Class Schedules

Globalization is upon us, resulting in unprecedented cultural interpenetration and civilizational encounter. Most of what animates this condition is old. However, the contemporary velocity, reach, and mutations of these forces suggest a new "world time," full of contradictions, perils, and promises. This course introduces students to globalization by asking What is globalization, and how does one study it? What are the principal forces (social groups, ideas, institutions, and ecological circumstances) that shaped and now propel it? What are its concrete consequences, and how are we to respond? Open to first- and second-year students, or permission of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

One of the most significant trends of the current era has been globalization: the shrinking of distances, the greater interpenetration of the world's peoples, and the rise, perhaps, of a so-called global culture. Yet it is too simple to say, "it's all a big mix," for the questions of how the mixing is done, and who mixes, are complex. The study of literature illuminates these questions. By reading important recent texts, this course tackles "world" questions: what does it mean to be from a certain place? what is a culture? and who are we in it? We'll work to link our own personal readings with the texts in dialogue with the world. Texts will be drawn from U.S. multicultural, "world," and travel literature, and rich theoretical readings. Open to first- and second-year students, or permission of the instructor. Prerequisite(s): Open only to First Year students and rising sophomores.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Open to first- and second-year students. This course develops a base of knowledge, concepts, and analytical skills for engaging with International Studies' multi-dimensional concerns. Ranging across disciplines but with an emphasis on social science, we study global theories of interaction and conflict between human groups and explore sites and implications of increasing encounter. Focusing on culture, people flows, nationalism and ethnicity, democratization, contending interests, security, religious fundamentalism, gender, and modes of community integration, we examine how particular cases reflect broader processes. Open to first- and second-year students, or permission of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Media have a tremendous influence on how we see and know the world. But while media is central to the production of a sense of "the global," media industries are materially, culturally, and geographically placed. Exploring some of these sites, and their complex interconnections, can help us to better understand our own media environments as well as some of the pressing issues that media systems worldwide face today: Who owns the media and who regulates it? How have its centers of power shifted over time? How do media systems located in different political, economic, and historical conditions result in different kinds of products? What is the impact of media industries on the earth? In this course we will follow a wide range of media forms (telegraph, radio, film, television, social) across time and space, focusing on questions of labor, infrastructure, and ownership. Course assignments will help you to make connections between past moments and contemporary questions, in relation to some of the media that matters most to you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course offers a theoretical and practical introduction to the study and promotion of human rights. Using broad materials, it focuses on the evolution and definition of key concepts, the debate over "universal" rights, regional and international institutions, core documents, the role of states, and current topics of interest to the human rights movement.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces and explores the major health problems facing developing countries, and the main approaches to remediation. The course considers the social determinants of health, and the need for public health programs to address the root causes of health inequities as well as illness itself. Focus is at the country, international-organization, and donor levels. Attention will be given to major indicators, recent trends, policies, and metrics for monitoring progress. A case study, such as international tuberculosis control, will be used as an applied analysis.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The sudden recent rise of artificial intelligence (AI), most prominently but not only ChatGPT, will have deep political, economic, and cultural effects. It may also constitute a revolution in the relations of humans to knowledge and to the world. In this experimental course, we will think about, and with, AI in a global frame. After asking “what is AI?”, we will explore AI topics including but not limited to carbon footprint, dataset feedback loops, human agency displacement, cognitive surrender, hallucination, human trainer trauma, state power, corporate power, autonomous digital power, autonomous warfare, AI and the professions, AI and international politics, AI in its cinematic and literary representations, and speculations on existential risk. Rather than keep AI at a distance during the course, we’ll work with it: carefully, skeptically, critically, together. But in some weeks, we’ll avoid screens completely.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Traces the evolution of (global) political economy as a peculiarly modern way of understanding and organizing (global) social life. Particular attention will be paid to how the distinction between the political and the economic is drawn and implemented in interconnected ways within nation-states and in international society. Course includes a detailed study of one of the key components of the international political economy: international trade, international finance, technological processes, etc. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

From Italian Mafia dons to famous American philanthropists; from the knitting of "trauma teddies" in Helsinki to gift shopping in London; and from ceremonial exchange rings in Melanesia to the present day global refugee crisis: this course will investigate how generosity is understood and practiced in global perspective. We'll begin the semester by examining key debates surrounding reciprocity, gifts, and exchange, theories of altruism and generosity, and patron-client relations. We'll then explore the birth of the "humanitarian spirit," and the complicated ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention. We will compare diverse religious traditions' approaches to giving, including Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Jainism. And we'll explore contemporary debates surrounding volunteerism within sectarian and neoliberal political regimes.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Traces the development of theoretical accounts of culture, politics and identity in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and related lands since the 1947-1991 decolonizations. Readings include Fanon, Said, Walcott, Ngugi and many others, and extend to gender, literature, the U.S., the post-Soviet sphere, and Europe. The course bridges cultural, representational, and political theory. Prerequisite(s): Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A concern for the relationship between nature and society has been one of the pillars of geographic inquiry and has also been an important bridge between other disciplines. By the 1960s, this area of inquiry was referred to variously as "human ecology." Over the last decade, certain forms of inquiry within this tradition have increasingly referred to themselves as "political ecology." The purpose of this seminar is to review major works within the traditions of cultural and political ecology; examine several areas of interest within these fields (e.g., agricultural modernization, environmental narratives, conservation, ecotourism); and explore nature-society dynamics across a range of geographical contexts. Towards the end of the course we will explore how one might begin to think in practical terms about facilitating development in marginal environments. Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor. Prior completion of a geography course(s) with an environmental or development focus is encouraged.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The familiar rhythm of an obsolete industrial order. The disquieting echo of a colonial category. The generation-spanning aspirations of a migration journey. The instinctive reach toward a long-lapsed faith. All of us, always, live amidst afterlives: situations that live on past their purported end points, shaping what comes after in unruly ways. In this course we take up a deceptively simple question: how does the past make itself felt in the present? Following ghosts, ruins, radioactive isotopes, war wounds, data doubles, and other figures of the not-yet-gone, we explore a range of possible answers offered across time, space, and scholarly disciplines. In particular, we interrogate the afterlife as an avenue for thinking through our entanglements, antipathies, and responsibilities as citizens of the world. Another aim is to cultivate considered relations to what came before us, as well as afterlives yet to come. To these ends, students in this course will read a series of full-length monographs while experimenting with a range of research methods for engaging their own local, lived, and intimate afterlives.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Drawing on several disciplines, this course confronts global hatred from three angles. The first is the hater's internal world and looks at how human nature, genetic structure/instincts, and individual psychology may foster hatred. The second is external, exploring the role history, culture, ideology, social structure, religion, and mass psychology play. The third seeks to apply the insights gained from the first two, asking: how might we break the devastating cycles of hatred so present in our world? Prerequisite(s): Senior standing or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

How has the experience of globalization been shaped, defined, and complicated by media? This course centers the role of media and media technologies in exploring how collectivities are formed, differences articulated, and encounters negotiated in an (unevenly) interconnected world. Today we tend to associate globalization with digital media, but from the newspaper reports of foreign correspondents to portrayals of cultural identity on soap operas and sitcoms, media have long informed understandings of the world and our varied places in it. Thinking about, through, and with media artifacts across a range of geographic contexts, we examine and interrogate dynamics of global exchange. Prerequisite(s): Open to first- and second- year students, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How has the experience of globalization been shaped, defined, and complicated by media? This course centers the role of media and media technologies in exploring how collectivities are formed, differences articulated, and encounters negotiated in an (unevenly) interconnected world. Today we tend to associate globalization with digital media, but from the newspaper reports of foreign correspondents to portrayals of cultural identity on soap operas and sitcoms, media have long informed understandings of the world and our varied places in it. Thinking about, through, and with media artifacts across a range of geographic contexts, we examine and interrogate dynamics of global exchange. Prerequisite(s): Open to first- and second- year students, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In the early days of the internet, many people predicted that the increased speed and scale of communications would make for a more homogenous world. Now, decades later, we see something different: a proliferation of cross-fertilizing cultures, sub-cultures, and counter-cultures online. This course explores some of this rich variety, studying online social worlds (from influencers to hacktivists) and the ways in which IT-informed ways of being seep into social life offline (from ideologies of innovation to algorithmic oppression). Critically deploying the concept of culture and the tools of ethnography to understand these emergent formations, this course will pay particular attention to difference and power while situating "the digital" in international context.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Against the swirling backdrop of political discourses about women in the Islamic world, this course will engage with feminist and postcolonial debates through literary works by Muslim women writers. The course will begin with an exploration of key debates about women's agency and freedom, the Islamic headscarf, and Qur'anic hermeneutics. With this in mind, we will turn to the fine details of literature and poetry by Muslim women. How do these authors constitute their worlds? How are gendered subjectivities constructed? And how do the gender politics of literary texts relate to the broader political and historical contexts from which they emerge? Themes will include an introduction to Muslim poetesses and Arabic poetic genres, the rise of the novel in the Arabic speaking world, and Muslim women's literary production outside of the Middle East: from Senegal to South Asia, and beyond.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When communication takes place across language barriers, it raises fundamental questions about meaning, style, power relationships, and traditions. This course treats literary translation as a particularly complex form of cross-cultural interaction. Students will work on their own translations of prose or poetry while considering broader questions of translation, through critiques of existing translations, close comparisons of variant translations, and readings on cultural and theoretical aspects of literary translation. Prerequisite(s): Advanced proficiency in a second language.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course introduces and explores the major health problems facing developing countries, and the main approaches to remediation. The course considers the social determinants of health, and the need for public health programs to address the root causes of health inequities as well as illness itself. Focus is at the country, international-organization, and donor levels. Attention will be given to major indicators, recent trends, policies, and metrics for monitoring progress. A case study, such as international tuberculosis control, will be used as an applied analysis.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces and explores the major health problems facing developing countries, and the main approaches to remediation. The course considers the social determinants of health, and the need for public health programs to address the root causes of health inequities as well as illness itself. Focus is at the country, international-organization, and donor levels. Attention will be given to major indicators, recent trends, policies, and metrics for monitoring progress. A case study, such as international tuberculosis control, will be used as an applied analysis.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores ethnic nationalism's causes and consequences in Eastern Europe. Drawing on several disciplines, we begin by examining the core concepts and theories in the contemporary study of nationalism. We then explore both the historical roots of Eastern European nationalisms, and their implications for democracy, minority inclusion, regional stability, and European integration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Food has been a global issue for over half a millennium. The intercontinental movement of potatoes, sugar, rice, tobacco and more has shaped populations, economies, empires, and environments, while food today inflects the worldwide experience of nationality, ethnicity, religion, health, gender, race, class, culture, rights, and indeed life. Thus this course explores global food from many disciplinary, geographical, and thematic perspectives. We will also interact with local food institutions, address in a limited way our own food practices, and cook and eat a bit too.Al

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since its “discovery” by Europeans in the 15th century, America has occupied a uniquely ambivalent place in the imagination of Europeans: as a window onto its own future, and as its backward and uncouth child; as a vindicator of human dignity, and as a warning example of democracy’s worst outgrowths. In this new course, we will trace the “New World” in the geographical, sociological, politological, literary, and cinematic imagination of Europe since the advent of European colonization. The focus will be on the unique transnational entanglements that have joined Europe to its uncannily similar other since the early modern era and continue to do so today. Discussion topics include: “first contact”; mapping the new continent; cannibalism and the Eucharist; premodern anticolonialism; romanticism’s love/hate relationship to the US; democracy and the tyranny of the majority; European antiracism and its hypocrisies; “Indianthusiasm” and the politics of cultural appropriation; critical theory moves to California or “Frankfurt Goes L.A.”; European émigrés’ role in the US denazification program; re-education movies in post-war Germany; Kafka’s "America" in text and film; current perceptions of fascism rising in the US. Readings by Hans Staden, Michel de Montaigne, J.G. Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, G.F.W. Hegel, W. v. Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Erik Erikson, T.W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka; films by Leslie Fenton, Jacques Tourneur, J.-M. Straub and D. Huillet. Weekly reading responses, participation in a group presentation, two short papers, one 10-page final project. Counts as elective for the Critical Theory Concentration.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In a notable turn around, a significant number of African societies, in recent years, have experienced both economic growth and renewal of the spirit of women and men acting as citizens. These are commendable achievements. Yet, old quotidian urgencies such as precarious personal safety, hunger, poor health, and political disorder are still prevalent. This is the dialectic of development. This course explores these contradictions. Most of the attention will be given to the concepts of power, politics, and development in contemporary Africa. The course concludes with each student submitting a research paper on a specific problem (e.g. environment, economic, social, cultural, political) confronting one country of the student's choice. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores the rapidly evolving field of transitional justice, examining how and why regimes respond to wide-scale past human rights abuses. Drawing on examples worldwide, it asks why states choose particular strategies and examines a variety of goals (truth, justice, reconciliation, democracy-building), approaches (trials, truth commissions, file access, memorialization, reparation, rewriting histories), actors (state, civil society, religious institutions), experiences, results, and controversies. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Leadership is among the deepest features of associational life, pervading every profession and institution, especially in the age of complex global change. Thus this seminar explores leadership. We begin with the relationship between structure and agency, and then focus on vision and invention, integrity and legitimacy, flexibility and decisiveness. Readings draw from Western, Islamic, and Indian sources. The main paper will focus on a major individual from any century or locale, chosen by the student. Prerequisite(s): Open to all but first year students.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

For more than a century, many fine minds - St. Lucian poets, Russian linguists, Mexican mystics, German forest historians, American sociologists, Bengali novelists, and Macalester International Studies students among them - have been drawn to thinking on a world scale. This senior seminar begins by reading some of them at essay length, then tackles current world-scale books the instructor himself has not yet read. Finally we generate some world-scale writing of our own. Open to all geographies and disciplinary specialties. Corequisite(s): Senior standing or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials