Global Perspectives
Global Perspectives courses in the spring quarters investigate several different global phenomena, enabling you to make comparative analyses and locate your own actions within a global context. Most courses are 4 units and structured with faculty-led lectures (2x/week, 50 minutes) and fellow-led sections (2x/week, 50 minutes), but some courses are taught as 3-unit seminars meeting twice a week for 80 minutes. Unlike autumn and winter, most spring courses have required lectures.
Students placed in spring quarter in August will receive an email during winter quarter to submit course preferences before spring enrollment opens.
Environmental Sustainability: Global Predicaments and Possible Solutions
How do we balance the benefits of industrialization against environmental justice? Is technological innovation a reason for optimism about the future of the environment? What do we lose as the biodiversity of the planet declines? This course engages with the big questions around the future of environmental sustainability from a global perspective, touching on climate change, energy, natural resources, waste, and technology, as well as the human impacts. Students will not only consider how global citizenship is informed by a responsibility towards the environment, but will have the opportunity to develop a practical solution to one of the key sustainability challenges.
Preventing Human Extinction
Killer epidemics, climate change, nuclear war, hostile artificial intelligence: is human extinction inevitable? Is it necessarily bad for the planet? What might we do to prevent it? You will have the chance to explore several plausible scenarios by which human extinction could occur within the next 100 years. We’ll study the psychological, social, and epistemological barriers that frequently derail efforts to avert these catastrophes.
The Spirit of Democracy
What has led to the remarkable spread of democracy around the world? And why do freedom and democracy now appear to be receding in the world? How are the original debates on the design of constitutional democracy in the United States relevant to the current challenges it faces? The class is a unique opportunity to not only study democracy in the United and around the globe but also participate in a practical experiment in “deliberative polling.” You will help develop and organize a focus group and run through a simulation of the deliberative democracy process.
Larry Diamond, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Living with Viruses
What is a virus? How do viruses affect our lives? Does the virus make us distinctly human? This course challenges you to think beyond conventional disciplinary distinctions through questions about the impact of biology on human behavior as well as the potential of humans to shape biology through genetic engineering. Through creative projects, students will engage the study of individual viruses in their microbial as well as cultural context.
Utopia, Dystopia, and Technology in Science Fiction
Science fiction thinks about how science and technology transform human society, values, and everyday experiences in ways good or bad. By projecting both utopia and dystopia, sf reveals and critiques technology-induced social malaises and keeps hopes alive by projecting better futures, testifying to the ceaseless human potential for self-renewal in sustaining civilization on Earth. This course asks the two-fold question: How can humans of diverse cultures harness technoscientific innovations while preserving humanist values and maintain a sustainable economy and civilization? How do narratives of utopia and dystopia depict the anthropocentric domination of nature and the exploitation working classes through the misuse and abuse of technology?
Just Biotech: Who Benefits and Who is Left Behind in Global Biotechnologies
Advances in genomics, artificial intelligence and neurotechnologies are expected to transform biomedicine. Genomics has been applied to prenatal testing in order to screen for genetic disorders, improve cancer treatment, and diagnose rare disorders. Artificial intelligence has been applied to improving areas of healthcare such as diagnostic tests and developing potential medical treatments. Neurotechnologies have generated hopes of providing improved prosthetics or treatment for people with neurological and mental health disorders. However, as these biotechnologies are developed and implemented, they raise important questions regarding justice and equity. Who benefits from these advances in science and technology, and who is excluded? Is research and development in these areas proceeding in ways that are inclusive of diverse perspectives and populations?
Daphne Martschenko, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
Nicole Martinez-Martin, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
Making of the Modern World
It is often stated that we live in a global age. What does this mean? How new is this phenomenon? What does it mean to think about the human experience from a global perspective? And, why does it matter? In this course, we will examine globalism and globalization in historical and contemporary contexts; engage with theoretical frameworks and a range of case studies from a variety of national/regional contexts; and use these to analyze global economic, political, environmental, and socio-cultural networks, trends, and issues, exploring the interconnectedness of the local and the global. We will consider how universal is the human experience and how the answer to this question might impact the future of humanity.
Pox, Plague, and Pestilence: A Germ’s Eye View of World History
Microscopic organisms have toppled empires, reshaped borders, and rewritten the course of human civilization. This course tells world history through the lens of disease, revealing how epidemics from the Black Death to HIV/AIDS have transformed societies, economies, and politics. Weaving together grand historical narratives with cutting-edge genetics, we will explore why humanity's uniquely dangerous disease pool runs deep in our evolutionary past—and how technological progress has accelerated its growth. Discover how pathogens drove the rise of agriculture, urbanization, slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, creating enduring patterns of wealth, power, and inequality that persist today. The course also examines humanity's remarkable escape from infectious disease—a triumph enabling modern life while destabilizing environments and fostering new threats. From ancient plagues to COVID-19, see how germs have both accelerated human progress and constantly pushed back against it. Human health is globally interdependent and inseparably connected to planetary well-being. How did we get here as a species—and where are we headed next?
Gender and Race in the Making of Global Tech Innovation
The speed and scale of emerging AI technologies in the 20th and 21st centuries has especially created an interconnected world in which the mobility of people, knowledge, and knowhow transcend national boundaries and geographic distance. Technology is a tool that can bring about tremendous benefit or harm to human life depending on many factors. How do ideas about identity and power shape technological innovation, the kinds of products that tech companies bring to market, the labor force that produces the products, and access to technology? Who gets to see themselves as "a computer person," and how do early childhood and educational experiences shape our perceptions of our relationship to technology and the digital world that surrounds us? This course explores these questions by examining case studies of how data about, ideas about, and experiences of race and gender shape the making of Silicon Valley and technology hubs around the world, including Bangalore and Delhi, London and Berlin, Seoul, Johannesburg and Nairobi.
The Beginning of Everything: Tracing the Earliest Written Traditions
This course offers a global, comparative introduction to the ancient world through some of humanity’s earliest surviving texts, moving across Mesopotamia, Canaan, the Eastern Mediterranean, including Greece and Rome, Africa, China, South and East Asia, and beyond to explore multiple beginnings. Rather than presenting a single origin story of “civilization,” the course places diverse traditions in conversation, examining how different cultures imagined the cosmos, authority, justice, knowledge, and the human condition, as well as how ancient texts portrayed private life, emotion, and aesthetic values. Through close reading of foundational works from a wide range of regions and genres, students trace both parallels and differences across traditions while considering historical and intellectual connections among them. By approaching the ancient world globally, the course illuminates how early societies articulated enduring questions about power, meaning, community, and knowledge, and how their debates continue to shape our intellectual and cultural horizons.
Vered Shemtov, Comparative Literature