With Karl Fields, Professor of Politics and Government
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course explores the interactions of Asian peoples — the commodities, social practices, and ideas that they produce — across borders, both political and imagined, and crosses disciplinary borders as well, drawing upon divergent materials from the humanities and social sciences in an attempt to do justice to a complex contemporary context that we have called “Asia in motion.”
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
To engage in the interdisciplinary process by identifying and analyzing issues from multiple disciplinary perspectives by participating in cross-disciplinary dialogue, and by exploring the integration of these multiple disciplinary perspectives.
IT TOOK (AND TAKES) A TEAM
Asia in Motion was the brainchild of Emeritus Professor Suzanne Wilson Barnett, who Fields says “did so much over the decades of her service to establish and nurture Puget Sound’s Asian Studies program.” Four Asian Studies faculty members (including Fields and Barnett) built the course in the summer of 2001; many other faculty members have taught it over the years, including Barnett, Fields, Mike Sugimoto, Nick Kontogeorgopoulos, Carlo Bonura, Gareth Barkin, and Yu Luo.
THE PROF’S VIEWPOINT
“My favorite experience teaching the course came in 2017 while leading the PacRim program, literally experiencing the course while in motion traveling into and through Asia,” says Fields. “We began the course in Moscow…[and] took the Trans-Siberian railway across the expanse of Russia, literally witnessing the transition into Asia in the landscape and the faces of our fellow passengers. The students read Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World over the six days it took us to arrive in Mongolia. We finished the course in South Korea, considering this country’s tumultuous imperial and colonial past and national and global present and future. I wish all students (and professors) could experience such a course.”
Classes for a Changing World is a regular feature in Arches that spotlights one of the scores of inspiring, innovative, and timely courses offered each semester at Puget Sound.
