Global Markets, Local Culture Course Descriptor

Course Overview

Globalisation is a key feature of modern life, helping reshape markets, transform politics, reconfigure social structures, and remake cultural practices in localities throughout the world. Yet globalisation is not simply a set of forces that are enacted “from above”. Rather, macro-level processes, practices, and ideologies are mediated and shaped by local culture, sub-national politics, and social practices in communities, neighbourhoods, villages, cities, and nations around the world. This course explores the varied and often contradictory processes and consequences of global capitalist development in a diverse set of localities.

Course Aims

The course aims to: 

• Provide a foundation in the field of anthropology and globalisation.
• Improve critical thinking skills.
• Improve analytical writing skills.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Professional Skills

Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning strategies for this course will include: 

Indicative contact hours: 36 hours, typically to include interactive group teaching, co-curriculars, individual meetings, and in-class presentations and exams. 

Course information and supplementary materials are available on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). 

Students will receive individualised developmental feedback on their work for this course. 

Students are required to attend and participate in all the formal and timetabled sessions for this course. Students are also expected to manage their directed learning and independent study in support of the course.

Assessment

Formative

Students will be formatively assessed in class through class activities. Formative assessments are ones that do not count towards the final grade but will provide students with developmental feedback.

Summative

Feedback

Students will receive feedback in a variety of ways: written (including via email correspondence); oral (within office hours or on an ad hoc basis) and indirectly through class discussion.

Feedback on examinations is provided through generic internal examiners’ reports and are made available to the student on the VLE. For all other summative assessment methods, feedback is made available to the student either via email, the VLE or another appropriate method.

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is used as part of the approval/modification process only.

Books 

Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2009

Chang, Leslie T. Factory girls: From village to city in a changing China. Random House Digital, Inc., 2009.

Reichman, Daniel. The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras. Cornell University Press. 2011

Indicative Topics

• The Anthropology of Globalisation
• Global Citizenship: Who is Global? Where is the Global?
• The Culture of Financial Markets
• Structural Adjustments and New Economic Programs
• Global Commodity Chains: Coffee and Tea
• Global Citizenship revisited
• Gender and the Global Workforce