GLOBALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY - Carleton U
My friend and colleague Dale will be teaching a course on one of my favourite themes! I am going to probably audit this course as it looks super awesome! I have seen a partial reading list and it looks great.
JANUARY 2010: GEOGRAPHY 4024
Subject to sufficient demand, a seminar course focused on:
“GLOBALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY”
If interested, Sign Up ASAP!
Instructor – Dale Armstrong
Introduction: Globalization is commonly taken to be an amalgam of five main elements: culture, economics, environment, geopolitics, and technology. The purpose of this course is to highlight the technological component of globalization. Crucial to understanding the nature of technological progress is to realize that technology does not simply ‘happen’ in a vacuum but, rather, is a function of both new technical innovations and the political decisions surrounding their implementation. In fact, ‘technogeopolitical’ decisions occur at a variety of scales across different environments, and are motivated by the idea of achieving particular end states to suit certain purposes.
Thus, what is important to keep in mind is that while globalization tends to ‘flatten’ the cultural and economic landscape, the politics of technology may well be applied in ways that perpetuate inequalities at various scales. Using both historical and contemporary examples, this seminar course draws attention to politics, strategy, and technology at the global, national, and regional/local levels. Particularly important from the contemporary perspective is the fact that the emerging, global, ‘infosphere’, and the networks therein, represent a new landscape of contested political control.
Provisional Topics:
