Global Affairs responds to today’s borderless challenges by teaching students to articulate and join projects of responsible collective action. These projects are ambitious by necessity and by design: they connect actors, ideas, and resources at all scales of human organization, from the local to the planetary.
The interdisciplinary Global Affairs major collects the global expertise of Rice faculty across 13 departments in the School of Social Sciences and the School of Humanities. Together, faculty and students seek answers to 3 big questions:
(1) How do local events interlock to have global effects? For example, how did anti-government protests during the “Arab Spring” contribute to a wave of anti-corporate “occupations” of public spaces in Europe and North America? Our curriculum supplies students with a robust theoretical toolkit for conceptualizing global phenomena as interlocking local actions.
(2) How do individuals organize in groups to spur global change? For example, why do some respond to climate change by working through global diplomatic fora while others promote a decentralized system of local adaptation? Our major invites students to discover the entire menu of impactful collective action. We bring global affairs practitioners into the classroom to help students prototype ways of becoming active global citizens themselves.
(3) In a world of linguistic and cultural differences, how do individuals and groups strive to understand and respond to each other’s definition of global challenges? For example, what explains the success of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative to harness the resources of global and local governments and community organizations in more than 200 countries and territories? Students will combine language study with expertise in global public policy to become culturally sensitive and responsible policy makers in government, advocacy, arts, business, and education.