ANTH 1500 - Planetary Home Care Manual

Crosslisted
(Also listed as ESTD 1500)

Goals: This course surveys the socio-cultural, economic, political relationships that bind the lives of those at the global “center” with those at the periphery–offering historical and contemporary contexts for understanding the profound disparities in wealth, health, life expectancy, population density, and access to opportunity evident in our world. From this point of linking across space, we consider what it will take to care for the earth as home as we move together into the future.

Content: Socio-cultural and historical contexts are introduced and investigated through an emphasis on primary sources, theoretical essays and course lectures, supplemented with two ethnographic case studies. Throughout the course students will be challenged to understand the context of the contemporary world system and their place in it. Drawing broadly on contemporary literature from geography, economics, political science, rural sociology, and anthropology this course will focus on issues such as: post-coloniality, the global division of labor, global production, cultures of consumption, global poverty, Cold War developmentalism, intellectual property issues, post-modernism, and social responses to globalization. We will focus significantly on global grocery chains and commons projects.

Credits: 4