Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning
2006 Summer Institute
Seminar Descriptions and Bibliographies
Seminar One
The Millennium Development Goals and Sustainability
“Even if he can vote to choose his rulers, a young man with AIDS who cannot read or write and lives on the brink of starvation is not truly free. Equally, even if she earns enough to live, a woman who lives in the shadow of daily violence and has no say in how her country is run is not truly free . . . .Not only are development, security and human rights all imperative, they also reinforce each other. This relationship has only been strengthened in our era of rapid technological advances, increasing economic interdependence, globalization and dramatic geopolitical change.”
Koffi Annan, “In Larger Freedom: Toward Development, Security and Human Rights for All” (2005)
The United Nations defines sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While sustainability is often understood solely, or primarily, in terms of the environment, this broader definition allows us to identify overlapping connections between the different seminar themes: poverty, development, health, human rights, democracy, etc. In this opening seminar, we will use sustainability as a framework for exploring the Millennium Development Goals and some of the definitions, assumptions, and expectations that give them their shape and fuel criticism of them. Lest we remain stuck at the most general level, we will also return to a narrower set of sustainability issues—environmental change, scarcity of natural resources, and global warming. Such issues reinforce the importance of incorporating scientific literacy into our conversations about general education, interdependence, social responsibility, and civic engagement.
Readings:
United Nations Millennium Goals Report 2005.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. “Challenges of Sustainable Development Under Globalisation.” International Journal of Development Issues 4 (2005): 1-20.
Sen, Amartya. “Democracy as a Universal Value.” Journal of Democracy 10 (1999): 3-17.
Mies, Maria. “The Myth of Catching-Up Development.” (Rothenberg, 150-157).
Enloe, Cynthia. “Daughters and Generals in the Politics of the Globalized Sneaker.” (Rothenberg, 271-277).
Lubchenco, Jane. “Entering the Century of the Environment: A New Social Contract for Science.” Science, 279 (1998): 491-497.
Karl, Thomas R. and Kevin E. Trenberth. “Modern Global Climate Change.” Science, 302, (2003): 1719-1723.
Seminar Two
Globalization, Wealth, and Poverty
Globalization, like sustainability, is a complex, but useful framework for placing moral and ethical questions within interconnected economic, cultural, political, and social contexts. In the second seminar we will examine some of the debates surrounding the potential of economic globalization to reduce extreme poverty. We will also explore some of the obstacles that stand in the way of those efforts.
While some, including Jeffery Sachs, are optimistic that globalization can lead to the end of poverty, others challenge us to reconcile developmental goals with pervasive instances of “structural violence,” that in Paul Farmer’s formulation, “become embodied as sickness, suffering, and degradation." (19) Claims of progress in the battle against poverty seem to depend upon who is measuring what. Such arguments underline the importance of numeracy and basic statistical literacy when students are asked to formulate and defend value-laden positions around contested global issues.
Readings:
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on
the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Introduction; Chapter One, “On Suffering and Structural Violence:
Social and Economic Rights in a Global Era;” and Chapter Five, “Health,
Healing and Social Justice: Insights from Liberation Theology.”
Yates, Michael D. “Poverty and Inequality in the Global Economy.” (Rothenberg, 330-339.)
Deaton, Angus. “Is World Poverty Falling?” (Rothenberg, 340-345.)
The International Forum on Globalization. “A Critical Look at Measurements of Economic Progress.” (Rothenberg, 346-355.)
Stiglitz, Joseph. “Globalization and Its Discontents: The Promise of Global Institutions.” (Rothenberg, 419-431)
Saadawi, Nawal El. “Women and the Poor: The Challenge of Global Justice.” (Rothenberg, 400-408.)
Roy, Arundahti. “Shall We Leave It to the Experts?” (Rothenberg, 461-467.)
Seminar Three
Women’s Rights Are Human Rights
Using the broad frameworks of human rights is a powerful way to introduce students to complex, interdisciplinary issues in a global context. It also offers a concrete demonstration of the power to change laws, consciousness, and everyday practices, locally and globally. Some scholars refer to the different waves of human rights. The first generation is seen as addressing political and civil rights; the second, social and economic realms; and the third and most recent, attention to the rights of peoples as social collectivities. In this seminar we will explore the efforts over the last quarter of a century to put women into the human rights equation.
In examining women’s issues, we confront some of the same questions in other human rights’ domains: Are there universal women’s rights or should they be determined by cultural dictums? Are there limits to imposing universal women’s rights if it violates national sovereignty? What do we do if there are competing rights, say between religious rights and women’s rights? How might one effectively organize globally to improve the lives of women in the face of arguments that some human rights discourse and activism represents an illegitimate imposition of Western values?
Readings:
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on
the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Chapter Two, “Pestilence and Restraint: Guantanamo, AIDS, and the
Logic of Quarantine.”
Gunning, Isabelle. “Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries.” In Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, ed. Katherine Wing. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
Bunch, Charlotte. “Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 12 (1990): 486-498.
Seminar Four
Health and Social Justice
While the UN Millennium Development Goals explicitly target certain illnesses, the challenges they raise are not simply about disease and inadequate health care. Global health issues are entangled with questions of human rights, gender, democracy, wealth, power, poverty, and social justice. In this seminar we continue our examination of these complex issues as a model for interconnected global learning that allows students to link knowledge and experience gained in diverse disciplines and disparate courses—courses that allow for increasingly sophisticated work appropriate to different levels of skill and intellectual development.
Readings:
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on
the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Chapter Eight, “New Malaise: Medical Ethics and Social Rights in the
Global Era”; and Chapter Nine “Rethinking Health and Human Rights:
Time for a Paradigm Shift.”
Breen, Nancy. “Social Discrimination and Health: Understanding Gender and its Interaction with Other Social Determinants.” This paper has been prepared under the Global Health Equity Initiative project on "Gender and Health Equity" based at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
Mills, Edward, Stephanie Nixon, Sonal Singh, Sonam Dolma, Anjali Nayyar, and Sushma Kapoor, “Enrolling Women into HIV Preventive Vaccine Trials: An Ethical Imperative but a Logistical Challenge.” PLoS Med 3(3): e94.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. “Microeconomics of Health: No Health Available at $7.50 per Person per Year.” (Rothenberg, 364-367).
Seminar Five
Religion, Conflict, and Democracy
There is a sense that growing levels of religious intolerance are shaping the nature of globalization in profound, if not fully understood, ways. Consequently, when we talk about global learning, we ignore religious questions at our own peril. When Shared Futures participants met in March, we agreed to focus one seminar on religious issues despite their absence from the Millennium Development Goals. In this final seminar we use religion as a lens to re-view the topical discussions that have come before. By emphasizing the relationship between religion, democracy and civil society, this seminar will raise questions about one source of potential conflict and reconciliation in a shared future.
Readings:
Barber, Benjamin. McWorld vs. Jihad: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy.
New York: Ballentine Books, 2001.
Introduction 2001; Introduction; Chapter 10, “Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad
via McWorld?” Chapter 14, “Essential Jihad: Islam and
Fundamentalism;” Chapter 19, “Securing Global Democracy in the
World of McWorld.”
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Grove, 1990 (1956).
Filali-Ansary, Abdou. “Muslims and Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 10 (1999): 18-32.
Marty, Martin, “The Future of World Fundamentalisms.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 142, (1998): 367-377.
About the Seminar Readings
One text distinguished itself as being especially useful in helping us weave the different seminar topics together. Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) provides valuable perspectives on multiple topics and will serve as a common touchstone for conversation. As Amartya Sen writes in the Forward to Farmer’s book,
We live in an age of science, technology, and economic affluence when, as Farmer points out, we can, for the first time in history, deal effectively with the diseases that ravage humanity. And yet, the reach of science and of globalization has stopped short of bringing reasonable opportunity for survival within the grasp of the deprived masses in our affluent world. This is where the pathologies of power take their toll. As Farmer argues, “Anyone who wishes to be considered humane has ample cause to consider what it means to be sick and poor in the era of globalization and scientific advancement.” (xvi-xvii)
Farmer demonstrates clearly why global learning and liberal education demand that we engage students in real-world problems and draw upon the perspectives and insights of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The rest of the seminar readings, taken together, will do the same. Where possible, we selected short pieces from Paula S. Rothenberg’s Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issues (New York: Worth Publishers, 2006) to flesh out the topics. Copies of additional materials will be found in your course packet.
The readings we selected and the time available for discussion will only mark the beginning of the kinds of thinking that will eventually translate into successful curricular change. Many of you have already implemented significant curricular transformation via global learning; others are just beginning. It is our hope that these seminar discussions will raise intellectual challenges as well as pedagogical and structural questions. The answers to these questions will be useful to the entire network (and through the network to the broader academy), no matter where on the spectrum of curricular development any individual or institution is currently located.
Additional Readings
One of the goals of the Shared Futures initiative is to challenge students to explore the relational nature of their identities—identities that are variously shaped by the currents of power and privilege, both within a multicultural U.S. democracy and within an interconnected and unequal world. In his afterword to Rothenberg’s Beyond Borders, Michael Schwalbe argues that American privilege comes at a price. “Most obviously,” he writes, “there is the cost of ignorance about others. This carries with it the cost of ignorance about ourselves. One thing we don’t learn, when we refuse to learn about or from others, is how they see us. We then lose a mirror with which to view ourselves.” (604)
While such questions flow naturally from all of the daily seminar topics, the following articles from Granta reflect more intentional efforts to raise fundamental questions about the role of the United States in the world as well as how some Americans see the world.
The following descriptions are from the Granta editors.
Granta 77: What We Think of American (Spring 2002)
The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn't confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. 'Hubris' was the general idea: in one opinion poll, two-thirds of the respondents outside the US agreed to the proposition that it was 'good that Americans now know what it's like to be vulnerable'.
Is the US really so disliked? If so, why? In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives—for better or worse—and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world's supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.
Granta 84: Over There: How America Sees the World (Winter 2003)
The USA is the world's newest, greatest and only empire. And, some would say, the world's most insular state as well as the most powerful, never troubling to correct its ignorance of the people and places beyond its borders.
Is it a slander? In this issue of Granta, American writers describe their encounters abroad and how they were affected by them, while, in reportage and fiction, outsiders to America come upon the strangeness of the place itself.
Two years ago, in the wake of September 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Granta asked writers across the globe to describe how America had influenced their lives—culturally, politically, economically, for good or ill. For this issue we turned Granta 77's question around and asked American writers how they had encountered countries other than their own.
While these readings are not assigned for a specific seminar, they explore place and identity in ways that we hope will inform all of our conversations throughout the week.
Opening Night Reading and Discussion — Caryl Phillips (Optional Readings)
We also included the following short pieces for participants to read in preparation for Caryl Phillips presentation. His novels are also highly recommended, although not assigned for the institute. (See his biography for more titles and information).
“Necessary Journeys.” The Guardian, December 11, 2004.
“American Tribalism.” In The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003, ed. Lawrence Rinder. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.
“Finding Oneself at Home.” The Guardian, January 21, 2006.
These, and other articles and interviews, are available on the web at www.carylphillips.com.
Film Series
Over the course of the institute, we screened the following films.
Darwin’s Nightmare (2004)
Directed by Hubert Sauper
Life and Debt (2001)
Directed by Stephanie Black
Dying to Leave (2003)
Directed by Chris Hilton and Aaron Woolf
|
