world problems and weaving disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary insights to understand them. This pedagogy emphasizes the importance of active learning, asking relevant questions, critical thinking, familiarity with theoretical concepts, and the impossibility of simple answers to the highly complex issues it raises.
The following required texts are available for purchase at the University Store:
1. Robbins, Richard. (2008) Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. 4th edition. Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
2. Robbins, Richard. (2004) Global Issues: A Reader. Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
3. Sije, Dai. (2002) Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Anchor Books.