Graduate Seminars on Global Issues (GSGI)
Today, pusuit of in-depth understandings of critical global issues requires that we apply a wide range of approaches. No one discipline can claim to have all - or even most of - the answers. Disciplines need to remain open to the thinking in other disciplines, and scholarship is needed if headway is to be made in addressing one intractable problem after another.
At a point in time when scholars agree on the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, most graduate students have only limited oppotunities to explore disciplines outside of their own fields. The DUCIS Graduate Seminars on Global Issues provide important occasions for graduate students across a range of discplines to meet together on a regular basis. Focusing on a comon theme, each seminar is designed to bring together students from two or more disciplines and to focus on two or more world regions, in a self-directed manner.
The goal of GSGI is to open up conversations among students of different disciplines. This allows each graduate student to lear more about the thinking and methods of the colleagues from other disciplines. The seminars sustain connections among students from the various disciplines as they work towards their doctorates, and often these contacts continue after the students leave Duke.
Many former participants have taken what they learned in the seminars to their faculty positions and helped teir schools expand and deepen commitments to interdisciplinary study.
Initrially funded by The Ford Foundation and now supported by DUCIS endowment funds, the seminar series has operated for nearly a decade. Each seminar has about 20-25 members who organize collectively the seminar's direction. A seminar meets every 2-3 weeks to discuss readings or presentations of a member's work.
GSGI has often organized major end-of-year events. These have ranged from a prominent speaker to a large-scale conference involving dozens of presentations and keynote addresses.