BTSC Special Undergraduate Course Development Grants for Faculty

Theme: Material Culture in the Global Cultural Economy
Grants Range from $500-2000
Deadline for Applications:
4pm Friday, November 7, 2003

The Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle (BTSC) announces a special, one-time-only grant program for UW-Madison faculty in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The goal of the program is to enrich undergraduate courses so as to include a component relevant to the study and understanding of "Material Culture in the Global Cultural Economy" (see description below). BTSC will award grants ranging from $500-2000 to individual faculty members for the design or revision of undergraduate courses offered in Spring 2004, Summer 2004, or Fall 2004. Applicants should show how the design and revision of the course promote the study and critical understanding of material culture and globalization, and deepen undergraduate engagement with the topic. Awardees may use the grant funds in a discretionary manner: to fund their own theme-related researches; to purchase books or video/dvd; to defray the cost of guest speakers for the course; to fund student and class projects; to hold an undergraduate workshop; or to make possible other theme-related endeavors for the class. Possible topics for course themes or segments include, but are not limited to: the history of the book; the representation of things in diasporic fiction or film; architecture and nationalism; photography and the cult of political figures; fetishes and fetishization; contested landscapes; illicit trade and manufacture; fakes and forgeries; fashion; souvenirs and memory; time and objects; the biography of things; things in culture and the thingness of culture; consumption; the theft or defacement of art and property; magic and things; property and cultural rights; property and cultural heritage; anxiety, desire, ownership, possession; food; radios, trains, and signs of modernity; histories of prosthetics; illness and objects; regalia and rule; secrecy and things; sacrificial economies; bodies and metaphor; rubbish and divestment; engender-ed/-ing things. Proposals should address how the undergraduate course locates material culture in contemporary or historical processes of globalization. Awardees oblige themselves to meet with members of BTSC at an evening faculty roundtable (to be arranged in Fall 2004) for a chance to share ideas about implementing the rubric in the undergraduate classroom.

Please submit a hardcopy course description and syllabus; contact addresses; a thumbnail profile of class size and format; indication of when the course will be run (Spring 2004, Summer 2004, Fall 2004); and a 1-2pp. statement describing how the course or course segment promotes the rubric of "material culture in the global cultural economy." The statement should also include a request for funds ($500-2000), proportionate with the scope of course activities and design, and make mention of how the funds might fruitfully be used.

Preference will be given to proposals that give the rubric prominence in the course; make innovative use of the funds; and promise to make an impact on student interest and engagement. We welcome proposals for curricular design for FIG or Small Course Initiatives (for 1st and 2nd year undergraduates).

Proposals are due: Friday 4pm, November 7, 2003

Please Drop off or mail finished Proposals to the following address:

Anne McClintock
Undergraduate Course Development
English Department (7th Floor HC White)
600 N. Park St.
Madison, WI 53706

Please include your email address for confirmation of receipt

Awards and awardees will be announced Monday, November 24, 2003. We expect to make no fewer than 3 and no more than 12 awards.

This BTSC grant program has been made possible by the generosity of UW-Madison's International Institute.


Material Culture in the Global Cultural Economy The inter- and multidisciplinary study of material culture is of enormous significance to international and area studies. The global cultural economy not only involves the circulation, appropriation, and transformation of ideas and images, but that, too, of things. For this reason, disciplines as diverse as literature, architecture, art history and visual cultural studies, anthropology, geography, history, landscape studies, museum studies, history of medicine and technology, religious studies, and political economy-to name but a few fields-all need to concern themselves with the social life of things as they move in and out of regimes of value, consumption, possession, and representation in the international arena. Indeed, globalization and world history are not intelligible without theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of materiality and into various sociocultural phenomena that attach to things (e.g. personhood, desires, vision, literacy, religious practice, fetishism, subsistence itself).