APPLIES TO ACADEMIC YEAR 2014/2015

ELE 3749 Globalization

Responsible for the course
Steffen Johannessen

Department
Department of Communication and Culture

Term
According to study plan

ECTS Credits
7,5

Language of instruction
Norwegian

Introduction
The development of affordable communication technologies, goods- and passenger transport, has important impacts on migration, international trade, and a number of other defining features of our times. These developments also affect contemporary discourses on globalization. Globalization also includes sub-discourses on political-, cultural- as well as economic integration. It further clarifies the contrast between the particular and the universal. The course aims to provide the students with an awareness of conditions for, and central consequences of, globalization.

Learning outcome
Acquired knowledge
On completion of the course the students shall have:

• Developed insights into important discourses concerning globalization, including technological, economic, socio-political and cultural discourses.
• Learned how to identify central triggers in discourses on globalization.
• Learned how to identify cultural patterns on local and global levels, understand processes of diasporization, as well as the concepts and interconnections between particularity and universality.
• Acquired basic overview of important migration flows.
• Acquired a basic overview of central (and emerging) financial markets.

• Identify development trends in contemporary globalization.
• Identify and discuss global geopolitical power structures, and identify development trends in these power structures.
• Identify and discuss critical relations between political and economic sectors.
• Account for the changing role of the nation state in regard to critical global issues such as climate change, international trade and migration, terrorism, judicial policy, etc.

• Globalization and distance: processes that restructure social relations in ways that make them less dependent on time and space, for example people’s relations to money as a means of payment
• Acceleration: compression of time and space
• Acceleration in mass media
• Standardization of cultural, humanistic, socio-political scales
• Translocal networking: ICT-based network societies
• Network Society, NGO influence, power and powerlessness
• Mobility: tourism, migration, diaspora communities, creolization and hybrid societies
• Vulnerability: natural disasters, terrorism, climate change, vulnerability of transport and digital networks
• Reactions: identification processes and self-understanding
• Global trade
• Migration with particular focus on immigration to Norway
• Labour-market structures in respect of Norwegian diasporas
• New economic power structures

The course consists of 45 hours, divided into classroom teaching, project work and supervising. The content of the course is theory-based.