The rise and spread of AI over the past few years has triggered seismic disruptions across our economies and lives. Yet, this technology is just one of many recent innovations coming from a handful of Big Tech firms that may be changing the future of work, commerce, and human and nonhuman well-being. At the same time, a less public and more hidden phenomenon parallels this new source of power: The rise of global financial firms (e.g., Big Finance) that oversee the flow of trillions of dollars on which our economies and lives depend. This course dives deep into a series of examples from our everyday lives to understand how the nature of our 21st century global economy and its connections to our collective well-being. We will probe into the world of social media and Big Data in order to understand new concerns about privacy, identity, and property rights, as well as concerns of how much land, energy, and water is required to maintain the world?s data centers. We will investigate the phenomenon of personal credit and debt and how it reflects dramatic shifts in ways we access money ? as a household, a city, and a corporation ? to help us figure out why the wealth/poverty gap has increased and why our lives become intimately connected to the circulation of capital around the world. The course will travel from Chicago to southern India, Brazil, and Spain and back to Minneapolis to learn about how these tools of credit, consumption, and entertainment travel so effortlessly across borders and why an economic breakdown in one place can trigger social trouble in many places elsewhere. We will learn how diverse communities are responding -- from full-throttle outrage to mobilizations of governments and politics to take control of these world-altering business strategies. As these shifts are having substantial personal, societal, and climatological effects across the planet, the course seeks answers with the help of a transnational, sociological, and ecological perspective. In all, this course will use texts, films, lecture, student participation/discussion, the news, guest presentations, and in-class student debates, to help us become fluent in the different scholarly debates on globalization and its many social forces, connections, and imaginations. We will work in breakout groups both for reading discussions and group research projects. The goal is to maximize group interactions to learn collaboratively in innovative ways.
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