Global Studies

Director of the Center for Global Studies: Nicole Simek

About the Concentration

The Concentration in Global Studies is a framework for students to demonstrate and be recognized for in-depth interdisciplinary engagement with global themes, processes, and problems, regardless of their majors or minors.

Please contact the Director for the Center of Global Studies for a complete list of concentration-affiliated faculty who may serve as advisors. Students may declare the Concentration at any time after they have declared a major and before the final semester of their Senior year.

Learning Goals

After completing the concentration in Global Studies, students should be able to:

• Move beyond seeing “the global” as exclusively “foreign.” They will be able to place themselves and their communities in webs of natural, economic, cultural, and social connections that defy geopolitical borders.
• Articulate how they have worked to defamiliarize their own assumptions about the world and their positions in it through rigorous, sustained engagement with difference.
• Demonstrate the ways that their education at Whitman has helped them make complex connections among various disciplinary perspectives on important global issues. More specifically, students should be able to demonstrate how they have engaged with the concepts of “global systems and histories,” “global circulations and movements,” and “global places and events” (as described below) from multiple disciplinary perspectives.