course description

This is an interdisciplinary course devoted to understanding the role of the US in a globalizing world. In this course, we will think critically about the interconnection between social, cultural, political and economic dynamics within and beyond the borders of our own country. We will explore the meaning of globalization from a geographical perspective, interrogating how and where “the global” is constituted.

A geographical approach attends to the spatial dimensions of social, political, economic, environmental and cultural life. It explores the differences between places as well as the similarities and connections that unite them. Hence, this course will introduce you to how the fields of political, economic, and cultural geography address the relations between seemingly distant spaces. We will open up geographical concepts such as migration, flow, networks, boundaries, place, space, and scale in an effort to better understand and explain the connections (and disparities) between people and places in a world in which events in far-flung locales are intimately entwined with one another. We will also explore the ways that events outside of New York City—be they in New Orleans or New Delhi—are often not far from the social, cultural and political forms that we encounter in our everyday lives. Finally, we will pay particular attention to how and where these spaces, and notions of “the global” that unite them, are constituted unevenly.

The course is structured around a series of readings and case studies taken from different sites around the world. After a brief introduction to concepts in globalization, we will focus on three key themes: global agricultural production and its critics; contemporary forms urban governance, growth, and inequality around the world; and uneven geographies of disease and medicine. We will read these cases through three key questions that structure the course:

(1) What does it mean to live in an increasingly interconnected world?

(2) How do we speak about and study accelerated social, economic, and political change (i.e. what kind of language do we use to describe the contemporary world and what methods to we use to understand it)?

(3) What does ‘global citizenship’ mean at a time when people, economies, cultures, and politics are increasingly (and often unknowingly) entangled in integrated networks that span the globe?