Global Arc

Focusing on three Ghanaian cities--Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi--the seminar traces the development of these urban centers from the earliest times to the present and explores the cultural encounters that have given them distinct identities. Using theories from history and anthropology, literature and cultural studies, political economy and urban studies, the seminar explores central questions in the study of the urban experience. Based in Accra, students will immerse themselves in the life of the city, mapping its social and cultural geography, trying to understand the structures that define it.

Nestled in the Caucasus, Azerbaijan offers an unparalleled perspective on the processes that birthed and continue to shape the modern world. Azerbaijan at the beginning of the twentieth century was a global pacesetter, the center of world oil production and then the first secular democratic republic in the Muslim world. After seven decades of Soviet Communism, Azerbaijan is again an independent state and global energy hub. We will study timeless debates on Islam and identity, empire and independence, autocracy and democracy, and energy and development.

Before 1918, Austria-Hungary was a world power that spread from the Mediterranean to Ukraine, and Vienna was one of the world capitals of art, culture, and intellectual life. This seminar will explore the cultural history of psychoanalysis and its relation to Austrian history. It will feature weekly guest speakers who will lecture on topics as diverse as the history of communism in Vienna, the place of psychoanalysis in today's world, and the transformation of Austria from a world power into a small landlocked nation that often has thought of itself as a new Switzerland - a neutral country and a buffer between East and West.

This seminar explores Chilean visual culture since the coup, focusing on the responses to censorship and repression by visual artists, filmmakers, performers, and collectives as they developed new ideas around liberty, human rights, and political minorities, as well as free expression, memory, and peripheral cultures. These artists placed their bodies and works into the public sphere, reclaiming new spaces and radically transforming Chilean life. Our analysis will also consider the complex negotiations of the transition, the composition of the contemporary Chilean art scene, and the implementation of neoliberalism.

This seminar will offer an introduction to some of the most prominent features of Chinese society -- work organizations, the education system, the urban/rural divide, migration, social inequality, marriage and family, ethnicity and religion, with an emphasis on understanding social phenomena in China within its historical, cultural, political and economic context. It will also allow students to begin to study other social changes in China and their long-term impact on the people living there, as well as people living in other developed and developing countries.

This seminar will examine xenophobia and xenophilia in Germany. Identification through irrational fear of the foreign is currently on the rise in many parts of the world, manifested in anti-immigrant, religiously motivated national exclusionary movements, discrimination, political party competition, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, internal purging, and massacres. This course examines their psychology and social meanings, focusing on both the modification of projections and the changing nature of its objects. It will introduce students to ethnographic methods by participating in cultural encounters and observations outside the classroom.

Many political scientists have described India as an "unlikely democracy". This course, taught at Ashoka University, Haryana, India, will examine the ways in which the workings of Indian democracy have shaped and transformed the meaning of five institutional formations: constitutionalism, religion, the economy, caste, and the city. The aim is not to provide a conventional or comprehensive overview of Indian democracy. It is rather to provide snapshots into the ways in which the Indian democratic experience is unsettling identities, unleashing new forms of mobilization, and transforming the meaning of citizenship as Indians experience it.

Time after time, Brazil has been hailed the "land of the future". Capturing the world's attention for over five centuries of colonialism and modernization, Brazil has offered rich natural resources for extraction and diverse social and political realities for the imagination of travelers and the work of scientists, academics and artists alike. Drawing from history, anthropology, literature and the arts, this Global Seminar explores how Brazil's becomings have been represented nationally and internationally and the ways in which its peoples have evolved within or escaped and recast the frames of this imagined country.

Students will use Giovanni Boccaccio's 14thC. classic, The Decameron as a starting point from which to explore the fundamentals of storytelling and the ways in which storytelling helps us navigate traumatic experiences. Students will study Italian language and culture, collaborate virtually with Italian theater artists to develop language skills, and their own short musical theater stories. The creation of a collection of short musical theater pieces, on a variety of contemporary (or reinvented classic) themes, responding to today's pandemic and exploring the fundamental human need to tell stories will be the centerpiece of the course.

India has been described as an "unlikely democracy." As Tocqueville argued, democracy, in principle transforms all the other social forms it touches, from religion to intermediate associations. This seminar will examine the ways in which the Indian democratic experience is unsettling identities, unleashing new forms of mobilization and in the process transforming the meaning of citizenship as Indians experience it. We will ask: Is Indian Democracy moving in a more illiberal and authoritarian direction? If so, what explains this transformation? How does this transformation look in comparative perspective?