Globalization & World Culture

This course explores the cultural impacts of intensifying forces of globalization. Contemporary globalization is often defined as a rapidly intensifying global flow of capital, people, commodities, ideologies, and media images. These global flows are binding together various regions of the world economically, technologically, ideologically, and culturally. This course explores the cultural impacts of globalization in different localities to ask whether the world is becoming more culturally homogeneous or whether cultural diversity will endure. Other questions include whether globalization is different from modernization, Americanization and Westernization; how cultural identities are reconfigured and manipulated in the process of globalization; and whether forms of cultural resistance to globalization have emerged and why? Theories of globalization and case studies are discussed and analyzed.