The bewildering complexity of the interconnections as well as the vast scale and dramatic impacts of the changes associated with the term in day-to-day use can leave us ill-equipped to answer the basic question: what is globalization? This course aims to address the challenge that this entails by bringing a critical sociological imagination to bear on the study of globalization. This means that the course develops a conceptual framework for studying globalization that is attentive to (a) how globalizing processes at the macro-scale of social structure impact upon concrete locales and individual biographies at a micro-scale, and how the latter provides us with a window through which to begin to study the former, and (b) how the impacts of globalizing processes in different spheres of social life are shaped by power differentials between social groups, institutions, and regions in the world-system, and the issues of social justice that this raises. Moreover, the course will investigate how the proliferation of transnational practices and relations that propels globalizing processes also entails challenges for the parameters of sociological inquiry itself, by eroding the tenability of analytic perspectives that conceive of the nation-state as a container of the structures, processes, and phenomena that we engage with in scholarly pursuits. The specific contents of the course will vary from year to year, and the course will investigate the impacts of globalization across a diversity of empirical fields of research.

Upon the completion of the course the student should be able to

• Discuss a range of critical theories about globalization and have developed the ability to utilize these theories in critical discussion and analysis of a wide range of challenges related to processes of global social change.
• Discuss the complexities and conflicts created by current global processes of societal transformation and to analyse how these processes are shaped by uneven, unequal, and contested power relations.
• Discuss the historical dimension of current processes of global social change
• Discuss the implications of globalization for the social sciences in general and more specifically for sociological thinking.
• Critically assess the ways in which sociological theories and analyses conceive of spatial scale in the analysis of global processes of social transformation.

Lectures: 20-24 hours

Seminars: 20-24 hours

Mandatory term paper (3000 words +/- 10 percent).

The essay will be commented and must be approved before the student can take the written exam.

The course will be evaluated by students and lecturer according to approved plan of evaluation for all bachelor and master subjects in sociology.

Department of Sociology