Futures in a Globalized World

Course goals

On completion of this course, you will:

1. Analyze and critically evaluate the key anthropological approaches to globalization and globalised conditions in contemporary world;
2. Understand the value of thinking with “the future” as anthropological lens in analysing global(ised) conditions in contemporary world;
3. Understand the relationship between theory and empirical analysis in anthropological study of globalization and the global condition;
4. Apply the key anthropological approaches to globalization to the everyday context and to your own research projects.

 

Content

The course focuses on key contemporary anthropological debates on globalization and the globalised conditions in contemporary world. By using the lens of “the future” and anthropological approaches to this notion, the course provides a deeper understanding of the process of globalisation and global(ised) conditions by providing the tools to grasp its paradoxical and contradictory effects. The course looks at how such effects play an important role in different forms of political and urban governance, and in economic, socio-cultural, political, material and environmental transformations. The course shows the value of ethnographically grounded research for understanding fields in which the global processes of disconnection and connection, dis-embedding and re-embedding, vulnerability and resilience, stasis and acceleration have been most visible: through the topics of labour, deindustrialization, infrastructures, temporality and the ways in which risks are being navigated. With this, the course explores different aspects of citizenship “from below” and focuses on the ways in which social inequalities are produced, maintained and/or challenged. In this course we are not looking for a definition of globalisation. Rather, we are looking into different aspects of the processes of modernity, globalization and inspect the value of anthropological and ethnographic insights for understanding the global conditions. The course encourages thinking about applying the knowledge on globalization to socially relevant issues and looks into possible ways in which anthropological knowledge on globalization could be applied in research.