Past Courses

Fall 2011

Fall 2011

S,SEASN 120: Re-Imagining Pakistan

Ali, N

South and Southeast Asian Studies 120 | CCN 83260 | TuTh 2-3:30 | 4 Units

This course will examine diverse life-worlds of Pakistan, from a historical, ethnographic and literary perspective. It will cover topics such as the political economy of feudalism, rural modernities,kinship ties, political Islam, and gender struggles. Apart from enriching students’ understandings of a very critical country in South Asia, a key aim of the course is to explore some of the particular stereotypes and simplifications about Pakistan and Pakistanis that tend to dominate Western representations of Pakistan.

Spring 2011

PP C103: Wealth and Poverty

Professor Robert Reich

Public Policy C103 | CCN 77124 | Friday 12-2 | 4 Units

This course is designed to provide students with a deeper understanding both of the organization of the political economy in the United States and of other advanced economies, and of why the distribution of earnings, wealth, and opportunity have been diverging in the United States and in other nations. It also is intended to provide insights into the political and public-policy debates that have arisen in light of this divergence, as well as possible means of reversing it.

LS158: Law and Development

Lecturer in Residence Jamie O’Connell

Legal Studies 158 | CCN 51587 | MWF 1-2 pm | 4 Units

The course will introduce students to major theoretical and practical problems connected to the interaction of law with development. Throughout the course, we will consider the range of ways in which major scholars and development institutions understand “development” and “law.” This is the first course offering in Berkeley Law specially designed for students in the GPP minor.

PH 112: Global Health

Professor Art Reingold

Public Health 112 | CCN 75644 | T-Th 12:30-2 pm | 4 Units

Good health, which is not simply the absence of illness and injury, is the result of the complex interplay of many factors, including the legal, social, political, and physical environments, economic forces, food availability and nutrition, access to safe water and sanitation, cultural beliefs and human behaviors, religion, and the availability of affordable preventive measures such as vaccines and of curative services, among others. By definition, global health transcends geo-political borders and standard academic disciplines, so a broad multi-disciplinary approach to its study and understanding is required.

UGBA 195: Entrepreneurship to Address Global Poverty

Professor John Danner

UGBA 195 | CCN 08314 | Th 1-4 pm | 3 Units

E2AGP is designed as a campus wide course that takes an interdisciplinary look at poverty and its related challenges from an entrepreneur’s perspective of designing sustainable venture solutions that can turn those challenges into opportunities—rather than that of a policy maker, advocate, researcher or professional service worker in the field. We will examine whether and how global poverty can be addressed through private sector entrepreneurial initiatives that complement other, more traditional efforts such as government programs, private philanthropy and corporate social responsibility activities.

IAS 180: Educational Justice: The Dream Act and Struggles Against Poverty

Lecturer Genevieve Negron-Gonzales

IAS 180 | CCN 46474 | T-Th 9:30-11 am | 3 Units

This course situates the pressing contemporary situation of U.S.-dwelling undocumented immigrant children within the broader context of global capitalism, migration and displacement, and the material discourse around citizenship and belonging. The struggle for educational justice relates directly to this generation of students, especially those in the Global Poverty and Practice minor, who are concerned with issues of inequality and social movements that grow out of unequal power relations.

UGBA 196: Selecting Successful Strategies to Reduce Global Poverty

Professor Paul Gertler

UGBA 196, Section 7 (will be cross listed with Public Health, TBA) | CCN 08346 | M-W 8-9:30 am | 3 Units

Development programs and policies are intended to change outcomes such as raising incomes, increasing productivity, improving learning, or reducing illness. Whether or not these changes in outcomes are actually achieved are crucial public policy and business questions, yet are not often examined. This course covers the methods and applications of impact evaluations, which is the science of measuring the causal impact of a program or policy on outcomes of interest.

IAS 140: Markets and Missions: A Practicum on Social Enterprise

Lecturer Jonathan Lewis

IAS 140 | No Open Registration, please see registration instructions below | M 3-6 pm, 8 weeks from January 24 to March 14 | 2 units

Markets and Missions: A Practicum on Entrepreneurial Poverty Solutions is a project-based course which critically and creatively examines social entrepreneurship, both in its for-profit and nonprofit forms, as a tool in the service of a world without poverty. Lectures will address the broad range of ethical, strategic and on-the-ground tactical realities which challenge and confront social change agents. This is a 8 week practicum course taught by a well-known practitioner in the world of social enterprise and microfinance investment.

To gain entry into this course, students must be of junior or senior standing and must submit an application explaining their interest in social enterprise.

IAS 140: Field Reporting in the Digital Age: Using Media Tools for Social Justice

Lecturer Tara Graham

IAS 140 | No open registration, please see registration instructions below | W 5-8 pm, 8 weeks from January 26 to March 16 | 2 Units

This course will offer students in the Global Poverty and Practice minor the opportunity to explore different forms of media to document, represent and communicate their fieldwork experiences. The course will focus on providing students with specific methods and approaches used by “backpack journalists” to post accurate, timely and engaging web content through the weaving of old and new storytelling techniques. Specifically, students will learn how to write for the web using basic interviewing and reporting practices. They will experiment with a variety of web-based tools used to complement and advance their research findings. They will each launch a website and blog (using a content management system) to house all content produced in the field. Students should walk away with the skill set and strategy necessary for packaging their field experiences into coherent web presentations.

This 8 week skills course is taught by a practicing journalist. It will be especially useful to those of you who plan to do your practice experience in Summer 2011. To gain entry into this course, students must be enrolled in or have completed IAS 105 and must have a laptop that they can bring to class each week for in-class lab work.

Fall 2010

Anthropology 189A: Poverty, Rights & Culture in the Asia Pacific
Professor Aihwa Ong
Tuesday, Thursday | 9:30 am – 11:00 am | 126 Barrows | 4 units

This course will explore conflicts between the moral claims of poverty, culture and rights discourse in the Asia-Pacific. In the West, human rights are promoted as a moral form of enlightened globalization, whereas in an emergent Asia, politicians view rights discourse as a strategy of cultural imperialism. This course will take us through different Asian cases where moral norms for protecting the weak, as sovereign rights, are often in tension with transnational rights discourse and interventions.

Part I highlights the contrasting moral schemes at work in rural and urban environments in Asia. Peasant societies, well-schooled in calamities wreaked by human and natural disasters, frequently enshrine a moral worldview based on distributive justice. With urbanization and industrialization, moral beliefs in social justice are becoming displaced by an idiom of capitalism that measures moral worthiness in terms of skills and education, not moral claims for protection. Furthermore, as traditional or religious moral values are threatened by the influx of female migrants into cities, and thus the weakening of social protection and controls over women.

In Part II, we consider how Western notions of human rights and humanitarianism are formulated as moral interventions into the developing world. On the one hand, there is the challenge of translating abstract notions of rights and equality into actual norms and practices, whether among the poor in India or refugee communities in California. On the other, the universalist claims of human rights are challenged in various contexts of intervention.

In Asia, some theorists reformulate rights as social capabilities of the poor that should be strengthened, while others warn against romancing poverty. Meanwhile, global health interventions intended to benefit poor countries may weaken local governments or expose the poor to new kinds of exploitation. Technological fixes for environmental problems may increase rather than mitigate poverty and pollution. Lessons from these cases include the uncertain outcomes of rights intervention and that only when ordinary people everywhere take action are the chances of owning rights & protecting the earth most promising.

Energy and Resources Group 175: Water and Development
Professor Isha Ray
Tuesday & Thursday | 9:30 am – 11:00 am | 56 Barrows Hall | 4 units

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? This 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.

Gender and Women’s Studies 143: Women, Poverty & Globalization
Professor Minoo Moallem
Wednesdays | 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm | 608 Barrows Hall | 4 units

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.”

Spring 2010

Information 181: Poverty and Technology
Professor Jenna Burrell
Tuesday & Thursday | 11:00 am -1:30 pm | 202 South Hall | 3 units

This course will encourage students to think broadly about the interplay between technological systems, social processes, economic activities, 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.

Public Health 112: Global Health – A Multidisciplinary Examination
Professor Arthur Reingold
Professor Suneeta Krishnan
Monday & Wednesday | 12:00 pm -2:00 pm | 101 Morgan Hall | 4 units

Good health at the individual and community level is central to human happiness, economic development, and societal progress. Good health, which is not simply the absence of illness and injury, is the result of the complex interplay of many factors, including the legal, social, political, and physical environments, economic forces, food availability and nutrition, access to safe water and sanitation, cultural beliefs and human behaviors, religion, and the availability of affordable preventive measures such as vaccines and of curative services, among others. By definition, global health transcends geo-political borders and standard academic disciplines, so a broad multi-disciplinary approach to its study and understanding is required. This course is open to all undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley and has no prerequisites. Discussion section required.

Public Policy 103 / Letters & Science 180U: Wealth & Poverty
Professor Robert Reich
Wednesday | 5:00 – 7:00 pm | Wheeler Auditorium| 4 units

UGBA 195S: Entrepreneurship to Address Global Poverty
Professor John Danner
Thursday | 3:00 – 6:00pm | C230 Cheit | 3 units

Can you do good and do well at the same time? This course explores how entrepreneurial ventures can help address global poverty in ways that do not depend primarily on foreign aid, corporate social responsibility initiative, philanthropy, or volunteerism to be sustainable. You will hear perspectives from faculty experts as well as directly from this new breed of entrepreneurs active around the globe.

Fall 2009

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

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.

Summer 2009

City & Regional Planning 190: Nairobi Summer Design Studio
Professor Jason Corburn

Over the summer of 2009, a team of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students, led by DCRP Associate Professor Jason Corburn, focused on providing alternatives to the river clean-up displacement plan for informal settlements in the Mathare Valley of Nairobi. The interdisciplinary team of students and faculty are partnering with Kenyan-based NGOs Pamoja Trust and Muungano va Wanjivivi, students and faculty from the University of Nairobi’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning among others.

During the summer studio course, students researched and created housing and infrastructure upgrade plans to improve river water quality by limiting pollution while also improving living conditions. The hope is that comprehensive social, physical, and environmental plans can help residents build political power, avoid eviction, and begin to address widespread discrimination, insecurity, and marginalization that slum dwellers often experience. In August 2009, the students will travel to Nairobi in order to refine these plans in collaboration with their partners.

Jason Corburn is an associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and a member of the Global Metropolitan Studies initiative at UC Berkeley. He co-directs the joint Master of City Planning (MCP) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program at UC Berkeley. [More Details]

Spring 2009

Civil & Environmental Engineering 290: Design for Sustainable Communities
*This course was also supported in 2007 and 2008
Professor Ashok Gadgil
MW 10:00am – 12:00pm | 24 Wheeler

This course provides concepts and hands-on design experience with innovative products or processes for improving sustainability of communities. The focus will be resource-constrained communities (mostly poor ones in the developing countries). Teams of three or four students each will take on separate practical projects, with guidance from subject experts, to help mature technical/scientific innovations into useful products or processes.
Student teams will have the option to define their own project with the instructor’s approval, or may choose from a variety of existing opportunities. For every project, a research mentor is required.

Ashok Gadgil is a Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering and is a Senior Scientist and Deputy Director (for Strategic Planning) in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

History 114B: Cities & Citizenship in South Asia
Professor Janaki Nair
MWF 1:00 – 2:00pm | 182 Dwinelle | CCN: 39489 | 4 units

How has the city in South Asia historically been the site where notions of citizenship, particularly as they concern the urban poor, were crafted, contested or redefined? This course will explore the modern history of South Asia (19th and 20th centuries) through its cities, to consider some of the enduring consequences of colonial rule/nationalist politics and post colonial policies for the contemporary predicaments of the working poor.

Janaki Nair is Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and is most recently the author of the book The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (OUP, 2005).

Peace and Conflict Studies 119: Vulnerability and Resilience in Armed Conflicts and Post-Conflict Settings
Professor Francesca Giovannini
MW 4:00 – 5:30pm | 30 Wheeler | CCN: 66733 | 4 units

This course seeks to examine the concept of “social vulnerability” in armed conflicts and post conflict setting by analyzing specifically the numerous roles that children, youth and women play (or are forced to) in ethnic civil conflicts. Departing from the analysis of theories of ethnic warfare and international peacemaking, the course will offer a broad overview of the legal and policy tools developed by the International Community to protect vulnerable categories.

Francesca Giovannini has over five years of experience serving in international organizations and NGOs and has most recently served as lecturer in the International and Area Studies Teaching Program since 2007.

UGBA 196, Section 1: Entrepreneurship to Address Global Poverty
Professor John Danner
Thursday 4:00 – 7:00pm | C230 Cheit | CCN: 08712 | 3 units

John Danner, Senior Fellow of The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, brings extensive experience to the classroom as an entrepreneur, advisor to global enterprises and emerging ventures, and as a former senior executive in state and federal government.

Fall 2008

Energy and Resources Group 175: Water and Development
Professor Isha Ray
185 Barrows
T/Th 12:30pm – 2pm
CCN: 27432

INFORMATION 190: Poverty and Technology
Professor Jenna Burrell
110 South Hall
MW 10:30am – 12pm
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.

Spring 2007

Economics 172: Issues in African Economic Development
Professor Edward Miguel

This course examines major current issues in development economics, with a focus on how they relate to Sub-Saharan Africa. The course covers both the core economic theories and statistical methods, as well as relevant historical and political topics.

Edward Miguel is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center of Evaluation for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000.

Public Health 181: Population and Poverty
Professor Malcolm Potts

This course provides a rigorous understanding of the relationships between population growth factor in the world’s poorest countries and regions, poverty, and women’s autonomy and health.

Malcolm Potts is the Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning in the School of Public Health.