Local/Global Worlds: Place-based Invest

Even in the midst of resurging nationalism, we continue to live in an intensely interconnected world where distant protests trigger local action, local pathogens seed global pandemics, international maneuverings cause local wars, faraway wars bring migrants and refugees to one’s community, global finance reshapes cityscapes, and a mounting climate crisis creates new living conditions everywhere. While studies of “globalization” often take a birds-eye view of the impacts of global interconnectivity, this course focuses also on regions, localities, and our own communities, as we seek to make sense of how the spaces that exist all around us are implicated in, and generative of, various kinds of global flows, ranging from capital, goods, and people to ideas, cultural products, and aesthetic preferences. Our broader aim, then, is to understand how the mutual imbrication of the local and the global generates tendencies that simultaneously flatten space and accentuate disparate socio-spatial dynamics and inequalities. In turn, we will also hone methodologies for investigating the complex and uneven ways global phenomena continually reshape communities and individual lives.

This course is timely and urgent as the world confronts challenges that require coordination and collaboration at and between the local, regional, national, and global levels. This moment requires us to think locally and globally at the same time, as we endeavor to understand, define, and address global problems. To this end, students will collaborate on group research projects to develop comparative, transdisciplinary, and contextual perspectives on how global issues resonate across different geographical scales and to explore ways to address the challenges that confront the world.