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We’re covering topics like wealth and poverty, cultural identity and immigration.
We want to encourage them to see the world as broadly as possible,
to understand different cultures, different societies, what life is like in different places,
and also have a sense of interconnectedness of the world today, of globalization
of why what happens in other countries matters to them, and vice versa.
It’s an interesting topic because it’s naturally interdisciplinary.
It’s a topic that requires that you understand different economic, political, and social issues.
So in the course we want to talk about ways in which
globalization does benefit certain people and ways in which it also has some consequences.
Both of us think it’s a very interesting topic, we come at it from an interdisciplinary perspective,
and as Gabe said, sociology is an interdisciplinary kind of discipline.
My background in Geography is also a discipline that prides itself on being interdisciplinary
or looking at things from a variety of perspectives.
There are some famous books out there like Fareed Zakaria’s book called
“The Post American World,” and so we’ll be reading an article by him called “The Rise of the Rest.”
and in that article he’s making the argument that other places
like India and China have been rising over the past couple of decades economically.
In a way that they’ve essentially caught up with the United States as being economic power houses, so to speak.
It’s a very interesting time to be a freshman in college.
There are changes happening in our world, that will certainly shape our future
in ways that didn’t necessarily, we didn’t see as important issues or as looming as they were when we were in college.
This is a small class, this will be a seminar, so expect a lot of participation.
We don’t want to lecture too much, I think we both lecture a lot.
Genereally, this is a chance to have a lot of class participation and students should feel free to express their ideas openly.
It should be a very open and comfortable forum.
If we think about social identities and cultural identities around the world,
some have described globalization as a paradox,
it has shrunken the world in terms of bringing people closer together.
Through our communications, trade relations and so forth, it brings us closer together. It makes the world smaller.
At the same time it rips people apart, because it creates tensions
when people feel as if their social identities or cultural traditions are being threatened.
The rapid consumption of goods and services has been another impact of globalization.
I really enjoy reading about the world, about what’s going on in other places,
and talking about how our American way of seeing the world is not necessarily,
and certainly not the way everyone else around the world sees things.
I think we’re both pretty curious, naturally curious.
We’re interested in how the world works, and seeing it from different angles,
and that’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to figure out, answer difficult questions, complicated questions,
about topics that seem abstract, like culture and globalization,
that when you think about it carefully, really have a big impact on people’s lives and on the world.
So if students come out of my classes with a little bit of a broader sociological imagination, I’m happy.
And you don’t have to be a sociologist to have a sociological imagination, of course.