Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World

Rating:
Summary: An incredible resource!
Review: Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson have put together a compendium of articles that attest to their central claim that, when thinking about the globalization phenomenon, "everything is connected. You can't really understand what's going on in one part of the world without looking at how it's related to everything else." Poetry, essays, illustrations, graphs, memoirs, and classroom exercises (one of my favorites: "How do you live on 31 cents a day?", p. 145) are collected that deal with colonialism, sweatshops, child labor, food production and distribution, consumerism and culture, and neoliberal capitalism. The selections are written by some of the best people in the field, and are almost always interesting. My only reservation is that Bigelow and Peterson could've spent more time on the military connection. But then one book can't be expected to do everything.

Bigelow and Peterson teach high school and fifth grade, and the anthology was clearly born from their desire to dialogue with their own students about globalization. But the anthology isn't limited to teenagers. It's actually a quite sophisticated and close-to-comprehensive collection that I intend to use in one of my own college classes on peace and justice. It fits a number of audiences nicely--high school, undergraduate college, lay reading.

Highly recommended! It would make a great post-Christmas, anti-consumerism gift.

Rating:
Summary: An incredible resource!
Review: Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson have put together a compendium of articles that attest to their central claim that, when thinking about the globalization phenomenon, "everything is connected. You can't really understand what's going on in one part of the world without looking at how it's related to everything else." Poetry, essays, illustrations, graphs, memoirs, and classroom exercises (one of my favorites: "How do you live on 31 cents a day?", p. 145) are collected that deal with colonialism, sweatshops, child labor, food production and distribution, consumerism and culture, and neoliberal capitalism. The selections are written by some of the best people in the field, and are almost always interesting. My only reservation is that Bigelow and Peterson could've spent more time on the military connection. But then one book can't be expected to do everything.

Bigelow and Peterson teach high school and fifth grade, and the anthology was clearly born from their desire to dialogue with their own students about globalization. But the anthology isn't limited to teenagers. It's actually a quite sophisticated and close-to-comprehensive collection that I intend to use in one of my own college classes on peace and justice. It fits a number of audiences nicely--high school, undergraduate college, lay reading.

Highly recommended! It would make a great post-Christmas, anti-consumerism gift.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Vignettes on a Variety of Inter-related Topics
Review: Rethinking Globalization, a social studies reader for teachers, presents a variety of essays and classroom activities on the topic of Globalization (yes, with a capital 'g'). The book makes for easy and accessible reading, and one can, after the first 40 or so pages of the book, choose a topic of interest and go from there. The book begins by defining globalization, and placing it firmly in the context of history. It then looks at the various interconnections, from economics and trade to poverty, war and civil strife, and shows how structural elements, both political and economic, have polarized the world into a minority of 'haves' versus a growing majority of 'have nots'.

The authors overlooked not a single pressing social issue or current event. Even the awful events of 2001 garnered some comment, and these too, the authors linked to the problems and issues of Globalization. I came away with a deeper understanding of the term, which basically boils down to the wholesale commodification of all of the resources on the planet(aka Earth For Sale, hence the cover picture of the planet with a bar code across it). However, given that at least one of the contributors teaches in an inner city school, I was quite surprised that issues affecting low-income individuals, the Drug Scourge in particular, somehow did not find their way into the text. Yet, while the book is truly global in scope, many of these global issues have their direct counterpart in some very local issues, and I commend the authors for introducing US based sweatshops in an attempt to point this out.

Basically, every single cause that has received its fifteen minutes (and only 15 minutes, no more and no less) of fame has found a home under the banner/umbrella of globalization. Ongoing problems such as modernizing forces encroaching on rural and traditional cultures, union-busting via back-door utilization of low-wage labor, interventionism by foreign superpowers in the political, economic and social affairs of foreign lands, and many others received equal treatment in the text. Potential readers of this book should take note, however, of the distinct presence of rhetoric along the lines of colonialism, class struggle and solidarity (especially among the lumpen proletariat), which, though limited in insight and applicability, adds an amusing but rather dubious and tenuous dimension to the text.

The presentation of each topic is pretty much even-handed, in the sense that there is no overt idealization of primitive cultures, for example. The book, as well as its authors, do indeed have their biases, and they do the reader a good turn by stating their biases upfront. As such, the text has a level of honesty and openness most uncommon in other books on the topic of Globalization, be they for or against it. Additionally, those with an interest in a particular topic or issue raised in the text will find the resources section of the book most helpful in obtaining more information. This section of the book, however, is geared more to the needs of teachers, and provides them with ample materials for potential use in the clasroom.

I personally liked the small vignette titled 'Prayers for a Dignified Life', written by Subcomandante Marcos of EZLN (Chiapas) fame. In it, he delivers an interesting spin on the Declaration of Independence, and I also detected some faint glimmerings of the Ten Point Program of the long defunct Black Panther Party. Truly heady stuff!

In sum, for those who want to know what all the hub-bub surrounding globalization is about, this is the book to read.