Sustainability

This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. This course introduces students to five pathways to thinking about global issues today: Global Conflict, Health & Environment, Culture & Identity, Wealth & Inequality, and Human Rights. We will spend three weeks focusing on each problem. Students will complete the course with a stronger sense of many of the major global issues of our time, as well as a sense of how those issues can be approached and studied from a variety of humanistic and social scientific perspectives. Students will also learn how aspects of identity, like race, sexuality, or gender, affect and are affected by global forces. Combined with GLIS 101N, this course will help prepare students for lives and careers in which they will interact with these large-scale global issues on a daily basis; it will allow students to understand how various local or national issues are affected by global ones, and to see ways of intervening in the world to address global problems.
1. Global Conflict: Why do people fight? Is violence inherent to human society? How is it possible to dream of an end to war, as creative writers of many cultures have done?
2. Health & Environment: How does climate affect human history? How have societies and individuals interacted with their environments, and how have the relations between human beings and the natural world been represented in literature and the arts? How are health issues depicted in narratives and other media, and how do health crises challenge political or cultural norms?
3. Culture & Identity: How do we come to be who we are? How are we shaped by the circumstances we grow up in? What is culture, and how do we understand cultures other than our own? What happens when people move or change cultures, or when cultures move or change people?
4. Wealth & Inequality: Why are some nations, and some people, rich, and others poor? What structural factors help explain those differences? How does the distribution of wealth factor into what counts as a good society?
5. Human Rights: What are the most fundamental properties of being human? Does everyone in a society have the same rights?