First-Year Courses in RC Social Science (Division 877)

Winter Term, 2000 (September 8 - December 22, 1999)

Most RC courses are open to LS&A students and may be used to meet distribution requirements. In most instances, RC students receive priority for RC course waitlists.

RC sections of LS&A Courses

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Charles Bright (cbright@umich.edu)

Credits: (4; 3 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

The aim of this course, designed for sophomores, is to help students locate themselves in the world they inhabit. We will attempt to "map" the world of the late 20th century, developing an analytically precise and historically grounded description of the contemporary world so that it can be seen as the product both of continuous historical processes and of specific, historically unique conjunctures. This will involve an investigation on three tiers: we will study the process of global integration over the last century and a half, the circuits of finance and exchange, of information-flow and migration, that selectively bind the world together; we will examine how the global flow of material goods and ideas percolate into and get appropriated to local contexts and needs, producing contests over meaning, identity, and everyday practice; and we will explore how the interactions of global and local worlds produce crisis and realignment in the "middle ground" of states, national policies, and national identities. The central problem is to understand how processes of global integration create disjunctures and fields of contestation that, in turn, make the proliferation of difference a key characteristic of an integrating world. There are no prerequisites for the class; students will be asked to read five books and a number of articles and to write two papers.