This study examined global studies programs which emerged as a seemingly new field of knowledge in Canadian universities, beginning in 1998. These programs arose within the context of a number of transformational processes in higher education, namely internationalization, the introduction of global citizenship, an accent on civic engagement, and interdisciplinarity. By analysing institutional motivations and the personal convictions of the initiators of the new programs, the study identified a problematic lack of cohesion within the growing field of global studies in Canada. The principal method of analysis adopted in this study was the first-hand examination of a number of specific cases at different universities or institutions of higher learning, in the form of extensive interviews with leading individuals in the relevant programs. Additionally, university policy documents, reports of Canadian organizations (e.g. AUCC), and program websites were consulted in order to examine trends in global studies programs in Canada. An in-depth review of existing literature on the conceptualization of global studies as well as an analysis of diverse data collected made it possible to identify a number of problems, foremost of which was a disconnect between the theoretical aspirations for the emerging field and the understanding of global studies due to a lack of consensus in Canada on a definition of global studies. It was revealed that a common understanding of global studies in Canada is lacking. Furthermore, the analysis brought to light the diverse ideas behind the conceptualization of global studies programs, and the ways in which the personal ideas of the programs’ founders interacted with a variety of motives for designing these kinds of programs at different universities. An examination of the composition of the programs revealed their indeterminate character, as well as a remarkable overlap with the field of international development. Finally, the study offers recommendations for the leaders in global studies in Canada and provides suggestions for future research.

This study examined global studies programs which emerged as a seemingly new field of knowledge in Canadian universities, beginning in 1998. These programs arose within the context of a number of transformational processes in higher education, namely internationalization, the introduction of global citizenship, an accent on civic engagement, and interdisciplinarity. By analysing institutional motivations and the personal convictions of the initiators of the new programs, the study identified a problematic lack of cohesion within the growing field of global studies in Canada. The principal method of analysis adopted in this study was the first-hand examination of a number of specific cases at different universities or institutions of higher learning, in the form of extensive interviews with leading individuals in the relevant programs. Additionally, university policy documents, reports of Canadian organizations (e.g. AUCC), and program websites were consulted in order to examine trends in global studies programs in Canada. An in-depth review of existing literature on the conceptualization of global studies as well as an analysis of diverse data collected made it possible to identify a number of problems, foremost of which was a disconnect between the theoretical aspirations for the emerging field and the understanding of global studies due to a lack of consensus in Canada on a definition of global studies. It was revealed that a common understanding of global studies in Canada is lacking. Furthermore, the analysis brought to light the diverse ideas behind the conceptualization of global studies programs, and the ways in which the personal ideas of the programs’ founders interacted with a variety of motives for designing these kinds of programs at different universities. An examination of the composition of the programs revealed their indeterminate character, as well as a remarkable overlap with the field of international development. Finally, the study offers recommendations for the leaders in global studies in Canada and provides suggestions for future research.

Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the reproductive condition for these postsecondary education systems and their infrastructures that has emerged within regional conditions of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials. Across its chapters, university globalism is defined and cataloged via institutional practices that shape learning and labouring conditions for students, their surrounding environments, and the pedagogies administered to market and credential student experience. Chapters examine the global university, the global learning interface, the global curricular programme, the global student and the global classroom as multi-scalar sites for observing university globalism’s forms and their effects, especially on the situation of undergraduates. This formation is studied via infrastructuralism as an analytic shortcut to questions of social reproduction, political economy and their geohistories in these Global North contexts as globally dominant, mass cultural sites for global education. I posit the framework of connectivity, defined as the social and infrastructural good through which globalism is variously represented and embedded into undergraduate study, to periodize this shared regional institutional culture from the 1990s to the present. Connectivity links higher ed’s digitalization with its cosmopolitan modes of networking, identity formation, and human capital development that emerge across the institutional spectrum in public pedagogies and curriculum studied herein. This infrastructure is managerial, extractive, and socially reproduced, conditioning ambivalence and pessimism into the institutionalist modes of learning, networking and credentialing promoted by university globalism. Connectivity’s pro-social ideologies of global citizenship, inclusive excellence and social innovation are analyzed against higher ed’s proletarianizing material conditions and its anti-social foundations in racial capitalism and settler nationalism within US and Canada. This study aims to illuminate global study’s contradictory terms for undergraduates alongside their organic intellectualism within university conditions, and their affordances for critical global pedagogical practice to meet the crises of the present. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines globalism’s pedagogical and technological expressions in undergraduate student experience in the US and Canada. This study reads the global projects of these higher education systems as an infrastructure that conditions learning and credentialing as forms of anti-social, settler national and managerial self-development. By taking up the global connectivity era of the past three decades, this work brings digital infrastructures into dialogue with globalist education policies and administrative and disciplinary curricular projects in the context of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials for undergraduates in these dominant inter/national sites for global education. It ultimately argues that the double binds produced by university globalism in these settings present a pedagogical occasion for abolitionist study in our time of planetary crises, unmasking the university as a knowable cultural object in a global cultural field and its infrastructure as a glitch-filled archive of relations of power, empire, and social reproduction.

Milind Kandlikar is uncovering how Delhi’s air quality problem isn’t necessarily a traffic congestion problem.

The transnational traffic of narcotics has had undeniable impacts on international development, for instance, stagnant economic growth in Myanmar (Chin, 2009), unsustainable agricultural practices in Yemen (Robins, 2016), and human security threats in Columbia (Thoumi, 2013). Furthermore, globalization is a catalyst for the transnational narcotics traffic (Robins, 2016; Aas, 2007; Kelly, Maghan & Serio, 2005). Several qualitative studies exist on the transnational narcotics traffic, yet few quantitative studies examine the issue. There is thus an opportunity for novel quantitative studies on the general question: “what are the main economic factors that influence the transnational traffic of narcotics between countries?” This study looked at the specific question: “are distance and economic size correlated with the volume of narcotics traffic between countries?” This study chose the gravity model as it centres on bilateral trade (Tinbergen, 1962), accounts for trade barriers (Kalirajan, 2008) and is empirically robust (Anderson 2011). This study defined a basic functional gravity model relating a proxy of the narcotics traffic to distance and economic size. Four augmented functional gravity models were also advanced to address omitted variable bias. The research was limited conceptually to cross sectional and pooled time series data. In addition, the data was also limited practically to a convenience sample of secondary data drawn from: the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) (2016a) Individual Drug Seizures (IDS); the World Bank’s (2016) World Development Indicators; and the CEPII’s GeoDist (2016) datasets. This study used a novel “dosage” approach to unit standardization to overcome the challenge posed by the many measures and forms of narcotics. The study used the Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimator as its estimations of the gravity model are consistent (Gourieroux et al., 1984), allow heteroscedasticity (Silva & Tenreyro, 2006) and avoid back transformation bias (Cox et al., 2008). The evidence analyzed in this study seem to indicate that the gravity model may not be applicable in its current form to the transnational narcotics traffic among countries that report drug seizures to the UNODC. However, the sampling method and the choice of proxy are likely to influence these findings. Moreover, the low explanatory power of the gravity model for the narcotics traffic, reflected in the values of the pseudo-R-squared coefficient of determination, indicates that other factors are at play. For instance, authors such as Asad and Harris (2003) and Thoumi (2003) argue that institutions could be a key factor in the narcotics traffic. Future empirical research into this topic could build on the theses findings to introduce new proxies and to explore alternate theoretical frameworks.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This item contains the agenda, minutes, and attachments for the Faculty Senate meeting on this date. There may be additional materials from the meeting available at the Faculty Center.