Time Schedule:
Genevieve E Mc Coy
BIS 303
Bothell Campus
The phenomenon of globalization has attracted the attention of many academic disciplines which often attribute novelty to trends that have in fact been around for centuries. Provides a historical perspective on current debates about globalization. Approaches may vary with instructor.
Class description
Globalization is a process that has been going since the migration of Homo Erectus out of Africa some 500,000 to a million years ago. However, it is only in the last 20 years or so that the scale and volume of global flows, that is the impact of global forces of all kinds on local life, has accelerated significantly. Globalization, or the physical expansion of the geographical domain of the global, has come about primarily through human migration, imperialism, and trade followed by processes of biological, cultural, technological, religious, and other kinds of exchange. In many ways, differences between historical and contemporary globalization are differences more of degree than of kind. Among its many effects, globalization has both positive and negative consequences: it both narrows and widens income gaps among and within nations; it intensifies and diminishes political domination; and it homogenizes and pluralizes cultural identities. In this course we will investigate several of the ways in which our world over thousands of years has been propelled by human motives to explore, prosper, and dominate, producing the "globalized" world we live in today.
Student learning goals
To give students an awareness of the growing interaction of the world’s peoples from earliest times to the present and to familiarize students with historical modes of thinking and of historical analysis.
To provide students the basis of current global and local issues involving trade and urbanization, economic and labor inequality, effects of changing technology, public health problems, imperialism and colonization, and slavery as they are rooted in the past.
To enable students to become better researchers, who can efficiently and effectively use the library’s data base resources at UWB and elsewhere in order to identify existing scholarship while producing original knowledge through data gathering and interpretation.
To provide students opportunities to become better speakers, able to communicate clearly and engagingly about complicated topics, arguments, and issues, and to work well collaboratively with other class members as fellow learners and researchers.
General method of instruction
Instruction will include brief lectures, class discussion, multi-media presentations, and Blackboard participation.
Recommended preparation
There are no prerequisites. Students who have cultivated a habit of reading the daily news and weekly magazines such as the Economist will be at an advantage.
Class assignments and grading
There will be readings for every class, two test/essays, and a research project based on some topic on globalization chosen by the student, culminating in a five-page paper.
Grades will be based on a mid-term and final essay exams, a research paper, and class or Blackboard participation.
