Mission

Miami University students at the University of Havana (study tour Cuba in Transition 2018)

The Department of Global and Intercultural Studies (GIC) prepares students to engage in an increasingly interconnected, integrated, and transformative world. Students will explore contemporary problems and issues from a number of different perspectives, disciplines, and frames of reference. GIC fosters critical self-awareness, understanding of how one's position in and relation to world cultures, including American, impacts one's individual, family, community, national, transnational, and global perspective. Students will develop skills to critically examine issues of power and inequality from the local to the global.

The Department of Global and Intercultural Studies (GIC) offers a broad-based study of the processes and problems that transcend national boundaries and critically engaged intercultural and intersectional issues such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. As a department, GIC focuses on a wide array of historical themes and emergent realities in a rapidly-changing world, fosters global consciousness, instills a sense of global citizenship, and foregrounds myriad, complex patterns of power and inequality that define and will continue to define the 21st century:

• mobility;
• migrations;
• diasporas and diasporic communities;
• war, conflict resolution, and peace;
• human rights;
• social justice;
• gender and sexual identities;
• global governance structures, bodies, treaties, laws, trade agreements, and institutions;
• complicated and multi-directional movements (or impeding of movements) of people, capital, commodities, ideas, and information across regional, national, and continental boundaries;
• economic, environmental, and political development, including uneven and unequal patterns of power;
• decision-making, policy-creation, and development;
• transnationalism and transnational cultural, political, social, financial, economic, environmental exchanges;
• the role of culture, including popular culture, in framing and shaping individual identities, local and transnational exchanges, and larger power structures;
• other salient issues through interdisciplinary methods and theoretical frames.

As co-majors of the department, Miami University students are offered an opportunity to enhance their primary degree through a broad interdisciplinary framework that includes multinational, international, transnational, national institutions, diaspora communities and cultures, and regional social, political, economic, and cultural issues associated with social justice, human rights, equity and equality.

Goals

• Explore questions of culture and identity in our increasingly interconnected world.
• Learn about the transnational flows of persons, ideas, and objects that characterize globalization today and have historically shaped our world.
• Propose solutions to contemporary problems using different perspectives, disciplines, and frames of reference.