Courses for the Graduate Emphasis in Global Studies

The Global Studies Emphasis course work is theoretically rich and empirically grounded. Students will explore both abstract and concrete expressions of the global across the world.  Courses are designed to be historically grounded, geographically global, and relevant to contemporary problems. As such, the first course “Theories of Globalization” exposes students to foundational work in the field of global studies over the past three decades.  It explores riveting debates about periodizing the global, and it balances a focus on top-down processes of globalization with a bottom-up approach that centers the lives of everyday people and social movements. The second course “Theory from the Global South” brings the margin to the center by deploying a notion of the global south as both a geography and a social relation.  It centers on the question of the decolonization of knowledge, and explores alternative epistemological approaches to knowing the world and its global processes. The final course in the sequence, “Contemporary Global Issues,” builds on the historical, theoretical, and empirical background in the first two courses to tackle today’s most pressing issues through a global lens. It explores topics like migration, urbanization, communication technologies, the crisis of liberal-centrism, climate change, warfare, economic crisis, transnational governance, global apartheid, public health, imperialism, and global social  movements.
 

INTL ST 204 - Theories of Globalization
Provides students with a broad overview of the major theoretical contributions in understanding global processes. The first half of the course examines long-term trends of historical globalization, and the second part looks at early debates in the emerging field of global studies from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The course aims to maintain a balance between global changes emanating from above at the level of states and transnational organizations, and those that emerge from below in the form of transformative movements led by everyday people.

INTL ST 205 - Theories from the Global South
This seminar seeks to push beyond the theoretical traditions of the Euro-American academy and to engage important theoretical contributions made by scholars from the Global South. We begin by discussing the validity of the “Global South” as a binary theoretical construct, and then ask who speaks for the Global South? We then read works by diverse scholars that bring into question taken-for-granted assumptions about power, authority, and significance. 

INTL ST 206 - Engaging Global Issues
The goal of this graduate seminar is to help students develop critical and interdisciplinary approaches to complex global issues that they can use in their own research. The selected readings will introduce students to theoretical approaches in areas such as globalization, global political economy, postcolonialism, nationalism and post-nationalism, race, gender, Indigenous theories, environment, conflict and security.

 

 

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