ClassInfo

Spring 2016: This course introduces students to intellectual debates on colonialism and the rise of capitalism, development and globalization, state power and violence, and the production of wealth/prosperity and poverty/inequality, as these practices have unfolded unevenly and relationally around the world. We start from the assumption that in order to adequately address questions of poverty and wealth, war and peace, global warming and environmental sustainability, and social equity and justice, we need to better understand their historical bases, as well as interrogate the ways we typically debate these ideas. We will do so through close readings of course materials, lectures, guest speakers, films, and weekly discussions in (relatively) small groups. The goal of the course is to better understand the roots of various forms of global inequality, how certain aspects persist and/or evolve, some are stamped out, while some endure to become common sense. This course, and this major, focus as much on the historical legacies of today's large-scale social "problems" as on the ways in which certain ideas become more believable than others, backed and supported by our modern institutions. We will think through what this tells us about the ways we generate knowledge about the world, emphasizing some practices and moments while erasing or making invisible many other aspects of social reality. We hope that the course will get us all to think about the way we see the world (and what problems we choose to focus on) and understand how it affects how we think about changing it.

Why do many of our political and development institutions think this way, and how can we work our way out of such narrow thinking and practices? What have been some of the longstanding political relations between the U.S. and countries in Latin America, and what are the many ways in which such political dominance has been challenged, and transformed? And finally, what is terrorism, a ‘war on terror', and how can we think about this difficult-to-comprehend phenomenon of ‘suicide bombing' in ways that can help us see through current political (and intellectual) messes?

By discussing these and other questions, we will be "doing theory," or thinking through concrete questions and processes in order to grapple with more general questions about modernity and its discontents, in ways that can prepare us for subsequent Global Studies courses, as well as for challenges in the world.