This page is currently under revision as the Crossing Borders Program undergoes administrative changes.
Crossing Borders Fellows participate in a series of team-taught graduate seminars that focus on cases and settings where globalization's antecedents and effects are evident and where interdisciplinary methods are appropriate and productive. This brings faculty into close working relationships with peers in other disciplines and in different parts of the world.
Below are a list of past seminars. Please click courses below to jump to description.
2012
Global History and Human Welfare (Fall 2012)
Transcultural Communication and Migration in the Indian Ocean Rim and Caribbean Regions (Spring 2012)
2011
The Changing Faces of West Africa in Literature, Film and Postcolonial Theory (Spring 2011)
2010
Gender and Slavery in Comparative Context (Fall 2010)
Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective: Local Relations, Global Processes (Spring 2010)
2009
Skirts and Trousers on the Line: Historical Debates on Gender and Sexuality in Africa and Southwest Asia (Fall 2009)
Reading Transnational Feminist Theory (Spring 2009)
Approaches to Human Rights (Spring 2009)
2008
Environmental Justice (Fall 2008)
Transitions in Moderate Muslim Societies (Spring 2008)
2007
Transnational Spaces of the Americas (Fall 2007)
Pilgrimage: Accounts and Approaches (Fall 2007)
Translation and Globalization (Spring 2007)
2006
Disrupting Diasporas Indo-Fijian, Indo-Trinidadian, and American Indian Experiences (Fall 2006)
Caste and Race in the 21st Century (Summer 2006)
Globalization: Historical Antecedents, Contemporary Views
2005
Environmental Policy (Fall 2005)
Problems in Political Theory; Liberalism and Multiculturalism: Theories, Controversies (Fall 2005)
Seminar Sociocultural Anthropology (Fall 2005)
Transnational Spaces of the Americas (Fall 2005)
2004
Global Media Seminar (Spring 2004)
History Workshop Theory & Interpretation. Section 1-Theory and Interpretation (Spring 2004)
Modes of Critical Analysis: Black Atlantic (Spring 2004)
Problems in Africa Art: Tourist Art and Cultural Tourism in Africa (Spring 2004)
Problems in Baroque Art: Sec 1- The World Seen: 16th-17th Century Netherlands Imagery of Global Exploration (Spring 2004)
2003
Introductory: Globalization (Fall 2003)
Transnational Trade: Material Culture and Identity on the Market for (Summer 2003)
Global Issues in Visual Culture (Spring 2003)
2002
Historical Relations of Coastal Africa and India: Society, Empire and Environment 1600-2000 (Fall 2002)
World Cinema and Transnational Cultures (Summer 2002)
Material Cultures in New World Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Approaches to the Connections Things Make (Spring 2002)
2001
Introductory: Globalization (Fall 2001)
Foreign Scholarship on the US: Focus on India and Southern Africa (Fall 2001)
Transnational Cultural Studies: Gender and Sexuality (Summer 2001)
Africa and Its Caribbean Diaspora (Spring 2001)
2000
Introductory: Globalization (Fall 2000)
Historical Memory in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Summer 2000)
Postcolonialism (Spring 2000)
1999
Introductory: Globalization (Fall 1999)
Seminar Title: Global History and Human Welfare
Session: Fall 2012
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History) and Anne Wallis [2] (Public Health)
This seminar will review the recent resurgence (since 1990s) of the findings and methods of “global history” and will survey broad differences in material welfare (health, security) among distinct social groups (slaves, workers, elites) in different polities (kingdoms, empires, nations) since antiquity. While individual and household economic well-being (or their absence) will be a part of the inquiry, the emphasis will fall on social, economic and environmental practices that shape the welfare of larger social segments. Our approach will be to first read and discuss classic works and thus absorb their continuing relevance and controversies; we will then turn to more recent studies (books and articles) that explicate the ideas and practices that affect welfare and prosperity (or their absence). Instead of steering students toward fixed conclusions, the instructors will draw out students’ insights into the sources of human welfare through comparisons, case studies and disciplinary treatises. Most readings will incorporate some degree of theory, and one result of the seminar will be to show how theory serves as an aid to understanding material life. The instructors are Paul Greenough (History) and Anne B. Wallis (Public Health).
Seminar Title: Transcultural Communication and Migration in the Indian Ocean Rim and Caribbean Regions
Session: Spring 2012
Instructors: Anny Curtius [3] (French and Italian) and Sujatha Sosale [4] (Communication Studies)
In this seminar, we will take a comparative approach to the study of media, and mediated cultural forms such as literature, film, and art in the Indian Ocean Rim and Caribbean regions. We will examine the histories, migrations, modernizations, globalization, media systems and networks, and culture in countries that have experienced British and/or French occupation. Mauritius, Mayotte, Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Trinidad are a few examples; other examples include non-island nations such as India, east and southern African countries on the Indian Ocean Rim, and Guyana in the Caribbean region.
The seminar is designed to familiarize students from a number of disciplines to alternate ways of viewing and comparing geographical areas that are labeled as “developing countries” or the “global South.” Because of their ongoing ties with dominant European countries, some of these areas do not fit readily within the concept of development. While the temptation is to classify them with developing countries because of their everyday realities and living conditions, they clearly have a profile of developed countries from a geopolitical perspective. The exposure to the regions in tandem and the complications and nuances are intended to spark new ideas for interdisciplinary research across a variety of departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Readings include, but are not limited to, works by Appadurai, Bhabha, Bose, Bragard, Clifford, Gilroy, Glissant, Hall, Mehta, and Torabully. They will enable students to examine forced labor migrations across continents and oceans that resulted in the development of new roots and identities, the forging of new creolizations and postcolonial cultures, and changes in media and political systems. The readings will help us interrogate seemingly readymade concepts such as globalization, hybridity, imagined homelands, and Glissant’s Tout Monde. Readings will be complemented by documentary and feature films. Students may choose to integrate a range of online media such as websites, blogs, and social networking sites in class discussions, presentations, and the research paper. We will look for possible intersections between cultural concepts, and structural aspects of the two regions--especially communication and political systems and networks.
Seminar Title: The Changing Faces of West Africa in Literature, Film and Postcolonial Theory
Session: Spring 2011
Instructor: Anny Curtius [3] (French and Italian)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Gender and Slavery in Comparative Context
Session: Fall 2010
Instructors: Catherine Komisaruk [5] (History) and Leslie Schwalm [6](History)
This seminar will explore the history of slavery and emancipation in comparative contexts, focusing on the Atlantic world. We will give particular attention to gender, not only as a significant aspect of the lived experience of slavery and emancipation, but also as part of the ideology shaping the formation, maintenance, and abolition of slave systems. Readings will be interdisciplinary but will emphasize history, and will include primary sources. One of the course requirements will include attending the Obermann Humanities Symposium, October 13-16, “Causes and Consequences: Transnational Perspectives on Gender and the History of Slavery,” where scholars from various universities will present and discuss their work. (Seminar members are expected to clear their schedules to attend.) Other assignments will include reading and discussion of secondary literature, study of primary source material including popular representations of gender and slavery, and map preparation.
Seminar Title: Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective: Local Relations, Global Processes
Session: Spring 2010
Instructors: Jacki Rand [7] (History) and Jennifer Sessions [8] (History)
This reading seminar will consider the dynamics of settler colonialism as both a historical process operating on a global scale and a social encounter experienced in diverse local contexts. Among the themes to be considered are theories and ideologies of settler colonialism; regimes of legal, territorial and personal dispossession; social and cultural formations in settler societies; decolonization and historical memory. In addition to the collective course readings, students will complete an individual semester-long project to be determined in consultation with the instructors.
Seminar Title: Crossing Borders in French Literature and Film
Session: Spring 2010
Instructor: Peter J. Eubanks (French and Italian)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Skirts and Trousers on the Line: Historical Debates on Gender and Sexuality in Africa and Southwest Asia
Session: Fall 2009
Instructors: Mériam Belli [9] (History) and Elke Stockreiter [10] (History)
This comparative and transnational course examines the history of gender constructions in Africa and Southwest Asia (the Middle East). We will highlight the diversity and nuances of such conceptions, as well as deconstruct common assumptions of gender identities and relations in these regions. For example, how useful is it to use Islam as a category of analysis for understanding gender relations in Africa and Southwest Asia? To what extent does religion, and particularly “Islam,” define male and female sexuality? We will first explore theories of gender and sexuality, before looking into examples drawn from African and Southwest Asian societies to grasp their historical and cultural diversity. You will gain a better understanding of changing perceptions of gender and sexuality across time and space, as well as question commonly accepted cultural categories. This course will use a variety of sources, both secondary and primary, such as scholarly works, literature, and audiovisual materials.
Seminar Title: Reading Transnational Feminist Theory
Session: Spring 2009
Instructor: Meena Khandelwal [11] (Anthropology and Women's Studies)
The discourse of globalization is dominated by a rhetoric of immediacy and transparency. Time and space appear to compress as information “flows,” passing with apparent ease and exactness from language to language, culture to culture, medium to medium, often all three at once. This course aims to study the complexity of the infrastructures that allow and prevent global translation to occur, whether at the level of the intrinsic linguistic difficulties of languages and texts, the long and arduous formation of translators, the state of publishing entities, the asymmetrical distribution of media structures, or the proliferation of techniques and technologies associated with these processes.
Seminar Title: Approaches to Human Rights
Session: Spring 2009
Instructor: Ahmed Souaiaia [12] (Religious Studies)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Environmental Justice
Session: Fall 2008
Instructor: Rex Honey [13] (Geography)
Explores issues in transnational feminist scholarship, including colonialism, globalization, nation-state, religion, “cultural traditions” and human rights—in both global and US domestic contexts. Readings are interdisciplinary with emphasis on anthropology and other social sciences.
Seminar Title: Transitions in Moderate Muslim Societies
Session: Spring 2008
Instructors: John Reitz [14] (Law) and Rex Honey [13] (Geography)
The course is a graduate-level seminar devoted to studying current political and social development in the Muslim world, with particular attention to Morocco and Bangladesh, two countries that were the focus of a study trip conducted by a team of UI professors and graduate students under the sponsorship of the Crossing Borders program in May and June, 2006. The five professors who participated in that trip will all be participating in this seminar and in the Crossing Borders Convocation.
Seminar Title: Pilgrimage: Accounts and Approaches
Session: Fall 2007
Instructors: Morten [15] Schlütter [15] [15] (Religious Studies) and Janine Tasca Sawada (Religious Studies)
Travel is a dominant social practice of our time. Some believe that the contemporary wayfaring impulse represents an evolution of the medieval practice of pilgrimage—a kind of response to post-modern spiritual needs.
In this course we will explore the nature of religious pilgrimage in both historical and contemporary forms, with an eye to the relationship between them. We will begin by discussing classical and revisionist theories of pilgrimage, and move on, later in the course, to specific case studies of religious travel, drawn from a wide variety of geo-cultural contexts. We will also sample recent scholarly interpretations of the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism.
The ultimate aim of the seminar is to foster critical reading, discussion, and writing in an interdisciplinary and intercultural setting. Early in the term, in consultation with instructors, students will choose a research topic in their particular area of interest that deals in some way with the motif of pilgrimage of religious travel. During the last several weeks of the seminar, participants will present their findings in class and complete a final paper.
Seminar Title: Transnational Spaces of the Americas
Session: Spring 2007
Instructors: Harilaos Stecopoulos [16] (English) and Claire F. Fox [17](English)
The past two decades have given rise to new transnational geographical models that encompass all or part of the Western Hemisphere, such as inter-American, trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, Black Atlantic, Circum-Atlantic, and New World Studies. Thus far, however, the emergent geographical frameworks have developed in relative isolation from one another; each has pursued transnational research on select objects and populations according to a different set of foundational texts, historical markers, and critical methodologies. This course will put into dialogue the methodologies of two emergent transnational geographical designations that have grown increasingly important to recent scholarship on the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Central, and South America: Inter-American Studies and New World Studies. While U.S.-based inter-American Studies scholars usually depart from a study of the southwestern U.S. as a Latino-Anglo contact zone, New World Studies scholars in contrast tend to privilege the Atlantic seaboard as an extended site of black African and white European interaction, emphasizing the transnational legacy of slavery as the tie that binds together Harlem and Rio, Charleston and Kingston, the global north and the global south.
By placing these two research areas in dialogue with one another, we hope to challenge the presumption among Americanists and Latin Americanists that certain geographies at once speak for and exclude particular historical and cultural topics, and also the idea that the study of the hemisphere's Black and Latino cultures need proceed along mutually exclusive lines. We would thus work to tease out the border politics and poetics of Atlantic spaces just as we would strive to examine the new world racial dynamics of U.S.-Latin American spaces. We also intend to question the manner in which the priority of Anglophone sources has limited the space and shape of Americanist methodologies.
Seminar Title: Translation and Globalization
Session: Spring 2007
Instructors: Russell Valentino [18] (Cinema and Comparative Literature) and Natasha Durovicova [19] (International Writing Program)
The discourse of globalization is dominated by a rhetoric of immediacy and transparency. Time and space appear to compress as information “flows,” passing with apparent ease and exactness from language to language, culture to culture, and medium to medium, often all three at once.
This course aims to study the complexity of the infrastructures that allow and prevent global translation to occur, whether at the level of the intrinsic linguistic difficulties of the languages and texts, the long and arduous formation of translators, the state of publishing entities, the asymmetrical distribution of media structures, or the proliferation of techniques and technologies associated with these processes.
Seminar Title: Disrupting Diasporas Indo-Fijian, Indo-Trinidadian, and American Indian Experiences
Session: Fall 2006
Instructors: Meena Khandelwal [20] (Anthropology) and Jacki Rand [7] (History)
This course considers simultaneously the experiences of diasporic Indians originating in the South Asian subcontinent and settled in Fiji and Trinidad on the one hand, and Indians indigenous to North America on the other. Readings will focus on themes of marriage, family, work and education in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will bring the concepts of diaspora and indigeneity--rarely considered together--into a productive dialogue in order to prompt new insights into colonial processes and to offer critical analyses of current theorizing about diaspora, displacement and homeland. Open to Crossing Borders fellows and to other graduate students throughout the University. A research paper will be required as the seminar's major writing project.
Seminar Title: Caste and Race in the 21st Century
Session: Summer 2006
Instructors: Virginia Dominguez (Anthropology) and Balmurli Natrajan
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Globalization: Historical Antecedents, Contemporary Views
Session: Spring 2006
Instructors Paul Greenough [1] (History) and James Giblin [21](History)
This seminar addresses multiple historical understandings of globalization. Most historians are skeptical of the concept. The focus is on recent work in several disciplines that 1) historicize globalization in theory and practice, paying attention to cross-cultural contacts, material flows, disseminated concepts and human movements that have constituted and propelled long-distance exchanges; 2) explore the work of leading practitioners of globalization studies and consider the impact of such work on disciplinary knowledge; 3) consider the re-emergence of the theme of "empire" in relation to imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, etc.; and 4) raise awareness of the role of scholarship in maintaining and altering processes of globalization. In addition to assigned readings, relevant documentary films will be screened both in and outside class. All students are expected to write research essays based on primary materials and incorporating, to a greater or lesser extent, concepts and methods discussed in the seminar.
Because participants represent several disciplines, we will develop a common vocabulary and repertory of shared concepts. For this reason alone, note-taking is recommended. Student facilitators will be appointed for each session (except the first) to initiate discussion on the assigned readings. Facilitators will have 30 minutes to set out the important issues and terminology and to invite responses. All students are expected to bring to every session a one-sided (typed) sheet of questions or observations about the assigned readings (please make a dozen duplicate copies for others).
Normally the seminar will convene promptly at 6:30 and end by 9:00 p.m. Discussion will be supplemented with films on January 30, February 27, March 6 and April 3, and on each of these dates the class will be extended for the film’s duration.
John Tomlinson and Frank Korom (authors of two of our texts) will be speakers during the Crossing Borders convocation (March 24-March 26), and a special meeting of the seminar will be organized around them in that period.
Seminar Title: Environmental Policy
Session: Fall 2005
Instructor: Rex Honey [13] (Geography)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Problems in Political Theory; Liberalism and Multiculturalism: Theories Controversies
Session: Fall 2005
Instructor: Alfonso Damico [22] (Political Science)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Seminar Sociocultural Anthropology
Session: Fall 2005
Instructor: Virginia Dominguez (Anthropology)
Seminar description not available
Seminar: Transnational Spaces of the Americas
Session: Spring 2005
Instructors: Harilaos Stecopoulos [16] (English) and Claire F. Fox [17](English)
The past two decades have given rise to new transnational geographical models that encompass all or part of the Western Hemisphere, such as inter-American, trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, Black Atlantic, Circum-Atlantic, and New World Studies. Thus far, however, the emergent geographical frameworks have developed in relative isolation from one another; each has pursued transnational research on select objects and populations according to a different set of foundational texts, historical markers, and critical methodologies. This course will put into dialogue the methodologies of two emergent transnational geographical designations that have grown increasingly important to recent scholarship on the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Central, and South America: Inter-American Studies and New World Studies. While U.S.-based inter-American Studies scholars usually depart from a study of the southwestern U.S. as a Latino-Anglo contact zone, New World Studies scholars in contrast tend to privilege the Atlantic seaboard as an extended site of black African and white European interaction, emphasizing the transnational legacy of slavery as the tie that binds together Harlem and Rio, Charleston and Kingston, the global north and the global south.
By placing these two research areas in dialogue with one another, we hope to challenge the presumption among Americanists and Latin Americanists that certain geographies at once speak for and exclude particular historical and cultural topics, and also the idea that the study of the hemisphere's Black and Latino cultures need proceed along mutually exclusive lines. We would thus work to tease out the border politics and poetics of Atlantic spaces just as we would strive to examine the new world racial dynamics of U.S.-Latin American spaces. We also intend to question the manner in which the priority of Anglophone sources has limited the space and shape of Americanist methodologies.
Seminar Title: Global Media Seminar
Session: Spring 2004
Instructor: Ece Algan (Communication Studies)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: History Workshop Theory & Interpretation. Section 1-Theory and Interpretation
Session: Spring 2004
Instructor: Sarah Hanley [23] (History)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Modes of Critical Analysis: Black Atlantic
Session: Spring 2004
Instructor: Harilaos Stecopoulos [16] (English)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Problems in Africa Art: Tourist Art and Cultural Tourism in Africa
Session: Spring 2004
Instructor: Christopher Roy [24](Art and Art History)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Problems in Baroque Art: Sec 1- The World Seen: 16th-17th Century Netherlands Imagery of Global Exploration
Session: Spring 2004
Instructor: Julie Hochstrasser [25] (Art and Art History)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Introductory: Globalization
Session: Fall 2003
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History) and Helene Basu (Anthropology)
Seminar description not available
Seminar: Transnational Trade: Material Culture and Identity on the Market
Session: Summer 2003
Instructors: Florence Babb (Anthropology) and Vicki Rovine
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Global Issues in Visual Culture
Session: Spring 2003
Instructors: Sarah Adams (Art and Arty History) and Julie Hochstrasser [25] (Art and Art History)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Historical Relations of Coastal Africa and India: Society, Empire and Environment 1600-2000
Session: Fall 2002
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History) and James Giblin [21] (History)
The seminar will introduce current scholarly work and controversies in the social, political, economic and environmental history of East Africa and Western India. These regions are normally approached separately, but a new literature is emerging that links them through the explication of webs of trade, empire and diaspora. Coastal strips and the complex social and cultural situation arising from cross-regional contact will be a major concern. The seminar will focus on the colonial and post-colonial periods (1600-2000), but issues arising from archeology and environmental science deepen the chronology and promise to disrupt familiar political narratives. A key feature of the seminar will be the participation of scholars from India and Africa who will share their recent work during the semester, not only in the Tuesday seminar but also in public lectures the following day. Attending the Wednesday evening lectures is considered part of the necessary effort in the course.
Seminar Title: World Cinema and Transnational Cultures
Session: Summer 2002
Instructors Kathleen Newman [26] (Cinema and Comparative Literature) and Natasha Durovicova (International Writers Program)
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar, designed for graduate students from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, will address three key issues in the current debates on the role of the moving image culture in the process of globalization: (1) the current configuration of world cinema and the geopolitics of the international film history, that is, the institutional patterns of production, distribution, and exhibition on the scale of the national, the regional and the global, (2) the question of the representability and/or intelligibility of the global via the cinema, and (3) the ways in which current theories of globalization are refashioning theories of cinematic representation. The course is also in part a methodology course: students who have not studied film previously will be introduced to film analysis, history, and theory, and all students in the course will consider the ways in which cinema might serve as evidence of the processes of social transformation.
The introductory section of the course will include a brief overview of methods of analysis as well as salient moments in film history. Two methodological topics to be addressed here are the nature of film as historical evidence and the problematic of writing the histories of national cinemas in confrontation with transnational cultures. The second section of the course will consider concrete aspects of the reception of the world cinema: co-productions, remakes, international festivals circuits, film and television as world texts. Here we will be concerned with the question of what is seen and what is not seen in the world film text – which images can and do circulate and which index the global only negatively. We will question how the textual and social intersect, that is, how social formations (nations, borders) are registered by, and contribute to the cinematic representation of the global. The third and final section will focus on the representation of globalization in contemporary world cinemas. Given that cinema has been since its inception and international medium, the question of the intelligibility of the global on screen naturally arises. While cinema has crossed borders more easily than other media, it also has always retained the imprint of the local even as it necessarily has imagined transnational cultures.
Seminar Title: Material Cultures in New World Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Approaches to the Connections Things Make
Session: Spring 2002
Instructors: Rudi Colloredo (Anthropology) and Mark Peterson (History)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Introductory: Globalization
Session: Fall 2001
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History) and Ken MacDonald (Geography)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Foreign Scholarship on the US: Focus on India and Southern Africa
Session: Fall 2001
Instructors: Virginia Dominguez (Anthropology) and Jane Desmond (American Studies)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Transnational Cultural Studies: Gender and Sexuality
Session: Summer 2001
Instructors: Florence Babb (Anthropology and Women's Studies) and Daniel Balderston (Spanish and Portuguese)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Africa and Its Caribbean Diaspora
Session: Spring 2001
Instructors: James Giblin [21] (History) and Michaeline Crichlow [27] (African-American World Studies)
Seminar not description not available
Seminar Title: Introductory: Globalization
Session: Fall 2000
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History)and Ken MacDonald (Geography)
The focus on the seminar is on recent work in history and the social sciences that explores (1) “globalization” in theory and in practice, paying attention to a variety of cross-cultural contacts, material exchanges, and human movements that constitute and propel “global” or “transnational flows” and (2) some of the new objects of disciplinary knowledge in culture, politics, science and economics that have been thrown up by globalization.
Seminar Title: Historical Memory in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Session: Summer 2000
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History) and Larry Zimmerman (American Indian and Native American Studies)
Seminar description not available
Seminar Title: Postcolonialism
Session: Spring 2000
Instructors: Ashley Dawson (English) and Ken MacDonald (Geography)
The second seminar sponsored by the Ford Foundation-supported Crossing Borders project, this course asks one central question: What theoretical approaches have scholars, artists and activists used to understand the cultural mechanisms and consequences of globalization? This broad question is explored at a number of levels and from a variety of (trans)disciplinary perspectives. Given the diversity of disciplinary perspectives that we expect students to bring to the seminar, we will open with an attempt to develop a common language of engagement. Subsequent sections will interrogate: the epistemological foundations of the forces driving globalization, and the relations between these forces and the (re)production of space and scale; differential experiences of globalizing forces as they are mediated by subject positionalities; struggles over the authority to define and police material and symbolic boundaries in a world imagined within and through multiple discourses of globalization; the implications of globalization for local ecologies, the maintenance of political sovereignty and processes of culture.
The seminar will be framed in an interactive manner and will consequently include student presentations of case study materials focusing on specific instances of the globalizing dynamic. Readings will cover the work of a number of major scholars from a variety of disciplines including George Lipsitz, Paul Virilio, Zygmunt Bauman, Jack Goody, Michel Foucault, Aihwa Ong, George Marcus, Karl Marx, Nicholas Dirks, and Michael Watts, among others.
The course will also maintain a critical focus on the methods involved in the production of knowledge related to globalization and its cultural effects. This focus has two primary rationales: a) to develop a critical self-awareness and reflexively interrogate the role of scholars in maintaining, reproducing and altering relations of domination inherent in processes of globalization; and b) to assess the modes of investigation relevant to conducting research in a world complicated by current understandings of webs of interconnectedness and interdependence and the asymmetrical flow of power through these webs. To enhance this engagement, we have arranged for a series of scholars to visit campus and address their work with students in seminar sessions. These will include: Dilip Gaokar (Rhetoric, Northwestern University), Ramachandra Guha (Independent Scholar & Visiting Professor, Stanford University), David Scott (Anthropology, Columbia University), and Nicholas Dirks (Anthropology, Columbia University).
Seminar Title: Introductory: Globalization
Session: Fall 1999
Instructors: Paul Greenough [1] (History)
Seminar description not available
Second-Area Travel Seminars
Second-Area Travel Seminars (SATS) result in rapid acquisition of functional information, regional contacts, teachable courses, and researchable issues.
Past SATS from Crossing Borders
- South Africa (Durban) - India (Bombay), 2005
- Paris-Instanbul, 2004
- Fiji-Trinidad, 2004
- St. Lucia-Trinidad, 2002-03
- Trinidad, 2002
- Goa-Mumbai-Gujarat, 2001
- India-Tanzania 1999