FALL 2023
L61 FYP 116 AMPERSAND: Geographies of Globalization & Development
This course provides an overview to the geographies of globalization and development in the world today. We begin by engaging with a variety of theoretical perspectives, definitions, and debates in order to establish the foundations upon which students can conceptualize and understand existing patterns of inequality, social injustice and environmental conflicts. In order to further highlight the different ways in which development and globalization interventions are experienced and contested, in the second half of the course we will focus our considerations towards specific contemporary issues at the forefront of globalization and development debates, including migration and refugees, urbanization, sustainable development, tourism, and alter-globalization social movements. This course is restricted to first-year students in the Global Citizenship Program.
L61 FYP 1503 AMPERSAND: Workshop for the Global Citizenship Program
This yearlong workshop, which is restricted to and required of participants in the Global Citizenship Program (GCP), is a companion to the core GCP fall course. The first semester of the workshop asks students to reflect critically on their own relationship to the concept of Global Citizenship. Through popular education and creative-based methods, students will explore their situated knowledges, worldviews, positionalities, and biases. The course engages with social, environmental, and epistemic justice themes through a decolonizing lens to question and reimagine how to embody critical global citizenship. By the end of the workshop, students will have tools to support their analysis and intentional engagement with the global-local community.
Companion Course: You are strongly encouraged to enroll in a foreign language at your level of proficiency.
SPRING 2024
L61 FYP 1133 AMPERSAND: Legacies of the Silk Road
Stretching from China to Europe, the Silk Road looms large in contemporary imagination, as visions of caravans, monks, and scholars still animate the deeper reaches of our minds. But what was the Silk Road, and how did it turn from a “road” that connected diverse cultures and civilizations to one that is dominated by geopolitical and national interests? This course investigates the foundations of political and religious identities across Central Eurasia from the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan to the internment camps in Xinjiang, to self-immolation protests in Tibet. Through a diverse array of religious texts, literary works, museum pieces, and state documents, this course invites students to examine the historical roots of present-day conflicts by rethinking the Silk Road. Throughout the course, we will explore how environmental conditions have shaped the rise and fall of civilizations, how technologies, people, and diseases have traveled across Eurasia, and how imperialism, capitalism, and globalization fundamentally transformed the historical landscape of the region. Ultimately, we will discuss whether the “Silk Road” may still offer us a critical framework to understand global connectivity in our current day when borders are becoming more rigid than ever. This course is restricted to first-year students in the Global Citizenship Program.
L61 FYP 1504 AMPERSAND: Workshop for the Global Citizenship Program
This workshop, which is restricted to and required of participants in the Global Citizenship Program, is a continuation of the Fall L61 FYP 1503 workshop. The spring Global Citizenship Workshop is praxis-oriented and asks students to apply and further reflect on the concepts learned during the Fall. Students are required to volunteer in the community for at least 10 hours per month. Each workshop session will provide a space for collective sharing about our experiences in the community and offer tools for meaningful engagement, social change, community building, and collective care. Towards to end of this journey, students will have gained important frameworks to understand the global and its relationship to our local realities, meaningful life experiences collaborating across differences, and powerful tools for future community engagement. An optional trip at the end of the semester, after exams, will provide further opportunities for hands-on learning and interaction with organizations and people involved in the themes of the course.
Companion Course: You are strongly encouraged to enroll in a foreign language at your level of proficiency.
