Graduate and Undergraduate Electives
The Committee on Global Thought courses encourage students to explore the ideas, cultures, and conversations that shape our interconnected world. With New York City as a backdrop, students examine the movement of people, goods, finance and develop new ways of thinking about their impact on the world. Bringing together students from different backgrounds, disciplines, and intellectual interests, these courses offer opportunities to challenge assumptions, exchange ideas, and discover new ways of understanding the world and our place within it.
Graduate Electives
Global Latin America (CGTH 4725)
In contrast to the “methodological nationalism” (or “regionalism”) that has long characterized outside analysis of Latin America, this course foregrounds the region’s global embeddedness and world-making potential—as a protagonist in the generation, adaptation, and diffusion of diverse border-crossing flows, frameworks, and imaginaries. It highlights the agency of state and non-state actors throughout “Latin America”—itself a homogenizing, Eurocentric label imposed from the outside—as constitutive forces in creating the world that we all inhabit, contributing to the problems that confront us, and helping to generate solutions. To do so, we will engage with a series of texts and materials produced by diversely situated interdisciplinary scholars, writers, artists, and political figures—many of them based in Latin America, and operating in languages other than English—who are all seeking to make sense of the region’s place in the world. From a transnational perspective, we will also identify pockets of “Global Latin America” that exist beyond the region’s borders, including in parts of New York City.
Instructor: Kevin Funk
Fall semester
Open to undergraduate and graduate students.
Global New York (CGTH 4400)
This course examines New York City’s long history as a site of globalization. Since European colonization, New York has served as a hub in world-spanning networks of capital, goods, and people. At the same time, the city’s reinvention in the late-20th century as a “global city”—defined in large part by its deep embeddedness in world financial markets—represented a fundamental shift in the city’s economy, governance, demography, cultural life, and social relations. We will interrogate how this came to be by exploring New York’s historical role in global business, culture, and immigration, with attention to how local and national conditions have shaped the city’s relationship to the world. While critically analyzing how elites both in and outside New York have wielded power over its politics and institutions, readings and discussions will also center the voices of New Yorkers drawn from the numerous and diverse communities that make up this complex city.
Instructor: Sarah Miller-Davenport
Fall semester
Open to undergraduate and graduate students.
City of Ideas: Independent Study in Global New York (CGTH 9001)
With its unparalleled faculty and location in New York City–a laboratory for global culture and ideas–Columbia is a hub for distinguished international guests, thought-provoking events, and conferences that feature pioneering scholarship. Beyond campus, New York offers students the opportunity to immerse themselves in the city’s exceptionally rich intellectual and cultural life. This course encourages students in the MA in Global Thought to take full advantage of the uniquely diverse array of arts and culture events, museum exhibitions, and academic lectures and conferences at Columbia and throughout New York City. Students earn credit in this course by writing thoughtful and critically engaged reflection papers on the substance of events they attend.
Instructor: Farryl Last
Spring semester
***This class is only open to Global Thought MA students.***
Undergraduate Electives
Seminar in Global Thought: Inquiries Into an Interconnected World (CGTH 3401)
This course on global thought will consider the ways in which we think about, debate, and give meaning to the interconnected world in which we live. In thematically focused collaborative teams, students will examine how the flows of people, things and ideas across national borders both connect our world and create uneven consequences within and among communities. We will locate ourselves in these processes, suggesting we need go no further than our closets, tables, and street corners to consider the meanings of globalization and our roles in the world today. This course has been approved to partially satisfy the Global Core requirement.
Instructor: Kevin Funk
Fall semester
Open to undergraduate students.
Approaches to Global Thought (CGTH 3600)
From website: This required course for Global Thought Scholars introduces students to transdisciplinary approaches necessary to address complex problems confronting the world today. The course places students into conversation with others of diverse backgrounds, passions, and majors to consider the approaches of their own disciplines, learn about the methodological “tool kits” of other fields, investigate examples of transdisciplinary research, and work with classmates to design their own problem-centered collaborative projects.
Instructor: Sarah Miller-Davenport
Spring semester
***This class is only open to Global Thought Scholars.***