Enrichment Courses

Each semester the Blum Center supports new courses that expand the University’s current offerings related to global poverty and development. In addition to expanding the base of knowledge on campus about poverty alleviation, these specialized courses attract and inspire students from a wide-variety of disciplines.

These courses are open to, and welcome, students from all majors. However, students who have declared the Global Poverty and Practice Minor will be given first priority in enrollment. Graduate students are also welcome to join these courses. For questions, please contact Eva Wong, evaw@berkeley.edu

These enrichment courses for Fall 2008 include the following:

IAS 115/ CP 115: Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium. Professor Ananya Roy

T/Th, 3:30-5 pm, 155 Dwinelle, CCN: 46505/ 13442

This course seeks to train students to become participants in the global debates about poverty, development, and inequality. In doing so, it teaches students about different models and paradigms of poverty-alleviation and different methodologies for evaluating these. It also highlights the most current and popular ideas in different sectors of poverty-alleviation, from micro-credit to slum upgrading to the Millennium Development Goals. The class situates such issues in the broader context of development theories and practices. In other words, the class links the millennial imagination for ending poverty with the long and contentious history of twentieth century development. While the emphasis is on the project of development with its distinctive apparatus of knowledge and policy, the class is also concerned with the role of civil society actors, social movements, corporations, private foundations, and global campaigns in seeking to tackle and even end poverty. Similarly, while the emphasis of the class is on the experiences of the global South, it is also concerned with poverty and inequality everywhere, including deprivation in the global North.

ERG 175: Water and Development. Professor Isha Ray

T/Th 12:30-2 PM, 185 Barrows, CCN: 27432

This course is organized around the following central question: (How) can water resources be managed with the multiple goals of sustainable use, economic development, poverty alleviation and equity? Through readings and discussions over the semester, the course will tackle the problems of water access and use in developing countries; the potential for technological, social and economic solutions to these problems, especially at local levels; the role of institutions (states, NGOs, markets…) in increasing access to water and sanitation; and the pitfalls of and assumptions behind some popular ‘solutions’. The course will draw on insights from public health, institutional economics, environmental politics and sociology, and technological interventions.

INFORMATION 190: Poverty and Technology. Professor Jenna Burrell

MW 10:30-12 pm, 110 South Hall, CCN: 42503

This course will encourage students to think broadly about the interplay between technological systems, social processes, economics, and political contingencies in efforts to alleviate poverty. Students will come to understand poverty not only in terms of high-level indicators, but from a ground-level perspective as ‘the poor’ experience and describe it for themselves. The role played by individuals and societies of the developing world as active agents in processes of technology adoption and use will be a central theme. Technologies' connection to socio-economic development efforts will be put into historical context by exposing students to several phases of intensive interest including the ‘green revolution,’ the push towards industrialization, the ‘appropriate technologies’ movement, and more recent interest in digital technologies. In our discussion of ‘information technologies’ we will explore not only key form factors such as computers, the Internet, and mobile phones, but also their incorporation into broader practices such as micro-business and agriculture.