B.A. in Global Studies

LIU Global offers a BA degree in Global Studies, a discipline that investigates the world’s interdependent political, economic, cultural, and ecological systems. Global Studies equips future leaders with tools to address challenges that transcend national and disciplinary boundaries, preparing them to develop solutions at the local, national, regional, and global levels. LIU Global organizes its curriculum around six issues that pose the greatest challenges to human wellbeing:

1. Economic inequality, poverty, and access to livelihoods
2. Social inequality: gender, race, ethnicity, and human development
3. Climate change, clean energy, and environmental degradation
4. Urbanization and sustainable human settlements
5. War, conflict, and displaced peoples
6. Justice, discrimination, and human rights

LIU Global teaches students how these challenges take different forms in different locations, thereby developing skills in adaptation and empathy as each locale articulates the particularity of its engagement with these issues. By addressing each issue through multiple lenses, students gain the skills in analysis and problem-solving that these complex challenges demand. Four lenses make up the core of LIU Global’s analytical method:

1. Environmental
2. Political
3. Cultural
4. Economic

Through a stair-stepped core curriculum, students gain proficiency in applying the lenses, learning how each one foregrounds certain aspects of a global issue while leaving others in the background. Comparing lenses, locations, and analyzing the interconnection of various factors that contribute to both problems and solutions, students learn how to address the complexity that makes these issues global and enduring.

Experiential learning lies at the core of LIU Global’s education. Students connect their classroom learning to life outside it through site visits, field trips, and immersive experiences such as home stays, service learning, and internships. Combined with the focus on global challenges, LIU Global’s experiential curriculum displays a practical orientation. Students learn by doing. As learners and guests in their host countries, such “doing” means dialogue, humility, and working together with those who are impacted most directly and forcefully by the global challenges that ground the curriculum. Through such experiential learning, students learn how to enter into relationships infused with respect and reciprocity so as to draw on all the expertise and will that these enormous challenges demand.