Classes

Hejsan! So today is meant to be the start of my third class, Swedish Social Policy, but there has been some confusion about when it starts. As far as I know it begins in 45 minutes at 2:15...gotta run, guess its starting now!

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Last Friday I begun a post about my classes as you can see above...I ended up going to the Swedish Social Policy class which was very interesting. We went over the idea of a welfare state and broke off into small discussion groups to classify what type of welfare state our various countries were. I'm very much looking forward to the next class sessions though it will end up being my shortest class, with only about a week straight full of classes. The teacher was nice and seemed very passionate about the Swedish model of the welfare state so we probably won't be getting any "fair and balanced" teaching of the other systems, but that can be expected, and it will be good to hear something vastly different than what I'm used to! There are aspects of the Swedish system I like though we also learned the Swedes will pay the highest taxes in the world come next year! Yikes!

I've also currently been taking two other classes. The first one that began back on Sept. 1 is a Glbal Environmental Justice course. This is my one class that spans the whole semester and meets only 1 time per week. Our material so far as been focused on the concept of "ecologically unequal exchange" which has explored the idea of how the "core" countries (USA, Britain, etc.) feed off of the "periphery" (poorer) countries. A key idea has been that the poorer countries perform the work for the benefit of the richer, core countries, while unequally destroying the poorer' countries environments in the process. It's been interesting. Last Tuesday we watched a movie called "Mammoth" which detailed the very different lives of a wealthy New York couple who had employed a mom from the Philippines who was in America trying to make a living for her children back home. We saw the desire for status and wealth among those more successful and the desperate desire by those less fortunate to live even a decent life. It was an eye-opening movie and I learned a lot...one of our assignments is to write a page worth of reflections on it.

My third class I'm in right now is called Democratization. It is a class in the political science department which also meets once a week and goes till the beginning of November (I think). So far we've learned about the various ways to classify states that are democracies and those that aren't. We've looked at the various forces that work to create a democracy or even return a democratic state to an authoritarian one. On Friday we had to turn in our paper topic we would like to write on. Most of us choose a case study, mine being that of Czechoslovakia. I learned in class that Czechoslovakia was an exception to the generally acknowledged principle that countries without national unity normally don't democratize. Yet Czechoslovakia did so I'm interested in exploring the forces that allowed for its democratization. Last week and for the next 4 meetings we have a guest lecturer from South Africa. His first lecture was very insightful so hopefully the next 3 will be too!

I have 2 more classes later on...Scandinavian Models of Equality and an Intro to Human Rights. I might drop the human rights course to take a Conflict in the Middle East class that a few friends are in and really liked. It just started so I would be able to catch up and it would allow me to drop a class that ends at the very end of the term which would be nice!