Time Schedule:
Maria E Garcia
CHID 480
Seattle Campus
Examines a different subject or problem from a comparative framework with an interdisciplinary perspective. Offered: AWSp.
Class description
GLOBAL GUINEA PIGS: ANIMALS IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE. While much attention has been paid to the processes associated with the human dimension of transnationalism, much less attention has been paid to the economic, social, and cultural processes which pull and push non-human animals across national boundaries. In an effort to fill this gap, this course examines some of the multiple ways that animals have entered transnational flows through the international economy of food, international development programs, and the transnational movement around animal rights. Food politics is an important if understudied dimension of global health. The globalization of the factory farm model of production has implications for human and non-human animal lives as the epidemics of mad cow disease, avian flu, and "swine" flu have recently and dramatically demonstrated. While these diseases are often seen as separate to the "normal" workings of international political economies, this seminar will explore how they have emerged in and through the processes of industrialization and globalization. Students will also examine the implications of development programs that place traditional animals like guinea pigs and alpacas, at the center of new strategies to confront poverty in many parts of the developing world. We will engage this new development literature and ask what the cultural and economic implications of this process are for local communities who often value animals for religious and social reasons that are incommensurable with the metrics of international development. Finally, students will explore the ethical and moral debates that have emerged under the rubrics of animal rights and animal welfare. While this debate has largely been seen as a “First World" phenomenon, this course will look at how concerns for the lives of non-human animals have been expressed by local communities and activists in a global context. Taking animals as the proverbial “fish in the water," this course seeks to complicate and de-naturalize the common sense understandings that make non-human animals an all too invisible part of world politics.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
SEMINAR
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
