Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Communication/Global Power Shifts (Fall 2015)

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This course examines the mutually constitutive relationship between rapidly transforming global communication systems and shifting structures of global political economic and cultural power. Competing claims of global power shifts – between the West and the Rest, between labor and capital, and between established institutions and networked “multitudes” – are analyzed in relation to enduring patterns and emerging dynamics in global communications.

The first part of the course addresses conceptual issues and provides historical, theoretical, as well as contemporary political economic and policy overviews. The second part focuses on the multifaceted intersections of an evolving geopolitics of information and ongoing processes of state transformation, market integration, and social struggles in and through a wide range of communication forms, processes, and practices in different world regions. The course demonstrates that competing claims of global power shifts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, they intersect in complex ways to define the new dynamics of power in the current era, as various social forces fight out their visions and stakes in a crises-laden global order both within and beyond the nation-state and other boundaries.