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  • Academia Meets Policy: Partnering with Think Tanks to Improve Student Experiences

    by Donna C. Tonini, MBA, Ed.DApr 23, 2025 11:00 am

    This past February, I had the privilege and pleasure of being invited to Spain to attend the School For Thinktankers 2025, sponsored by the organization On Think Tanks (OTT) at Fundació Bofill in Barcelona. The weeklong training seminar started with an inspiring welcome session, setting the stage for an exciting week of learning, collaboration, and growth. As the Center for Global Studies (CGS) is launching a new Master of Science in Global Studies (MSGS) with 3 tracks including Global Governance, Global Security, and Gender and Public Policy, partnering with think tanks to collaborate, create student internships, and develop opportunities for students to present work and publish is a strategic focus of the center. Through the new master’s degree, CGS can offer avenues for networking, increased exposure to, and engagement with think tanks across the world.

  • CGS Faculty Affiliates Recognized in LAS Faculty Awards Announcement

    by Donna C. Tonini, MBA, Ed.DApr 3, 2025 4:00 pm

    We are proud to celebrate the achievements of two Center for Global Studies (CGS) faculty affiliates who have recently been honored through the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) faculty awards and announcements.

  • Arts and Education without Borders: The 9th Annual Globalizing the Community College Curricula Conference 2025

    by Dr. Zach PetreaFeb 12, 2025 2:45 pm

    The 9th Annual Globalizing the Community College Curricula Conference 2025: Arts and Education without Borders conference was an immensely successful conference that will positively impact the Global Studies Program at Heartland Community College (HCC) in Normal, Illinois. The conference featured “innovative strategies and best practices for integrating global perspectives into community college curricula through the arts” and followed through with a diverse speaker lineup that provided multiple subject examples ranging from philosophy, art, composition, anthropology, and political science.  

  • Scholarly Publishing in the Globalization Context: A Glimpse into the Relationship Between Global Market and Global Welfare

    by Yanling LiuDec 19, 2024 4:30 pm

    In 2022, when I was in the process of applying to the MSLIS program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I attended the KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) PubFactory Virtual Series, which had a session about the impact of globalization on scholarly publishing presented by KGL’s Director of Consulting, Kevin Lomangino. Lomangino pointed out that the western countries used to have absolute dominance in the scholarly publishing industry, which went hand in hand with the dominance of English-speaking countries, but due to globalization, this dominance was challenged. China was gaining more power in scholarly publishing as it strived to collaborate with researchers from all over the world, especially those coming from the Middle East and Asia, and publish quality research in the world's highest impact journals. Globalization was not a new trend, but journal publishers were increasingly noticing the impact of globalization on the scholarly publishing industry, and whoever ignored the global trend would potentially miss out on revenue opportunities. Scholars in regions such as Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East were seizing the opportunities to expand their research output and global outreach, which increasingly diversified scholarly communication.

  • Care Work and Climate Change, Feminist Perspectives under the Neoliberal Economic Malestream

    by Shoutao Wu (Vincent)Dec 16, 2024 1:45 pm

    I once heard a story about an ordinary rural woman. Born in a small village in southeast China in the 1970s, she had four siblings, two older sisters, one younger sister, and one youngest brother. Her family was not rich. At that time, a small household in a small village in that area relied mostly on small-scale farming, rice, sugarcane, tea, and cattle breeding. Children were a promising source of labor that could translate into economic growth for the family in the future. Therefore, before China's one-child policy, it was not uncommon to see a household with five, six, seven or more children.

  • International and Area Studies Library joins 2025 Global Press Archive Area Studies Initiative with CGS support

    by Lily DenehyDec 16, 2024 11:30 am

    Recently, the International and Area Studies Library (IASL) at the University of Illinois pooled US Department of Education, Title VI National Resource Center funding from the Center for Global Studies, Center for African Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center to make important historical newspapers available Open Access through the Global Press Archives' 2025 Area Studies Initiative.

  • Students Reimagine the Future in Global Sustainability Competition

    by Donna ToniniDec 9, 2024 4:30 pm

    On December 7, 2024, 14 teams from across the globe gathered via Zoom for the 4th annual Reimagine Our Future sustainability competition award ceremony. The competition brought together 249 students from 11 institutions in the USA, UK, Ukraine, South Africa, China, Austria, Colombia, and Italy, who spent eight weeks crafting innovative solutions for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and showcasing contributions of diverse disciplines such as engineering, health sciences, agriculture, and architecture to sustainability through factsheets. 

  • Professor Manfred Steger's recent visit culminated with his talk "Globalization at a Crossroads: Deglobalization or Reglobalization?”

    by Lily DenehyNov 11, 2024 12:30 pm

    The Center for Global Studies hosted prominent globalization scholar Professor Manfred Steger (Professor and Chair, Sociology, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study. On Monday, October 7th, Professor Steger gave a talk titled “Globalization at a Crossroads: Deglobalization or Reglobalization?” making a case that the world is in an era of reglobalization fueled by exponentially increasing “disembodied globalization.” 

  • International Studies Research Lab hosts 12 fellows from across U.S.

    by Lily DenehyOct 14, 2024 11:45 am

    The Center for Global Studies ran the International Studies Research Lab (ISRL) this summer, making its first full in-person session since the Covid-19 pandemic. This blog post summarizes the lab, its purpose, and highlights three of the eleven projects developed through the ISRL.

  • Migration, Religion, and Technology in Rural Cambodia

    by Paul UnSep 25, 2024 1:00 pm

    During the summer of 2024, I traveled to Cambodia to conduct field research for my dissertation. I was there to study foreign aid, public finances, and how the Cambodian government negotiated loan terms. While studying these mass flows of international capital I came across money that was crossing borders in smaller amounts but was perhaps even more interesting.