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GLST 205: Building Blocks of Global Studies: Overview of Approaches, Concepts, and Issues (Rev. C2) Report a Broken Link

The study of transnational processes or globalization is essentially interdisciplinary, engaging insights from fields such as sociology, human geography, political science, cultural studies, and many more. This is necessary to increase the “depth” and “breadth” of understanding of the complex concept of globalization, which is used as a description, as a process, and as an ideology. This course begins with a broad overview of this multi-layered field and an introduction to the tools needed for understanding global issues. It also examines the core issues of Global Studies and the agents of change in our world, which are being continually shaped by complex layers of interactions. Finally, the course considers the various movements resisting global economic policies and wraps up with a critical retrospective on the state of our world.

Unit I: What Is Global Studies?

Required Readings and Media
Adichie, C. N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story. TED Talk.
Mitchell, T. (2002). Can the mosquito speak? Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (pp. 19–27). Berkeley: University of California Press
Nederveen Pieterse, J (2013). What is global studies? Globalizations, 10(4), 499–514.
Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 2(1), 20–34.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Biermann, F. et al. (2012). Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving earth system governance. Policy Forum 335 (6074), 1306–1307.
Juergensmeyer, M. (2013). What is global studies? Globalizations, 10(6), 765–769.
Scheuerman, W. (2018). Globalization. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
St. John, M. (2016). Colonization road. CBC Firsthand.

Related article: Fiddler, W. (2022, May 10). Municipalities grapple with renaming Colonization Roads to further Indigenous reconciliation and awareness. The Globe and Mail.
Steger, M. B. (2013). It’s about globalization, after all: Four framings of global studies. A response to Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s “What is Global Studies?” Globalizations, 10(6), 771–777. 

Unit II: Some Approaches and Tools of Analysis for Examining Globalization

Required Readings and Media
Darian-Smith, E., & McCarty, P. C. (2017). Chapter 3: A global theoretical framework. The global turn: Theories, research designs and methods for global studies (pp. 55–75). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Estes, N. (2019, November 19). They took our footprint out of the ground: An interview with LaDonna Bravebull Allard. Public Seminar.
Lightfoot, S. (2016). Indigenous politics as global change. Global Indigenous politics: A subtle revolution. New York: Routledge.
Parekh, S., & Wilcox, S. (2014). Feminist perspectives on globalization. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Chang, H. J. (2014, November 5). ECONOMICS: Theories and facts. YouTube.
Klein, N. (2019). Introduction: We are the wildfire. On fire: The burning case for a Green New Deal. Toronto: Knopf.
Miller, A. (2008, March). How the news distorts our worldview. TED Talk.
Parashar, S., Tickner, J. A., & Peterson, V. S. (2018). Introduction. Revisiting gendered states: Feminist imaginings of the state in international relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

          Note: This link will download the entire eBook. The article begins on page 125.
Robinson, W. I. (2007). Theories of globalization. In George Ritzer (Ed.), Blackwell companion to globalization (pp. 125–143). New York: Blackwell.
Steger, M., & Wahlrab, A. (2017). Chapter 3: The second pillar of global studies: Transdisciplinarity. What is global studies? Theory and practice. Routledge.

Unit III: Actors, Institutions, and Ideologies in the Global Era

Required Readings and Media
Aikau, H. K., & Corntassel, J. (2014). Chapter 14: Forces of mobility and mobilization: Indigenous peoples confront globalization. In The Sage Handbook of Globalization. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Barboza, D. (2016, December 29). How China built “iPhone City” with billions in perks for Apple’s partners. The New York Times.
Prashad, V. (2014). Introduction. The poorer nations: A possible history of the Global South. New York: Verso.
Steger, M. (2017). Chapter 7: Ideologies of globalization: Market globalism, justice globalism, religious globalisms. Globalization: A very short introduction (4th Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Curtis, A. (2011). Love and power. All watched over by machines of love and grace. BBC Episode 1.
E-International Relations Online Resources
Haslam, P. (2017). Private enterprise and development. In Paul Haslam, Jessica Schafer and Pierre Beaudet (eds.) Introduction to international development: Approaches, actors, issues, and practice (3nd Ed.). Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Prashad, V. (2014). BRICS report. New York: RLS.
Shephard, A. (2018). Amazon scammed America’s hurting cities. New Republic.
Weiss, L. (2005). The state-augmenting effects of globalisation. New political economy, 10(3), 345–353.

Unit IV: Why Does History Matter in Understanding Contemporary Globalization?

Required Readings and Media
OER Project. (2014, May 20). How did the world become interconnected? | Big History Project. YouTube
Mann, C. C. (2002, March). Technology: 1491. The Atlantic.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2012) "Periodizing Globalization: Histories of Globalization," New Global Studies, 6(2).
Pomeranz, K., & S. Topik. (2014). The making of market conventions. The world that trade created: Society, culture and the world economy, 1400 to the present (pp. 3–48). New York: Routledge.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Crash Course. (2017, July 17). Why early globalization matters. YouTube.
Hunt, T. & Lipo, C. (2009). Ecological catastrophe, collapse, and the myth of “ecocide” on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In P. A. McAnany, & N. Yoffee (Eds.), Questioning collapse: human resilience, ecological vulnerability, and the aftermath of empire (pp. 21–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stearns, P. N. (2017). Introduction. Globalization in world history (pp. 1–12). New York: Routledge.  
Steger, M. (2017). Chapter 2: Globalization in history: Is globalization a new phenomenon? Globalization: A very short introduction (4th Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McAnany, P. A., & Yoffee, N. (2009). Ecological catastrophe, collapse, and the myth of “ecocide” on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Questioning collapse: human resilience, ecological vulnerability, and the aftermath of empire (pp. 1–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Unit V: Where Are We: Local and Global Are Connected (Cultures, Communication Commodities, and Climate)

Required Readings and Media
Betts, A. (2016, June) Why Brexit happened and what to do next? TED Talk.
Nixon, R. (2011). Introduction. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (pp. 1–44). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
NPR. (2013). Planet money makes a t-shirt: The world behind a simple shirt, in five chapters. www.npr.org. [Video]
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2015). Chapter 3: Globalization and culture: Three paradigms. Globalization and culture: Global melange (pp. 45–59). Lanham, ML: Rowman and Littlefield.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Halpern, S. (2018, October 18). Mind games. New Republic.
Inequality.org. (2019). Global inequality.
Roudometof, V. (2016) Theorizing glocalization: Three interpretations. European journal of social theory, 19(3), 391–408.
WID. World. (2018, July 13). World inequality report 2018. YouTube.
Zaman, S., Selim, N., & Joarder, T. (2013). McDonaldization without a McDonald's. Food, culture & society, 16(4), 551–568.

Unit VI: Where Are We Headed: Increasing Inequality and Entrenched Ideologies (Austerity, Animosity, Anthropocene, Automation) / (Migration, Inequality, Anthropocene, Cybertariat)

Required Readings and Media
Hickel, J. (2016). Global inequality may be much worse than we think. The Guardian.
CBC Radio. (2018). Platform capitalism, digital technology and the future of work. www.cbc.ca.
IPCC. (2018). Global warming of 1.5 °C (special report). www.ipcc.ch.
Jones, R. (2016). Introduction. Violent borders: Refugees and the right to move. New York: Verso.
Jones, R. (2016). Chapter 3. Violent borders: Refugees and the right to move. New York: Verso.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Blyth, M. (2010). Mark Blyth on Austerity. Brown University. YouTube.
Bor, J., Cohen, G. H., & Galea, S. (2017). Population health in an era of rising income inequality: USA, 1980–2015. The Lancet, 389(10077), 1475–1490.
Graham, M., Hjorth, I., & Lehdonvirta, V. (2017). Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. Transfer: European review of labour and research, 23(2), 135–162.
Hickel, J. (2015). Five reasons to think twice about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. LSE Centre for Africa Blog.
De Pencier, N., Burtynsky, E., & Baichwal, J. (2018). The Anthropocene Project. www.theanthopocene.org. (Documentary and interactive features including AGO (2018): Into the Anthropocene: Our impact on Earth.)

          Note: Listen to this link as you browse the content from the Anthropocene Project:

          https://soundcloud.com/agotoronto/sets/into-the-anthropocene
Saksena, S., Fox, J., Epprecht, M., Tran, C. C., Nong, D. H., Spencer, J. H., . . . & Wilcox, B. A. (2015). Evidence for the convergence model: The emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) in Vietnam. PLoS One, 10(9), e0138138.
Vince, G. (2014). Introduction and Chapter 1: Atmosphere. Adventures in the Anthropocene. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed.

Unit VII: Alternative Global Future(s): Transforming Worldviews

Required Readings and Media
Estes, N. (2019, November 19). They took our footprint out of the ground: An interview with LaDonna Bravebull Allard. Public Seminar.
Finkel, A. (2019). Introduction. Compassion: A global history of social policy. London, UK: MacMillan and Red Globe.
Finkel, A. (2019). Conclusion. Compassion: A global history of social policy. London, UK: MacMillan and Red Globe.
Hall, T. D. & Fenelon, J. V. (2009). Chapter 2: Indigenous global struggles: Models of revitalization and resistance. In Indigenous peoples and globalization: Resistance and revitalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
Latour, B. (2020, March 20). What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model? (S. Muecke, Trans.).
Malm, A. (2015). The Anthropocene myth. Jacobin.
Supplementary Readings and Media
Coulthard, G. (2016). Conclusion. Red skin, white masks (pp. 151–179). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Democracy Now. (2020, July). “A dream that comes true”: Standing Rock elder hails order to shut down DAPL after years of protest. Democracy Now.

Harari, Y. N. (2014; 2016). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind or Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. (Introductions and/or conclusions).

          Note: These titles must be accessed from a library.
Harari, Y. N. (2017). Chapter 1: The new human agenda. Homo Deus (pp. 6–59). New York: Harper Collins.
Klein, N. (2017). Chapter 13: A Time to Leap: Because Small Steps Won't Cut It. No is not enough. Toronto: Knopf.
Kofas, J. (2017). Neoliberalism and the social contract: A historical perspective. Cesran
Ladner, K. & Dick, C. (2008). Out of the fires of hell: Globalization as a solution to globalization: An Indigenist perspective. Canadian journal of law and society, 23(1/2), 63–91.