Instructor: M. Griffiths, H. Tseng
This seminar-based course introduces students to a series of key concepts vital in conceptualizing our globalizing world. Students will engage with cultural, linguistic, and geographic spaces as diverse as East Asia, West Africa, Australia and Canada (with a focus on indigenous peoples in these latter two sites), as well as multiple other sites from across the planet. Coordinated by members of the 2012-13 INTERACT Postdoctoral Collective the course is taught with the participation of a group of 5 lecturers who are experts in specific global regions and issues. Students will engage with the discourse of globalization and its attendant limits and problems through such topics as: enlightenment and orientalism, kinship and migration, liberalism and its limits, and the nation-state in a globalizing world. The interdisciplinary course offers students the opportunity to engage methodologies and approaches from across the humanities and social sciences from cultural anthropology and history of ideas to literary analysis and cultural studies.
