Grappling with Global-Personal and Victim-Culprit Tensions Reflections on Teaching Globalization Courses

Introduction This essay is a reflection on my experience in teaching sociology courses on globalization. I was hired by the Department of Sociology of the University of Alberta ten years ago to create globalization courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Trained in world-system studies at SUNY-Binghamton, I thought I could introduce to the students the useful tools to critically examine globalization. My pedagogical objective for the undergraduate courses, however, quickly turned to juxtaposing globalization against 'personal' for a couple of reasons. First, I was frustrated with the division of roles in classroom between the instructor and the students as the provider and receiver of knowledge, respectively. This role assignment usually makes students passive participants in classroom while the instructor is expected to turn into an entertainer. I was not impressed with my ability to entertain, and I believed that the students could play the role of entertainer with their personal examination of their roles in globalization. Secondly, I was frustrated with the complacency of the privileged middle class students from the Global North. Critical examination of globalization would involve questioning their lifestyles and privileges they take for granted. Also, they may be victim of globalization due to corporate infringements on environment, labor rights, and sovereignty particularly in the Global South, (1) even though the university students in Canada may be primarily the beneficiary of corporate activities. The best way to make them realize their involvement is to critically examine their personal involvement in globalization. These frustrations made me develop globalization courses that juxtapose a large-scale social process and students' personal involvement, and that examine contradictory and complicated ways we interact with globalization both as victim and culprit. I am using the term 'global-personal tension' to describe the challenge of putting personal against global, and the term 'victim-culprit tension' to describe the exercise of examining our multiple and often contradictory involvements in globalization. The lineage of my pedagogical concerns involving 'personal' in the world-system studies started with the exciting undergraduate courses my good friend Mohammad H. (Behrooz) Tamdgidi taught at SUNY-Binghamton and then at SUNY-Oneonta in the 1990s. He asked his students to apply the world-system approach to the understanding of their personal development, thus providing opportunity to critically reflect upon themselves and those who were influencing them at various life stages. At the end of the Spring 1997 semester at SUNY-Binghamton, he published a selection of his students' essays in a book titled in the World-System: Stories from an Odd Sociology Class. The volume was a rare accomplishment in an undergraduate course since most of the term papers in university/college courses remain personal. Making student papers open to the public empowers the students (and instructor) since it provides a forum to continue engaging in learning/teaching experience. Even though the book initially met a challenge when the parents of a student contributor demanded the university to stop its publication because they were embarrassed by the critical assessment they received from their child, the university solidly stood on the side of the instructor and the student's freedom of expression and the book was published. While I do not have the capability to publish student essays, I learned from Tamdgidi's efforts the importance of putting the student at the center of learning experience. Tamdgidi criticized the world-system studies for their Euro-centric, economic, and macro bias, and he suggested alternatives that build on his reinterpretation and hybrid introduction of Marx, Gurdjieff, and Mannheim (Tamdgidi 2003). The two tensions I was grappling in my globalization courses were among the primary scholastic concerns he has been engaging in since his graduate student days. …

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