IE 200 Global Studies [CRN 26224]

Overview of Course

Welcome to IE 200 – Global Studies, a foundational academic experience of our voyage. This course is designed as an interdisciplinary journey of inquiry where each of our nine destinations becomes a case through which we investigate how common themes such as geography, environmental systems, culture, history, power, identity, and human choices interact. Through comparative inquiry, we strive to move beyond seeing countries as separate destinations to recognizing global patterns, connections, contrasts, and our own culturally situated ways of understanding the world.

The course integrates three complementary disciplinary lenses. Port Country Discovery examines where we are, why place matters, how history has shaped the present, and how people and places are interconnected. The Physical World explores the physical environment—including oceans, water, air, soil, climate, and natural resources—and considers the causes and consequences of environmental change, with particular attention to sustainability, inequality, and who bears its impacts. Intercultural Studies examines how culture and worldview shape human understanding and behavior while helping us recognize our own assumptions and develop skills for intercultural observation, communication, collaboration, and engagement.

Learning occurs through classroom inquiry, life at sea, cultural encounters, experiences in port, and reflection upon those experiences. Throughout the voyage, we strive to connect local observations to larger global forces and repeatedly ask: So what? What broader pattern, tension, opportunity, or responsibility does this case reveal?

Ultimately, Global Studies asks one unifying question: What does each place teach us about the challenge of living together on an interconnected, unequal, and rapidly changing planet?