ICS 195CC: Critical Approaches to Global Issues
Critical Approaches to Global Issues is the required (and exciting!) gateway course for the International Comparative Studies major. Many courses at the university will ask students to solve global problems. In ICS 195, we work, instead, to understand the problem itself, using history, anthropology, political theory, sociology, film, and literature to access the voices and thought of people living under the constraints of global systems that create systemic inequality. The course is designed to introduce students to core concepts in International and Global Studies, including globalization, imperialism, capitalism, nationalism, liberalism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, humanitarianism, and decolonization. Course material and lectures challenge linear and Western-centric thinking about progress, modernity, and development, whose foundations, meanings, and contradictions are critically examined.
Taught by: ICS faculty
ICS 314S: Doing Global Research
How do we know what we know? How do researchers transform information, statistics, gossip, field notes, impressions, documents, both historical and contemporary, virtual realities, and interviews into analysis and writing? You will learn the key technique/technology of global research by studying how to use databases, how to use/interpret surveys and interviews, how to observe the use of space and the ways people interact, how to navigate archival collections, and explore how popular culture and media, and representations can be sources of data.
Taught by: ICS faculty
ICS 335S: Decolonization: Histories, Movements, Meanings
This course explores decolonization as an historical event, a theoretical category, and a series of contemporary movements. While historians have tended to treat decolonization as a completed event, many activists today use the term to discuss a still-present need to end colonial institutions — from settler colonial occupation in places as widespread as Turtle Island (North America), Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), to the hegemony of Western thought in university curricula, to the display of art and artifacts expropriated from the colonies in museums in major cities such as New York, London, and Paris. Some questions we will ask and attempt to answer in this class are: What does decolonization mean historically as well as in contemporary society? How do people in different parts of the world understand colonialism and decolonization, given the vast geographic and temporal differences in colonial history? What could it mean to live in a decolonized world, and is it possible to have a common, universal vision for what this could look like?
Taught by: Professor Jessica Namakkal
ICS 388: Global South Asia
South Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar) is the most populous region in the world, and the South Asian diaspora is the largest diaspora in the world. Global South Asia explores the construction of the South Asian diaspora, asking questions about the relationship between people and states. How has the history of modern South Asia, from the colonial era through independence and Partition, shaped the migrations of South Asian people throughout the world, and how has this same history affected other parts of the world? We will think about how race, caste, gender, sexuality, and nationality operate in the South Asian diaspora, as well as about how South Asia is represented in Western popular culture.
Taught by: Professor Jessica Namakkal
ICS 391: Death, Burial, and Justice in the Americas
This is a class about what death, the dead, and burial places mean to living people searching for justice. We explore the various kinds of “necroviolence” and harm that the dead—and the communities close to them—experience. But we also study transformative acts of care and repair that happen in the wake of violence, undertaken by activists, family members, cemetery reclamation groups, and forensic anthropologists. This community-engaged course features visits to a local African American cemetery and other sites, student research on their own "chosen ancestors," as well as partnerships with local organizations that honor Durham’s dead.
Image credit: Adam Rosenblatt
Taught by: Professor Adam Rosenblatt
ICS 398S: Global Humanitarianism
What makes it possible for some people to be saviors and others to require saving? We study the role of states, NGOs, aid agencies, corporations and technologies in humanitarian work, especially in a post-USAID world.
Image credit: SAIH Norway-Who Wants to be a Volunteer
Taught by: Professor Kathryn Mathers
ICS 502S: Comics as Research: Visual Approaches to Ethnography, Advocacy, and Journalism.
How do we know things about the world by making and reading comics? What unique potential do comics have for portraying time, memory, space, speech, and subjective experiences? In this class, we read works of graphic ethnography, graphic medicine, comics journalism, and comics theory, and create our own research-based comics in Durham.
Image credit: Adam Rosenblatt
Taught by: Professor Adam Rosenblatt
ICS 568S: Imagining the Global South
Dreaming, imagining, and hallucinating are at the heart of making new ways of being and living in the world. Explore how new forms of activism, laboring, consuming, educating, parenting, and moving are made possible or constrained by imagination.
Image credit: THIRD WORLD BUNFIGHT |South African performing arts
Taught by: Professor Kathryn Mathers