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Overview of the Pilot Curriculum General Education Requirement
Current Pilot Curriculum General Requirement Course Descriptions

• Past Pilot Curriculum General Requirement Courses
• Past Faculty
  

This course fulfills the Category I General Education Requirement.

Faculty:

This course uses data from what is actually happening in the course of the semester to introduce the concepts and methods of the social sciences. It analyzes the current state of globalization and sets it in historical perspective.

We will focus on a series of questions not only about actual processes but about the growing awareness of them, and the consequences of this awareness. In answering these questions, we will distinguish between active campaigns to cover the world (e.g Christian and Muslim proselytism, opening up markets, democratization) and the unplanned diffusion of new ways of organizing trade, capital flows, tourism and the Internet.

The body of the course will deal with a series of analytical types of globalization, reviewing both the early and recent history of these processes. The overall approach will be historical and comparative, setting globalization on the larger stage of the economic, political and cultural development of various parts of the modern world.

The course is taught collaboratively by two social scientists: an anthropologist and a sociologist, offering the opportunity to compare and contrast two distinct disciplinary points of view. It seeks to develop a concept-based understanding of the various dimensions of globalization: economic, political, social, and cultural.

Topics include:

• Demographic processes (diasporas and other large scale movements of individuals and populations, for territory, trade or labor).
• Political and military processes of conquest and integration.
• Commercial and financial processes, international investment, capitalism and the corporation.
• Processes of cultural diffusion and the movement of ideas in language, religion and political systems.
• Ecological consequences of globalization.
• War and ethnopolitical conflict.
• Inequality and poverty as global issues.
• Emergence of globalization in music, sports and fashion.

At the end of the course students will understand the significance of globalization in the modern world, and be able to compare the approaches of different social sciences.


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