Worlding Classrooms: What Do We Teach When We Teach 'the World'?
This seminar asks what it means to teach the “world” in fields such as world cinema, world literature, comparative literature, and global media studies. Courses organized around the world often promise breadth, diversity, and cross-cultural understanding, but they also face practical and conceptual problems. What counts as the world? How does the nation appear in “world” courses? How do syllabi balance coverage, depth, translation, historical context, aesthetics, and political urgency? How do institutional expectations and restrictions mold the student imagination of the “world”? How does the positionality of the instructor presuppose, structure, or influence the “world” classroom?
