Third World Studies at Hampshire College

Globalization and Third World Studies
Globalization has become the focus of extensive debate and scholarship regarding the “Third World” that emerged in the context of half a millennium of European expansion. Although the Third World is increasingly differentiated internally, it has suffered the multiple impacts of colonialism and comparative poverty.

A recent intensification of global processes has been marked by technological advances in communication, rapid movement of financial capital, growth of supranational legal and political institutions and advocacy networks; and sometimes extreme destabilization of families, historical identities, and communities.

Students are encouraged to engage these issues through a variety of disciplines: history, economics, the arts, legal studies, and politics, among others. Students are also encouraged to learn new languages and visit disadvantaged regions.

Student Project Titles

 * Mine Div III: The World’s Largest Goldmine and the Free Papua Movement
 * Facilitating Development for Rural Women: Theory and Analysis of ICT use in Gender Development Practices in Rural India
 * Kayamandi: A Township’s Struggle to Educate its Children in Post-Apartheid South Africa
 * Strange Tongues: Language and the Politics of Assimilation
 * Building Dutiful Daughters: Cultural Violence in Thai Prostitution
 * Nari Jibon Microcredit Project
 * Nigeria’s Lost Generation: Deconstructing the Area
 * Boy Phenomenon
 * State-Society Relations: The Politics of Agency and the Quest for Women’s Empowerment in Kenya’s Post-Independence Era

Featured Faculty Profiles
Laurie Nisonoff Professor of Economics

Elizabeth Hartmann Director of the Population and Development Program, Professor of Development Studies

Omar S. Dahi Assistant Professor of Economics

Sample First-Year Course

 * World Trade and the WTO

What is the World Trade Organization (WTO) and how does it function? What is the relationship between economic trade theory and WTO policies? How do decisions made at the WTO impact the lives of people in developed and developing countries? We will examine these questions by drawing upon writings (by scholars, activists, labor unionists) and film documentaries. After developing a general idea of the structure and impact of the WTO, we will specifically explore why the 2003 Cancun meetings were considered a significant ‘victory’ for developing countries and whether an alternative strategy to neoliberal globalization is beginning to emerge.

Sample Courses at Hampshire

 * African Development
 * Border Matters: Mexico &amp; the U.S.
 * Comparitive Orientalisms: Afro/Arab/Asian Connections
 * The Cuban Revolution: Visions, Reality, Crisis &amp; Collapse
 * Culture, Religion &amp; Environmentalism
 * Ethnography of South Asia
 * Empires &amp; Citizenship: Postcoloniality &amp; Puerto Rican Communities
 * Global Ethnography
 * Globalization &amp; Africa
 * Interrogating Fear: Bioterror, the Environment &amp; the Construction of Threats
 * Locating Resistance in a Globalizing World
 * Making of Modern South Asia
 * North-South or South-South? International
 * Economic Relations in the Age of Globalization
 * Reproductive Rights: Domestic and International Perspectives
 * Rethinking the Population Problem
 * The State &amp; Politics in Africa
 * Social Movements &amp; Social Change: Zapatismo
 * Third World, Second Sex
 * World Trade &amp; the WTO

Through the Consortium

 * Africa: Problems &amp; Prospects (SC)
 * Documenting Change: Southeast Asia (AC)
 * Gender &amp; Economic Development (UMass)
 * The Press &amp; the 3rd World (UMass)
 * Seminar in Third World Development (MHC)
 * World Politics (AC)

Facilities and Resources
The Global Migrations Program is a college-wide initiative funded by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation to rethink cold war paradigms of knowledge and citizenship in light of the unprecedented movements of persons across national and cultural borders that characterize our globalizing world. The program seeks to develop new curricular initiatives that are responsive to these transnational, multicultural movements and the local conflicts over identity, belonging, and citizenship to which they give rise, asking: What happens when we make migration/movement the focus of our teaching and learning rather than discrete nations/cultures, when we emphasize “routes” over “roots”?

The Population and Development Program was established in 1986 to bring a global perspective to the study and investigation of population and environmental issues and to challenge traditional views of over-population and immigration as primary causes of environmental degradation, political instability, and poverty. The program now serves as a documentation and monitoring resource for educators, students, journalists, activists, leaders, and policy makers in the U.S. and abroad. The program offers courses and forums, sponsors visiting scholars and activists to speak on campus, and publishes and curricula advancing alternative analysis and investigation on reproductive rights, population, development, environmentalism, and women’s health.

The Five College Peace and World Security Studies Program was established in 1982 by faculty from the Five College consortium to enhance undergraduate education in the field of peace and international security studies. The program has since grown into a major educational effort which offers publications, workshops, course offerings at the Five Colleges, public lectures and conferences, and a student leadership program.

The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture series focuses on issues of the Third World and honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, a long-time professor of world politics at Hampshire College. The event has attracted many notable speakers. Secretary-General Kofi Annan inaugurated the series in academic year 1998-1999. Other speakers have included renowned professor and author of Orientalism, Edward Said; Palestinian doctor and recent candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority, Mustafa Barghouthi; as well as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Information From Quoted: http://www.hampshire.edu/admissions/globalization.htm