ISS 315 Midterm Study Guide: Weeks 1–8 Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts, theories, and key historical reference points from the ISS 315 midterm study guide.

Orientalism

Edward Said's concept analyzing how Western scholarship, literature, art, and institutions represented 'the Orient' as a single, exotic, irrational, backward, or threatening place in contrast to a rational, advanced West, reinforcing authority and justifying domination.

Cultural Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci's term for domination maintained partly through consent, where the values and assumptions of a powerful group become common sense so that the existing social order seems natural rather than political.

Colonialism

Control over territory and people that often includes land seizure, labor extraction, political rule, and cultural restructuring.

Postcolonial Studies

An academic field examining the enduring legacies of colonial rule in identity, representation, institutions, literature, and social relations.

Decolonial Studies

Approaches asking how colonial patterns of power and knowledge continue even after formal empire ends, and exploring how these patterns might be challenged.

Time-Space Compression

David Harvey's concept describing how transport, communication, finance, and production technologies make distant places feel closer and accelerate economic and social processes, with unequal access across different locations.

World-Systems Theory

Immanuel Wallerstein's framework treating the modern world economy as an interconnected system structured into core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral regions that reproduce unequal exchange.

Core Regions

Within world-systems theory, geographic areas that tend to concentrate capital, high-profit production, and institutional power.

Peripheral Regions

Within world-systems theory, regions that are structural positions often designated as sources of lower-cost labor and raw materials.

Dependency Theory

A theory arguing that underdevelopment is not a stage poorer nations fail to outgrow, but an active condition produced through unequal relationships with wealthier economies, such as reliance on exports, debt, and foreign capital.

Globalization

The intensification of cross-border flows of people, goods, capital, ideas, images, and institutions, which increases connection while also generating disjuncture, uneven development, and cultural conflict.

Ethnoscapes

Arjun Appadurai's term for the global flow and movement of people, including migrants, tourists, refugees, workers, students, and diasporas.

Mediascapes

Arjun Appadurai's term for the worldwide distribution of images and information through news, film, television, social media, and other media platforms.

Technoscapes

Arjun Appadurai's term for the cross-border movement and uneven global availability of technologies, skills, and technical systems.

Financescapes

Arjun Appadurai's term for the rapid, complex worldwide movement of money, investment, credit, and capital.

Ideoscapes

Arjun Appadurai's term for the global movement and circulation of political ideas and values, such as democracy, rights, nationalism, freedom, and sovereignty.

Disjunctive Cultural Flow

Arjun Appadurai's concept explaining that global flows (scapes) do not move in a coordinated manner, creating mismatches, hybrid identities, and unpredictable cultural changes.

Indigenization

The process by which outside ideas, goods, practices, or institutions are adapted and incorporated into local cultural contexts.

Glocalization

The process by which global forms and products are modified and given local meanings rather than being uniformly replicated everywhere.

McDonaldization

George Ritzer's concept describing the spread of fast-food-style principles into a wide range of institutions and everyday activities.

Four Dimensions of McDonaldization

The foundational principles identified by George Ritzer: efficiency (fastest route to a result), calculability (emphasis on quantity or speed), predictability (identical experiences across settings), and control (standardized rules and technologies regulating people).

Coca-Colonization

A critical term for the global spread of a recognizable consumer product and its associated values, symbolizing American cultural influence, commercial standardization, and consumption linked to modernity.

Original Affluent Society

Marshall Sahlins's concept from Stone Age Economics positing that non-industrial societies can achieve affluence by meeting their needs with limited wants, challenging the assumption that economic rationality requires endless growth.

Kwakiutl Potlatch

A ceremonial gathering among Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples involving the giving or redistribution of goods to establish prestige, recognize status, and solidify social responsibilities.

Kula Ring

A ceremonial exchange network of shell valuables among Trobriand Island communities described by Bronisław Malinowski, functioning to maintain relationships, trust, and prestige rather than serving immediate material utility.

Decolonizing Gender

Questioning the assumption that Western gender categories and roles are universal, while examining how colonial powers historically imposed European family norms and restructured Indigenous social systems.

Intersectionality

A framework associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw for analyzing how systems of power like racism and sexism interact to produce unique structural outcomes that cannot be analyzed as isolated identity categories.

Global South

A political and historical term designating regions shaped by colonialism and unequal global power relations, rather than a strictly geographic marker of the Southern Hemisphere.

Clash of Civilizations

Samuel Huntington's thesis arguing that post-Cold War conflicts would be driven by cultural and civilizational identities along religious and historical fault lines rather than by economics or ideology alone.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A phenomenon where a belief or expectation alters behavior in ways that cause the expected outcome to occur, such as political actors anticipating conflict and behaving aggressively, thereby causing reciprocal hostility.

Jihad vs. McWorld

Benjamin Barber's concept describing the simultaneous clash between 'McWorld' (integrating global consumer markets) and 'Jihad' (fragmented, exclusionary, and sometimes militant identity politics).

Relationality

A framework emphasizing that beings exist through continuous reciprocal relationships and obligations to other people, land, ancestors, plants, and animals, contrasting with individualism.

Three Sisters

An Indigenous complementary planting system consisting of corn (provides vertical structure), beans (climbs and fixes nitrogen), and squash (spreads leaves to shade soil), embodying ecological reciprocity.

Extractive Capitalism

An economic pattern treating land, labor, and ecological systems as resources to be taken for profit, frequently shifting social and environmental costs onto local or Indigenous communities.

Nigeria as a 'Tower of Babel'

A course metaphor highlighting Nigeria's extensive linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity, including the Hausa/Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba groups, whose relations are shaped by colonial institutions and resources.

Ogun

A Yoruba orisha associated with iron, metalworking, tools, technology, and warfare.

Mama Tchamba

A spirit lineage associated in some Ewe Vodun contexts with the historical memory of slavery and the spirits of enslaved persons.

Sociological Imagination

C. Wright Mills's concept that bridges private individual struggles ('personal troubles') with larger historical institutions and societal patterns ('public issues').

Power/Knowledge

Michel Foucault's formulation that knowledge and power produce one another, where expert systems and institutions define what is accepted as normal, true, deviant, or governable.

Nakba

An Arabic term meaning 'catastrophe,' designating the mass displacement, dispossession, and flight/expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 establishment of Israel and war.

Six-Day War (1967)

A military conflict wherein Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, capturing the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights.

Oslo Accords (1993)

Agreements signed by Israeli and Palestinian leadership providing mutual recognition and a structure for limited Palestinian self-governance while leaving core final-status issues unresolved.

Decolonizing Global Health

An effort to analyze how colonial histories and global power imbalances dictate health funding, priorities, and research, advocating for local resource control and institutional accountability.

Three Delays Framework

A maternal health model analyzing mortality factors: (1) delay in deciding to seek care, (2) delay in reaching a medical facility, and (3) delay in receiving adequate care upon arrival.

Entitlement Approach

Amartya Sen's theory stating that famines and starvation occur because populations lose legal and economic means (entitlements) to command food through labor, production, or trade, even when food is abundant.

Reproductive Autonomy

The principle that individuals should possess the freedom and accessible means to make informed childbearing decisions without discrimination, barrier, or coercion.

Fortress Conservation

An environmental protection strategy that seeks to preserve nature by creating enclosed reserves while forcibly evicting or banning Indigenous and local populations.

Takers and Leavers

Philosophical categories in Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, contrasting 'Takers' (civilizations founded on dominating nature and endless growth) with 'Leavers' (societies that live within ecological limitations).

LandBack

A movement and framework advocating for the return of Indigenous lands, jurisdictional self-determination, and the rebuilding of cultural and spiritual obligations to territorial ecosystems.

Indigenous Sovereignty

The inherent right of Indigenous peoples and nations to govern themselves, sustain cultural systems, exercise political authority, and manage their territories.

Berlin Conference (1884–1885)

A diplomatic assembly in which European imperial powers created formal conventions for dividing, claiming, and colonizing the African continent.