IAS Teaching Program

New Curriculum Tackles Global Poverty

In partnership with the new Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, IAS has begun an ambitious series of course offerings on global poverty. The Center's inaugural course, "Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium" (IAS 140 and City and Regional Planning 290), was taught in the fall 2006 semester by IAS Associate Dean Ananya Roy, associate professor of city and regional planning.

Roy's aim for the course was to "reach out to students in a variety of disciplines and professions, and help them gain a deep understanding of what it means to work on global issues, particularly those around poverty and inequality." By all indicators, there was a great

deal of pent-up desire for such understanding on the Berkeley campus. More than 200 students

Ananya Roy

signed up for the class, necessitating two location changes. (It was finally held in the Pacific Film Archive Theater.)

For Roy, the course was a first step in a larger effort to bring together faculty working on issues of poverty, international development, the political economy of the global South, and grassroots action and social change to develop a more coherent curriculum aimed at training a new generation of global leaders. IAS faculty in many disciplines and with various regional expertise have devoted their careers to understanding poverty and development, and Roy and Dean John Lie reached out to faculty both to provide guest lectures for the inaugural course, and to develop future courses to be sponsored by the Blum Center. Future projects include lecture series and an undergraduate minor in global studies.

The Blum Center was initiated through a $15 million gift from UC Berkeley alumnus Richard C. Blum that includes a $5 million challenge grant. The Center taps the expertise and resources of the nation's top public teaching and research university to achieve significant-and financially sustainable-results. Serving as the nexus on the Berkeley campus for cultivating targeted new education programs and convening resources to combat global poverty, the Blum Center focuses on implementing solutions extrapolated from cutting-edge research while engaging students in transformative service programs. For more information on the Blum Center's programs, visit http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu.