Managing New Global Challenges

Description

This course exposes students to in-depth, critical discussions of a series of issues that present great challenges to human societies in the age of globalization. Drawing on cutting-edge research by scholars in multiple disciplines in social sciences and humanities, this course acquaints students with analytical concepts and qualitative approaches to participate in the debates on these issues. These issues are grouped under four themes: 1) uneven development and poverty; 2) care work and population; 3) science, technology, and society; and 4) climate change and Anthropocene. Weekly class lecture and discussion covers a specific topic such as slums and gentrification, urban sanitation, family change, platform economy, medicalization of birth and death, human and nature, and human-animal relations. While these issues are discussed separately, they are also interrelated. Discussions draw on empirical case studies in local settings, but to comprehend the depth of the issues requires a global perspective and an interdisciplinary approach.