UC Berkeley undergraduates interested in the Culture and Globalization Course Thread should contact course-threads@berkeley.edu.
The Course Thread on Culture and Globalization conceives of our world as transnationally connected through migration, markets, and media. Our intellectual maps and cultural policies, however, still tend to rely heavily on categories of identification that are defined by a fixed territory, national origin, and “authentic” heritage.
This thread redirects attention to mediation and interdependence on local and global scales. Courses within the thread seek to examine archives of cultural memory, multilingualism, circulation and valorization of aesthetic forms, and performances of ethnicity and national identity.
Course offerings span a wide range of departments including Anthropology, Folklore, Film and Media, Music, Rhetoric, German, and Spanish& Portuguese. New forms of spectatorship in relation to cinema, popular music, and digital media — along with the production of new traditions, such as art and musical forms that embody indigeneity — form a common ground of investigation.