Current Courses

Fall 2009

IAS 115/ CP 115 Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium
Professor Ananya Roy
Wheeler Auditorium
T/Th 2:00pm – 3:30pm
CCN: 46511 / 13436

Students will participate in the key theoretical debates about global poverty and inequality.  This course will teach students about different models of poverty alleviation and methods for evaluating such models and practices.

Gender and Women’s Studies 143: Women, Poverty and Globalization
Professor Minoo Moallem
190 Barrows Hall
W 3:00pm – 6:00pm
CCN: 32963

This course examines new patterns of inequality as they relate to the feminization of poverty in a global and transnational context.  It will give students the opportunity to enhance their critical knowledge of new forms of globalization and their impact on the least-privileged groups of women locally and globally.  It also provides an opportunity for students to work with a local or global non-governmental or community organization with a focus on gender and poverty, and to engage in a systematic analysis of the strategies and practices of these organizations.  Class readings will be organized around themes such as: rights and needs; activism and community politics; economic restructuring and flexible sexism; neoliberalism and feminization of poverty; transnational institutions (GATT, World Bank, IMF); the welfare state; militarism and consumerism.

Students will be asked to work with an NGO or a community organization for a minimum of three hours a week.  They will be asked to establish a dialogue with the organization, and try to forge a theoretical connection between class readings and the activist concerns of a particular community organization.  A list of relevant NGOs and community organizations will be provided at the beginning of the semester.

Anthropology 189, Section 1: Poverty and Peripheries in the Asia Pacific
Professor Aihwa Ong
185 Barrows Hall
T/Th 11:00am – 12:30pm
CCN: 02630

Contrary to claims about the world being flat, we will discover that it is highly uneven, webbed and scaled by geopolitical rivalry and different kinds of capitalism. In this class, we will examine the tightening interrelationships between poverty, peripheries and gender across the Asia Pacific. The dynamic region is crisscrossed by links between cities and peripheries, great wealth and abject poverty, differentiated female and male labor markets, and the new rich and new coolie classes. The workings of global capital have shaped a multitude of peripheries, by both limiting prior access to resources, on the one hand, and by creating new borderlands of industries on the other. In these ecosystems of shifting, overlapping, and competing working populations, poverty acquires many meanings: inadequate wages, exploitation, job insecurity, moral unworthiness, lack of rights, and vulnerability to the capricious play of power and climate change.

Gender is explicitly deployed by corporations, labor agents and political actors as a form of labor mobilization and control in high tech manufacturing, domestic work, sex work, health & personal services. Environmental resources that the poor depend upon are now a major calculation in development projects. Increasingly, NGOs and activists are questioning the adequacy of the human rights regime to address these issues of exacerbated deprivations and diminishing access to the living conditions. In short, Asian-Pacific borderlands and borderline populations raise question of the human and new thinking about global rights in access to a planet in peril.

Economics 115: The World Economy in the 20th Century
Professor Brad DeLong
F295 Haas School of Business
T/Th 12:30pm – 2:00pm
CCN: 22525

This is a course in the history of economic experience: how economies evolved and how people lived their lives within the framework of the economy of their age in a particular time—the long twentieth century from 1870 or so to the present—for the world as a whole. It is an effort to provide an account of the development of the world economy since 1870, intended to answer the following questions:

  • How much richer today are we, as a species and a civilization, than our predecessors and ancestors of 1870 or so?
  • Why were the overwhelming majority of people in the world back in 1870 so poor by our modern-day industrial-core standards? Why weren’t they able to use their technologies to create a better standard of living for themselves and a better distribution of wealth for themselves back then?
  • Why has the past century and a third—a century and a third that has seen unprecedented growth in transportation and communications technologies—also seen unprecedented growth in the degree of income and wealth inequality around the globe?
  • What are the prospects for the future—continued divergence or convergence, continued population explosion or stability, continued growth in living standards or stagnation as Malthusian forces and other obstacles believed banished centuries ago make their reappearance?
  • We will focus on:
    • Poverty—absolute and relative
    • Economic growth
    • Living standards—elite, middle class, and poor
    • Business cycle fluctuations: booms and depressions
    • Financial integration, stability, and instability
    • Globalization—in communications, in power, in trade, in transportation, in immigration and emigration.