Global Studies Course Listing
Spring 2008

Global Studies does not currently offer a degree program for undergraduates or graduates. However, a wide range of courses are available in disciplines across campus for students interested in studying these issues. The courses below are being taught by Global Studies faculty.

In addition, some courses taught by Global Studies faculty can be found by linking to the course listings of related departments and programs.

Courses are added to this list as they are sent to us by faculty.
Please check back regularly.

Ability, Disability, and Normalcy in Transcultural Perspective
Instructor: Bernadette Baker
Curriculum and Instruction 975; 3 cr; call number: 71819
Class meets: T 10 am - 12.30 pm
There is no discussion section.

This course takes as its starting point that not all societies have separate words for human, mind, body, disability, and ability. This phenomenon suggests enormous cosmological differences on a global scale as well as the specificity and provincialism of the West in terms of contemporary onto-epistemological distinctions. We will examine four ‘home’ areas from which interdisciplinary, transcultural, and comparative scholarship has emerged around such issues: historical, anthropological, critical legal theory and policy, and sociological and literary criticism perspectives. This includes an interrogation of how such disciplines could even form. Students should gain an understanding of the differences between such approaches and the implications for their own writing.

Agroforestry
Instructor: Peter Bloch
Forest Ecology 430 section 1; 3 cr; call number: 73045
Class meets: TR 2:25 - 3:40 pm
There is no discussion section.

Agroforestry is a land use practice that involves the combination of trees or other woody perennials in agriculture to benefit from the resultant ecological and economic interactions. This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the concepts and practices and institutions that provide the basis for agroforestry. Agroforestry is a relatively recent ‘discovery’ in sustainable development circles, yet some agroforestry techniques are among the first forms of agriculture devised by humans. The course includes: An introduction to agroforestry: the nature of agroforestry, the creed and its critics, and an overview of agroecological systems. The science of agroforestry: biophysical aspects of agroforestry, including plant productivity, light and water, soils and nutrients, and genetic resources. Social and economic dimensions of agroforestry: sociocultural, political, and legal issues affecting agroforestry adoption and sustainability, economic incentives and profitability. The practice of agroforestry: agroforestry as practiced in the humid tropics, in temperate zones and in silvo-pastoral systems, and agroforestry's economic and environmental impacts.

Carnival Arts of the African Diaspora
Instructor: Henry Drewal
Art History 579 section 1; 3 cr; call number: 72197
Class meets: T 4:00 - 6:00 pm
There is no discussion section.

African Diaspora art history is the story of resistance, subversion, accommodation, and transformation. This course explores the arts of Carnival, a specific pre-Lenten Christian festival that has served as a vehicle for the agency of African peoples and their descendants in the Americas. We will consider how and why African diasporic peoples have shaped and been shaped by historical factors and cultural values (social, political, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic) in the face of hegemonic forces that attempted to suppress or eradicate them. The specific sites will include: New Orleans, Panama, Trinidad, Brazil, and the Caribbean disapora communities of Toronto and Brooklyn, NY.

Communities, Homelands, Exiles
Instructor: Theresa M. Kelley
English 563 section 01; 3 cr; call number: 71093
Class meets: TR 1:00 - 2:15 pm
There is no discussion section.

This course investigates what happens when writers for a variety of reasons-- personal, political, cultural-- find themselves outside as well as inside communities, longing for home or creating new homelands. Amitav Ghosh, an Indian novelist and anthropologist, whose In an Antique Land we will read, puts it this way: Ain the geography of human history no culture is an island. This is so, Ghosh explains, because cultures, including island cultures, are enmeshed with their neighbors and others in a complex, always shifting, network of differences. These claims are especially apt for modern global cultures, both those which conquered and those which were at one time conquered. For in the ebb and flow of colonial conquest, rule, and liberation, all the cultures involved have found their identities recast in ways that convey the impact of other cultures. One aim of this seminar is to reflect on how these ideas about culture and cultural identity work in contrast to a classic view of culture as a self-contained, coherent whole. The vehicle for this reflection is rhetorical: that is, our focus will be how words and images rely on devices of narrative, position and figurality to mark place, rootedness, displacement, relocation, violence, sexuality, trauma, race, and hybrid identities and cultures. The focus of the readings and discussion will be literary and visual texts, augmented by historical or cultural materials.

Contemporary Francophone Issues in Government, Organizations, and Enterprise
Instructor: Janet H. Caulkins
French and International Business 314 section 001; 3 cr; call number: 58527-58528
Class meets: TR 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
There is an optional discussion section.

Interdisciplinary course, conducted in French, for undergrads and grads with a passion for French, who wish to combine a global orientation with personal goals for study, field-work, or internships in one of the French-speaking regions of the world: Europe, Africa, Canada, the Caribbean or Asia. Fr/IB 314 is one of three student-centered courses which focus on a range of issues in government, organizations, and enterprise in the Francophone world and include in-depth studies of cultural and professional relations between Francophone Africa, France, the European Union, the United States, and Asia. Fr/IB 314 has proven to be a vibrant course in which students link their analysis, learning, and research of contemporary professional Francophone cultures to current issues of global significance in their other areas of specialization or major interest. Opportunity to work with the professor on individual research projects in areas of special interest to individual students. A 4th credit is optional.

Genres of Western Religious Writing
Instructor: Lee Palmer Wandel
Religious Studies 234 section 001; 3 cr; call number: 71025-71028, 73426, 73429
Class meets: TR 9:30 - 10:45 am
There is a required discussion section.

Writing intensive course. The lectures introduce students to the three major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: their sacred texts, histories, rituals, and cultures. Students explore the different genres of each of these traditions, beginning with the Torah, Bible, and Qur'an, and including the Mishnah, Hadith, psalms, liturgy, and prayer. P: Successful completion of or exemption from Com A. Open to Fr.

Global Physical Environments
Instructors: Jack Williams, Jim Knox
Geography 120 section 001; 3 cr; call number: 56745 or 56746
Class meets: MW 8:50 - 9:40 am
There is a required discussion section.

Global distribution and processes of climate, weather, ecosystems, landforms, and soils, emphasizing interrelationships. Lec 001 meets MW 8:50-9:40 am, Lec 002 meets MW 11:00-11:50 am.

Introduction to Human Geography
Lecturer
Geography 101 section 001; 3 cr; call number: 56735-44; 61543-4; 63977-8
Class meets: TR 9:55 - 10:45 am
There is a required discussion section.

This newly redesigned introduction to human geography is structured to acquaint students with the recent global patterns and processes that have come to be known as globalization through the use of a human geographic perspective. To do this, the course systematically explores globalization through the use of a series of human geographic ‘lenses’, including: cultural geography, population geography, economic geography, urban geography and political geography/geopolitics. Within each of these sub-fields of human geography, the course focuses on the current patterns and processes of global change, the geographic variability of these global patterns and processes, and on the ways in which changes at the global scale are affecting, and in turn are affected by, local and regional events and conditions.

Introduction to Mass Communication
Instructor: Greg Downey
Journalism & Mass Communication 201 section 001; 4 cr; call number: 56957; 58273-84; 59151; 58285-91
Class meets: MWF 9:55 - 10:45 am
There is a required discussion section.

An introduction to mass communication in political, economic, social, technological, and global context. We explore the intertwined functions of entertainment, strategic communication (advertising, public relations, political communication), and journalism as they enable and adapt to changing processes of technological innovation, political restructuring, cultural diversity, and economic globalization. Prerequisite to applying to major in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. This is a Comm-B writing-intensive course.

Memory Discourses and Postwar German Cinema
Instructor: Marc Silberman
German, French, History, Political Science, Sociology 804 section 001; 3 cr; call number: 58653
Class meets: W 3:30 - 5:30
There is no discussion section.

This seminar investigates critical theories and cinematic practices of how experience becomes memory. During the past 15 years new forms of memory work have entered the public sphere, perhaps most strikingly in the visual media. Accompanying these cultural practices, new discourses have emerged that increasingly dominate the field of cultural studies: reflections on how memory shapes mentalities, identities, symbols, texts, and media. While this social and critical memory boom has evolved with strong transnational and interdisciplinary dimensions, the seminar’s focus will be primarily on Germany, which offers a case study not only of extreme “experience” but also arguably of a protracted and rich trajectory of “coming to terms with the past,” with instructive blindspots, repressions, repetitions, and illusions. The first goal of the seminar will be to review major sources of current memory discourses such as “mémoire collective” (Maurice Halbwachs), “Bildgedächtnis” (Aby Warburg), “lieux de mémoire” (Pierre Nora), and “kulturelles Gedächtnis” (Jan and Aleida Assmann). The second goal will be to define methodological implications of the new memory discourses for issues of constructing the past, especially in the context of Holocaust studies, which in the Anglo-American academe have focused on the limits of representation (Friedländer), trauma (Dominick LaCapra), and witnessing (James E. Young). The third goal will shift attention to postwar German cinema, which provides a corpus of “textual” material to examine paradigmatically how memory of the “difficult German past” has been constructed at specific historical junctures, by different generations, and under opposed socio-political regimes (East vs. West Germany). As a popular medium the cinema has been at the center of public expectations and demands for explanations and entertainment, for authenticity and emotions, for truth and and illusions. At the same time its stories and images constitute the very stuff of collective memory: stories and images of victims and perpetrators, of loss and reconciliation, of shame and resistance. Seminar participation includes preparation of the assigned readings and screening of films (on DVD or VHS after the third weekly session). Each participant will prepare a 20-25 minute class presentation and write a substantial research paper. The course will be conducted in English, but reading and listening comprehension of German for some of the texts and films will be necessary. Students with adequate linguistic and cultural background are encouraged to develop individual projects beyond the German cinema, e.g., French approaches to the experience of collaboration, Spanisch approaches to the Civil War and Franco, Italian approaches to fascism and Mussolini, post-Soviet approaches to Stalinism, etc.

Race Issues in Music Teaching
Instructor: Deborah Bradley
Curriculum and Instruction 945 section 001; 3 cr; call number: 71815
Class meets: M 4:30 - 7:05 pm
There is no discussion section.

This course will analyze how racially coded cultural meanings are produced, interpreted, legitimated, and/or rejected in educational settings, including but not limited to schools. Critical perspectives from postcolonialism, feminism, and poststructuralism will be explored to consider how race has been investigated and taken up in/through sociology, cultural studies, and studies of education and schooling, analyzed through a lens of anti-racism pedagogy and practice. This course attempts to think about the relation or lack thereof between globalization, transnationality, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalisms as these discourses, moments, and movements collide in contemporary critical and democratic discourses, particularly as they are interpreted (or not) within current discourses of music and music education.

Responding to Global Warming
Instructor: James Pawley
Zoology 400 section 4; 3 cr; call number: 73801
Class meets: TR 9:30 - 10:45 am
There is no discussion section.

Students will read, and write written comments on, 3 books related to climate change, energy and societal response. They will hear a large number of (>10) of invited lectures given by on-campus and off-campus experts on the topics covered. Students will work in groups of 4 to develop responses to the lectures using a WIKI page. Personal WIKI pages will be used to write their "Most Interesting Sentence" from each reading assignment along with a rationale for the choice. Groups will also develop 2 WIKI projects: one related to media coverage of a current enviro topic and a second in which they each "do something" in response to the present predicament.

Understanding Human Rights
Instructor: Sharon Hutchinson and Florence Chenoweth
Anthropology 940 section 2; 3 cr; call number: 72456
Class meets: F 1:30 - 4:00 pm
There is no discussion section.

Since the end of the Second World War, the idea of human rights has become a universal political ideology--almost a kind of worldwide secular religion. Today, the principles enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have become the yardsticks by which many people measure "human progress." But this has not resulted in dramatic declines in either the frequency or viciousness of human rights abuses across much of the globe. Militarized violence, political and economic oppression, sectarian strife, disease and grinding poverty continue to cripple the lives of ever-growing numbers of people in the world today. In this seminar, we will confront this disheartening reality head on. Together we will be developing cross-disciplinary models and understandings of why this chasm between the legal discourse and effective practice of human rights remains so broad. We will be also be developing a comprehensive and integrated understanding of human rights, which extends to basic social, economic, cultural and collective rights as well as civil and political rights. This graduate seminar is designed to speak to graduate students across multiple disciplines (Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, History, Political Science, Agricultural Economics, Journalism & Mass Communication, etc).

Women, Social Institutions and Social Change
Instructor: Christina Ewig
Women's Studies 102 section 1; 3 cr; call number: 57905-10; 63565-6
Class meets: MW 8:50 - 9:40 am
There is a required discussion section.

This is an introduction to women’s studies course with a global perspective. Students will be asked to think critically about the power relations that affect the lives of diverse women in the US – diverse in terms of race, class, ability, sexuality and other markers of power – AND will be asked to contemplate the positions of diverse women from around the world. The class focuses on gender and race as key social institutions which shape people’s lives around the world. It also focuses on social change – in particular, the roles of women in inspiring social change. In this course we explore a broad range of issues in historical and contemporary global gender relations, divided into six major themes. The course begins in Part I by examining social constructions – of knowledge, gender, sex, race and sexuality. Part II focuses on citizenship: how citizenship is gendered and racialized, historically and today. We will critically consider US “second wave” feminism and the motivations behind US identity movements such as Black feminist, Asian feminist, Latina and Queer politics as modes of contesting traditional notions of citizenship. These US-based movements will be compared and contrasted to feminist and queer organizing in other countries. We will also look at how states shape gendered and racialized citizenship status. Part III looks at how medicine and human reproduction are terrains in which gender, race and class relations are invoked and reproduced in different global contexts and different historical periods. Part IV examines representations of race and gender in consumer culture, and cultural constructions of beauty in global perspective. In Part V we will use our new found tools for understanding representations of women to examine the specific representations of race and gender in the post 9-11-01 period, the war on terror, and the war in Iraq. Finally, in Part VI we will explore the various ways that women around the world are affected by and imbricated in globalization through a gendered analysis of global economic and social policy, migration, and the structure of the new global economy.

Global Studies 301 Ingraham Hall 1155 Observatory Drive University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison WI 53706 Ph 608.265.2631 Fx 608.265.2633 info@global.wisc.edu