Courses
Approved Courses ArchivE
International Studies Core Courses
Courses Taught by the IS Senior Lecturer 2011-2012
COURSES TAUGHT BY IS PRIZE LECTURERS 2012
COURSES TAUGHT BY GUEST LECTURERS-University of Heidelberg 2012
International Studies Core Courses
23101. Comtemporary Global Issues I
23102. Contemporary Global Issues II
23101. Comtemporary Global Issues I. It is recommended that students who are majoring in IS enroll in this required introductory course in their first year. This class is the first part of a two-sequence course designed for students majoring in the International Studies. This class is a foundational overview of the global questions and puzzles of globalization in its very many dimensions. It is designed for the International Studies majors as well as others with interests in international studies and academic curiosity about the current contemporary order. It is the first part of a two-sequence course. The class proceeds thematically, stringing together many themes (environment, global health, humanitarian intervention, popular culture, governance) that usually comprise the domain of “global” affairs, events, items, organizations, trends, and phenomena. The class also unfolds theoretically and empirically, rooting theoretical propositions in some concrete historical, geographic, and cultural locations. Investigation of global entails attention to local, as well as to some not so easy to locate sites: of flow, of trans- and international, of regional. Thus, a parallel inquiry of the class will be: how do we study global, how do we grasp the local, and what are the means of observing, assessing, qualifying and quantifying all intermediate spaces and categories that make up the contemporary life? At the heart of our class exploration is existence under the global condition, and we will be wondering about human life in the light of contemporary challenges and opportunities: new technologies and diseases, global imagination and mass consumption, nation-states and emergencies that transcend borders, and enduring histories.
23102. Contemporary Global Issues II. It is recommended that students who are majoring in IS enroll in this required introductory course in their second year. This class is the second part of a two-sequence course designed for students majoring in the International Studies with two objectives in mind. First, in the vein of Introduction to Contemporary Global Issues-I (CGI-I), the class continues to explore concepts, processes, and phenomena that constitute ‘globalness’, giving them historical depth and critical angle. Unlike CGI-I, however, this class reads closely three books while examining three broad fields of inquiry—science/knowledge/technology; economy; and politics—and three overlapping disciplinary approaches: anthropology, sociology, and history. Second, the class relies on the assigned texts as excellent examples of scholarship with which to elucidate the processes and challenges of academic research. We will learn, by means of these examples, how to design an academic research project. The second objective of the class, then, will be to produce a research proposal, developing in the process a better understanding of what scholarly research entails and what preliminary work needs to be done in order for a research project to proceed. The drafting of the research proposal will follow a set of the very same guidelines (enclosed) that will structure the writing of your BA research proposal (due to the IS at the beginning of the Spring Quarter of your Third Year) and your BA thesis. More generally, however, you can rely on the research framework introduced here to guide any other research endeavor, undertaken in the context of another class, a field research, or a grant proposal. Winter. Students must complete 23101 and 23102 prior to the year in which they graduate.
29700. Reading and Research. PQ: Consent of instructor and program director. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course form. As part of this process students must specify in which of the three tracks (International Political Economy, Transnational Processes, or Area and Civilization Studies) they would like the course to count. This is a reading and research course for independent study not related to BA research or BA paper preparation. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
29800. B.A. Thesis (Autumn Seminar). Required of fourth-year IS majors. This weekly seminar, taught by graduate student preceptors in consultation with faculty readers, is designed to aid students in their thesis research. Students are exposed to different conceptual frameworks and research strategies. Students must have approved topic proposals and faculty readers to participate in the seminar. Autumn.
29801. B.A. Thesis (Winter Seminar). PQ: INST 29800. Required of fourth-year IS majors. Continuation of INST 29800. This weekly seminar, taught by graduate student preceptors in consultation with faculty readers, offers students continued B.A. research and writing support. Students present drafts of their work and critique the work of their peers. Winter.
29900. B.A. Thesis (Reading and Research). PQ: Consent of instructor and program director. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course form. This is a reading and research course for independent study related to B.A. research and B.A. thesis preparation. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
Courses Taught by the IS Senior Lecturer 2011-2012
27501. Global Capital, Local Bodies: Speculative, Spectral, and, Scientific Economies
28510. NGOs and Humanitarian Subjects: Politics of Humanitarian Intervention
28525. Living With Debt: A Comparative Perspective
27401. Magic in the Market (= ANTH 25115). This class explores cross-cultural interplay between magic, broadly speaking, and the market. Market in capitalism has regularly been attributed spectral, mystical, fantastic, uncanny, and effervescent properties while the globalized faith in the markets has produced an array of highly efficacious enchantments. The class begins by rereading classic texts on magic in the context of ritualized exchange and then proceeds to examine some thoroughly modern and postmodern examples of the occult. Reading on the occult economies, economistic optimism of the development industry, promissory bioscientific enterprises, the spirits of financial and venture capital, and the emergent forms of new-age healing and biomedical innovation, the course will interrogate political and economic potentials of the continued relevance of magic in the domain of social practice and lived experience.
27501. Global Capital, Local Bodies: Speculative, Spectral, and, Scientific Economies (=ANTH 25102). THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE IN WINTER 2012. The project of this class is to closely examine the relationship between global capital and local bodies, or put differently to look at the implications of economic forms for particular people’s experience and collective forms of existence. The class will read divergently critical theories of capitalism and some historically-situated field materials, focusing on interplays between speculative, scientific, and spectral qualities of economic practice. We will examine some local sites of multinational capital investment, production, and circulation: from factory floors to marketplaces, from transnational scientific research to pharmaceutical marketing. In order to better grasp local bodies, the class will pay special attention to biomedical, genomic, and pharmaceutical industries that emerged as a major locus of global capital investment, as well as read for the existential, bodily, and political complaints about shared market conditions voiced around the globe. By examining comparatively some particular health disorders, incidents, and interventions, the class will ask: How are the ways of being, feeling, and thinking determined by the abstract global power of capital? How do bodies and economies intersect? How do local bodies and subjectivities negotiate temporalities, materialities, and epistemologies associated with the speculative and spectral features of global capital? Can we grasp a shared global condition, which is capitalism, from the vantage point of some embodied local lives?
28510. NGOs and Humanitarian Subjects: Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (=ANTH25235) THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE IN WINTER 2012. The political nature of humanitarian intervention has long been scrutinized across academic disciplines. The course engages this relatively recent and expanding form of political practice by first examining the international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within a web of transnational dynamics that make up the "international community" and the field of emergency relief. Next, the class turns attention to the processes that make up "humanitarian subjects" as well as to experiences and practices of local populations that fall in and fall out of this category: displaced persons, refugees, residents of conflict and post-conflict countries, as well as local officials, activists, and militants. The project of this course is ultimately to examine the multiplicity of political forms, stakes, dispositions, and strategies surrounding the field of international emergency relief as well as to pay attention to consequences, explicit and unintened, of international NGO humanitarianism for the local and global exercise of political power. The class is grounded in case studies of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur and framed with a reading social theory for divergent and complementary notions of politics: ethnographic, post-foundational, biopolitical, affective, critical and realist.
28525. Living With Debt: A Comparative Perspective (=ANTH25110). THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE IN WINTER 2012. This class approaches debt anthropologically, as a cultural category that forms and undoes social relations, amasses and dissipates wealth, and profoundly shapes the experience of people involved in market or nonmonetary exchanges. Treating debt as a broadly economic category, the class will investigate comparatively how do people live with debt, how does indebtedness feel, and what are the economic and political implications of local borrowing-lending strategies. Because consumer and national debt seem to be a shared contemporary global predicament, the class will also critically examine historical dynamics at work in and different scales of debt economies: national, transnational, familial, and personal. The class looks at practice and experience of indebtedness inside and outside the market: from credit card debts to intimate gift exchanges, from blood sample donations to transnational migration to geopolitical relations. By broadening our definition of debt, these comparative insights aim to excavate an experience of indebtedness held in common cross-culturally as well as complicate what seems most natural about giving, owing, and owning.
COURSES TAUGHT BY IS PRIZE LECTURERS 2012
29225. Resource Extraction and the Global Economy
29235. From the Qing Empire to the Chinese Nation State: The Incorporation and Transformation of China in the World. This course is an investigation of Chinese history, as visible through certain points of interaction between China, non-China, and global patterns of historical development. It will explore the transition from Qing Empire to Chinese Nation State as a series of historical transformations and incorporations mediated by global historical developments. In doing so, the course will attempt to build out an alternative to prevailing modes of interpreting Chinese history that frame it either in terms of Western impact-Chinese response or in terms of exclusively Chinese historical dynamics. By unpacking the historically specific practices and thought that constituted the transformation from Qing Empire to Chinese Nation State and the incorporation of both into a set of global relations and dynamics, the course seeks to denaturalize the transition from empire to nation state and put it into dialog with similar developments elsewhere in the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Great Britain will feature as a key interlocutor given its prominent role in China during the last fifty years of the Qing Empire and the suitability of British imperial projects for comparison with developments in China. Through attention to how the history of Qing Empire/China aligns with global patterns of historical change, students will develop a more rigorous and historical understanding of what we today call “globalization.”
29225. Resource Extraction and the Global Economy (=ANTH25430). How does “nature” matter? And in a global economy, what is the significance of natural resources and extractive industries for human life? If energy dependency and resource depletion, environmental security or the violence of extractive sites are hardly new concerns, natural resources are currently being mined, cultivated, and extracted on an unprecedented scale to satisfy expanding economic growth and global demand. Historically, colonial and post-colonial nations have been the main providers of resources to the industrialized North, but unlike the late nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa,” contemporary politics and the ecology of natural wealth in the “global south” unsettle long-established circuits of resource flows and forcefully convoke a discussion on the place of nature in global capitalism. This course does not purport to cover the wide topical and thematic literature pertaining to environmental policy, development and community-based resource management, or ethno-ecology. While alluding to these fields, this class is designed to provide critical tools to understand processes of transnational resource extraction and commoditization of nature. Particular emphasis will be given to Africa, with an eye toward the global economy of natural resources. It draws from perspectives in political economy, anthropology and political ecology to ask: what constitutes nature and natural wealth? What is the cultural and human significance of resource extraction in capitalism?
COURSES TAUGHT BY GUEST LECTURERS-University of Heidelberg 2012
29602. Culture of War in China.
29601. Modernity for the West, Development for the Rest? History Making in Transcultural Perspective. What is ‘development’? This course explores the question of development from a transcultural perspective. We will be analyzing how the idea of development spread from the West to other parts of the world and how the meta-narratives of EuroAmerican modernity have been partially implemented within the framework of the idea of a world-wide ‘catch-up’. A central theme of the course is the contested field of ‘the modern’-- how it has been defined and by whom. One of the tasks is to understand not only how modernist or developmentalist ideologies emerge, but also how they achieve a self-evident status. From an understanding of the processes through which progress became a universal ideal, it will then be possible to understand in greater depth critiques of developmentalism.
29602. Culture of War in China. This course will examine the role of the military in China from the perspective of cultural and social history, with a focus on the modern period from 1840 to 1949. The aim is to contest the prevalent notion that the Chinese society is and always was essentially ‘a-military’ and non-violent, and neglected war and martial culture in favor of a pacifist scholarly tradition. Already in the classical period before 220 BC, military culture played an important role among scholars, officials and kings, and military writings produced during that time. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, military reforms along Western lines and a century of war influenced the Chinese perception of the military as well as the self-understanding of military elites, leading to a seminal change of military culture in China. Firstly, we will discuss the systems of conduct and self-perception of members of the military in various periods, including questions of masculinity, gender roles and alternative forms of the martial in popular culture. Secondly, we will analyze attitudes of various strata of society towards the military and civil-military relations in China. Thirdly, the course will tackle traditions of representing military events in literature, art, and the media.
Teaching Opportunities
2012- 13 IS Teaching Application Deadline: May 11, 2012. Check out "Announcements" link at left for position and application details.