Course Description
Summary
The ability to easily share culture across borders is often viewed as one of the benefits of globalization. But while enjoying the next Bad Bunny or BTS track, we should keep in mind that powerful global institutions like the United Nations also participate in globalizing culture, frequently with serious consequences.
This introductory course explores the ways that the idea of culture underpins legal and political discourses, frameworks and agendas. Using the work of post-colonial, feminist and legal anthropologists, we will do a close (and interesting!) reading of primary sources, such as UN protocols and conventions, asylum and refugee principles, and development and anti-trafficking campaigns to explore: the boundaries of culture’s explanatory power; how problematic assumptions about the Global South are reproduced and mobilized through cultural explanations; and how activists from the Global South respond to and reframe these assumptions.
