Interdisciplinary Graduate Education for Global Social Justice and Critical Development Thinking: Minnesota’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Knowledge, power and practice: global social justice and sustainable development education

Proposal

The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC), a campus-wide center at the University of Minnesota, fosters an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural community of faculty and graduate students committed to studying global change, with a focus on the global south. Over 30 years, ICGC has engaged more than 600 graduate students in learning about global social and environmental change and justice. ICGC’s scholarly activities are broadly interdisciplinary, including students and faculty from six colleges and schools and dozens of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Among the key intellectual themes structuring our work is environmental justice and sustainable development in global context. This panel contribution will explore how we approach interdisciplinary graduate education related to sustainable development and environmental justice. ICGC’s educational and research programs have several core principles: sustained engagement among a broadly interdisciplinary community of scholars; connections between theory and practice; attention to questions of power and inequality; and understanding various ways of knowing about sustainable development and global change. Sustained cross-disciplinary dialogue is sustained through a series of interdisciplinary seminars for graduate students who earn a graduate minor in critical development studies, in which humanities, social science and natural science students meet regularly over a three-year period. The culminating seminar involves workshops on their own research projects to receive interdisciplinary insights that strengthen their work. We extend this interdisciplinary engagement to other activities such as connecting artists whose work focuses on water with our research circle on the theme of water access and governance in the global south. Theory-practice connections are addressed in all seminars and in many related events, including dialogue with practitioners, activists and artists whose work addresses sustainable development themes. Attention to questions of power and inequality structures our academic programs. We focus particularly on these issues in the conducting research and knowledge production. ICGC students explore various ways of knowing about sustainable development and global change through seminar discussions, visiting speakers and engagement with communities. For instance, students spend time at a local immigrant farmers’ alliance to better understand questions of environment, food production and immigrant communities. ICGC’s academic programs, developed and refined over three decades, offer a case study in critical sustainable development education for graduate students that helps to explore effective pedagogical practice, mechanisms to support diverse groups of students, and methods to foster connections across disciplinary, generational, academic/practitioner and geographic boundaries.

Author

• Karen Brown, University of Minnesota