Dr. Andrew Wood Office: HGH 210; phone: (408) 924-5378 Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda

Introduction : Course Calendar : Policies : Readings
Assignments : Check Your Grades : Return to Frontpage

Introduction

Individuals and groups are more mobile now than in any time in human history. From the nineteenth century introduction of the locomotive to the late twentieth-century creation of virtual travel in online environments, movement and migration have increasingly mediated the ways in which we communicate, construct, and contest our identities. This course explores the implications of our increasingly mobile culture on our sense of self and society, while offering a set of conceptual tools to explore and interrogate the implications of our increasingly placeless culture.

Success in this course follows your ability to:

• Increase your understanding of human behavior and social interaction in the context of value systems, economic structures, political institutions, social groups and natural environments.

• Employ discipline-specific language to articulate the implications of mobility on national identity.

• Apply basic claims of postcolonial critique to U.S. and global tourist sites.

• Reveal and critique places in public life defined by mobility rather than permanence.