SOC4321
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SOC 4321 - The New Global Economy: Big Tech, Big Finance, and the Future of Work, Consumption, and Well-being (3 Cr.) Global Perspectives
Sociology (10987)TCLA - College of Liberal Arts
Course description
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.
SOC majors/minors must register A-F.
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.
SOC majors/minors must register A-F.
Minimum credits
3
Maximum credits
3
Is this course repeatable?
No
Grading basis
AFV - A-F or Audit
Lecture
Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for:
00847
This course fulfills the following Liberal Education requirement(s)
Global Perspectives
Fulfills the writing intensive requirement?
No
Typically offered term(s)
Periodic Spring