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
Global Capitals: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and People
This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities at different moments in time: Renaissance-Florence, Transnational-Accra, Imperial Beijing. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for his course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation).
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?
Pacific Ocean Worlds: A Sea of Islands
How do we think about the modern Pacific Ocean world? Here in California, we border this vast waterscape, which is larger than all the world's remaining oceans combined and which could easily fit all of the planet's landmasses within it. What lessons can we learn from the region's diverse and dynamic island cultures, its entangled histories, and its urgent contemporary issues? How has the Pacific impacted ideas about modernity elsewhere in the world? And what unique Oceanian modernities are emerging from the region? Engaging with a rich array of literary and performance texts, films, and artworks from the 19th to the 21st centuries, we will consider different ways in which the Pacific has been imagined. We will further explore how Pacific Islander scholars, artists, and activists have drawn on their cultural traditions and knowledge systems to create new works that respond to current challenges facing the region, including colonialism, globalization, tourism, migration, climate change, militarization, and nuclearization.
Modernity and Politics in Middle Eastern Literatures
This course will investigate cultural and literary responses to modernity in the Middle East. The intense modernization process that started in mid 19th century and lingers to this day in the region caused Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary cultures to encounter rapid changes; borders dissolved, new societies and nations were formed, daily life westernized, and new literary forms took over the former models. In order to understand how writers and individuals negotiated between tradition and modernity and how they adapted their traditions into the modern life we will read both canonical and graphic novels comparatively from each language group and focus on the themes of nation, identity, and gender. All readings will be in English translation.
Burcu Karahan, Comparative Literature
Modern Europe: Self, Society, and the Liberal Order
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.