Think globally, act locally. It’s been said before.
Here, we will be concentrating globally. Meaning, we will look at international academic concentrations at Brown, where students often engage in quite rigorous research and thesis writing on some very serious matters. Examples abound. From 2010 international relations concentrators alone (and you can read the abstracts): “The Weaponization of the Civilian: Network-Centric Warfare, The Human Terrain System, and Postmodernist Critique of the 'Civilian',” “Representing 'Deportable' Subjects: Constructions of Immigrant Identities in the Discourse on Removal in the United States,” “Of Bullets and Ballots: Reforming Radical Islamists through Political Inclusion.”
In this section of the Global Conversation, over time, we will be posting presentations made by global concentrators at the end of the past academic year, bringing you titles alliterative, titles ironic – titles that run the gamut from the depressing to the quixotic. And what better place to start than with this video, made during commencement, of development studies concentration advisor Cornel Ban.
He’s very funny as he delivers “a little sociology from the helicopter” to the already somewhat bemused parents of the 2010 graduating class of DS majors. Playgrounds and dungeons are his metaphors, as are hippy communes. But then, seriously, he congratulates the seniors on the work they have done in Brown’s DS concentration – “the headquarters of critical thinking” – providing very sophisticated answers to original questions in what he considers a superb exercise in global citizenship. So watch the video, and don’t miss Cornel Ban’s Central European comparison of Franz Kafka and Stephen Colbert.
