This Seminar takes the form of a multimodal web-seminar for the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the phenomenon of globalization, which seeks to identify, characterize and understand the major technological, economic, social, environmental and political changes, as well as the processes of cultural exchange and intersection, of which globalization takes place at our times.
In particular, we seek to understand globalization through the multi-mode interconnectedness resulting from the approximation of peoples, cultures, rules of social coexistence and religions and the use of the most advanced means of transport, communication and information.
We will therefore seek to overcome the tight logic of building a vision of the world and the cosmos from a national or regional centre. The supervening worldview of these studies will result in a more complex approach, based on a multipolar perspective that underlies the so-called “complex thinking”, which results from the promotion of complexity sciences, in line with what Edgar Morin proposes in his work Thinking Global.
The Global Studies Seminar aims to train students for a critical gnosiological perspective on the origins of globalization in the process of broadening the knowledge of the world in the modern era in relation to the processes of construction of the proto-globalization, or first globalization, which led, in the long run, to the full bloom of globalization in today's world.
Students will be trained to understand how the creation of global circulation and communication instruments has generated a movement of interactions and exchanges that underlie the building of the consciousness and a global vision of the world, in which Portugal and Spain played a pioneering role, making known “the world to the same world”, in the words of Vieira, in History of the Future. The problematization of concepts and the knowledge of the movement of ideas, both political and social, as well as the knowledge of the scientific innovations and the new instruments and institutions that led to the creation of the first database of global knowledge, within the framework of the modern process of decompartmentalization of the world, will open windows to the understanding and characterization of today's information society, and will provide the basis for a critical reflection on the challenges and problems that human beings and societies face in our times, in view of the urgent need to make commitments and to draw safe ways to build a sustainable future in which humanity can have a more harmonious relationship with the natural environment.
By comparing different societies and political systems and understanding their compatibilities in space, we will seek to uncover the role of politics in a rapidly changing world, as well as the possibilities for sharing responsibilities between political actors and citizens in order to manage and solve transnational problems.