Global, Urban, and Environmental Studies (GLUE)

Courses in this cluster explore the lenses and identities through which we experience the world and how the global and local are linked in ways not always obvious to the casual observer or embedded participant. Courses cluster around experiences and accounts of the global—everyday life under globalization, personal and national narratives, and the construction of hybrid, cosmopolitan or transnational identities.

This cluster concerns how the global is “ordered”—how the world we live in today is designed and arranged, constrained and enabled. The most influential forms of ordering include the global economy and the nation‐state system with its international institutions and interactions. Within these forms we encounter tensions between hierarchies and networks, state and non‐state actors, flows and borders, rules and exceptions. This cluster aims to critically evaluate the assumptions, interests, and values behind the orders and alternatives that structure our field of action.

The success of development, the legitimacy of national policies, and the thin line between peace and war all rest on the question of justice: what is right, what is just, and for whom? This cluster examines the challenge of achieving global justice and the attendant attempts to justly govern global flows of people, goods, money, and information. Courses deal with questions such as: How are laws and norms changing under globalization? What contradictions and tensions are produced by human rights today? Is humanitarian intervention a moral imperative or an imperialist fantasy? Can wars be just? Can past injustice ever be adequately dealt with? Is there a global civil society that can provide a legitimate counter to corporate or state power?

This cluster focuses on three global spaces where The New School has special analytical strengths. Cities are indelibly local yet inescapably inscribed by global flows of money, people, and trade. Contemporary media confounds the scale between local and global while transforming our identities, perceptions, and reactions, as well as power relations. The environment knows no borders: global flows can result in very local challenges, and local problems reverberate at global scales. All of these spaces are linked by the challenge of how we design our cities, our forms of information, and our relationship to the environment. Courses in this cluster link explicitly to cutting edge work in design carried out at The New School.