Major & Minor Requirements – Global Studies
Our requirements are designed to allow students flexibility in choosing courses that best serve their academic, professional, and personal goals while giving them structure to think carefully about their curricular choices and gain the experience and skills to prepare them for proactive, knowledgeable and sensitive engagement with global issues.
MAJOR
The BA in Global Studies consists of:
Two core courses, “(Dis)Order and (In)Justice: Introduction to Global Studies” and “Global Economies: Understanding Global Capitalism,” which introduce students to key issues and perspectives in Global Studies.
Two Knowledge Base electives, survey courses at the 2000 level or above that introduce a field, phenomenon, and/or method of exploring our world.
Five Global Challenges electives, higher level seminar courses that allow students to gain more depth in a given subject. At least three must be in your chosen cluster (see descriptions).
A Foreign Language requirement to demonstrate proficiency sufficient for living and working in another context, satisfied through coursework or a proficiency test.
A Global Engagement requirement involving volunteer work, internship, self-designed research, activism, and/or study abroad with faculty approval, followed by a 2-credit colloquium in which students connect their experience to their academic work, and reflect on ethical engagement.
A Collaborative Research Seminar, a small seminar course taken in junior year, which offers advanced methodological training with practitioners and/or non-profits.
A Senior Capstone project. Students complete an individual project over the course of one year under close faculty supervision.
MINOR
The Global Studies minor requires the two core courses, one Knowledge Base elective, and three Global Challenge electives, as above. Our Collaborative Research seminars are also open to minors.
CLUSTERS
Global Challenge electives are grouped into four clusters:
Places, Peoples, and Encounters (PPE)
- This cluster focuses on the relationship between global structures, multiple forms of knowledge, identities, and lived experiences.
- Courses link the global and the local through an emphasis on how structures affect everyday life under globalization, and how people across a variety of contexts understand, negotiate, and resist them.
Markets and States, Networks and Hierarchies (MS)
- This cluster concerns how the global is “ordered,” especially through the global economy and the nation-state system with its international institutions and structures.
- Courses explore the tensions between hierarchies and networks, state and non-state actors, and rules and exceptions, critically evaluating the assumptions, interests, and values behind the orders and alternatives that structure our field of action.
Rights, Justice, and Governance (RJG)
- This cluster examines the challenge of achieving global justice and its attendant attempts to justly govern global flows of people, goods, money, and information.
- Courses offer critical perspectives on the complexities and contradictions of top-down interventions and institutions of law, development and aid, and memory, justice and reconciliation.
Urban, Media, Environment (UME)
- This cluster focuses on how the organization of space, dissemination of information and media, as well as changes in the environment pose new global challenges at scales beyond the regulation and power of formal institutions or local actors.
- Courses familiarize students with new methodologies to understand these challenges.
Note:Â Be sure to check with your advisor to receive up-to-date information or further clarification on Major & Minor Requirements.