12.10: Capstone Assignments
- Page ID
- 292467
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Assignments
1. Global Issue Systems Map
Choose one global issue examined anywhere in this book and create a systems map showing how it connects to at least four other domains.
Your map should include:
- key actors and institutions;
- historical forces;
- economic or political incentives;
- environmental or technological factors;
- groups that benefit and groups that bear costs;
- at least two feedback loops;
- one potential leverage point for change.
Accompany the map with a 750–1,000 word analysis explaining the relationships you identified and why your chosen leverage point could produce meaningful change.
2. The Global Issues Analysis Protocol Capstone
Select a contemporary global issue and apply all seven stages of the Global Issues Analysis Protocol:
- Define the outcome.
- Trace history and infrastructure.
- Map actors, institutions, incentives, and flows.
- Identify power and exclusion.
- Evaluate evidence and competing interpretations.
- Compare interventions and tradeoffs.
- Specify responsibility, remedy, and learning.
Conclude by explaining whether your understanding of the issue changed during the process and which stage most affected your analysis.
Suggested length: 1,500–2,000 words.
3. Design the Spaceship
Imagine that you are part of a global council responsible for redesigning the institutions governing “Spaceship Earth” for the year 2050.
Create a new governance framework addressing at least four of the following:
- climate and sustainability;
- food and water;
- migration and mobility;
- artificial intelligence and digital rights;
- economic inequality;
- democracy and human rights;
- conflict and security;
- cultural diversity.
Your proposal should identify who makes decisions, how power is distributed, how marginalized voices are included, and how accountability is enforced.
Present your proposal as a policy brief, visual constitution, infographic, podcast, video, or multimedia project accompanied by a written rationale.
4. One Object, Many Global Systems
Choose an ordinary object or experience from your daily life, such as a smartphone, shirt, cup of coffee, streaming subscription, meal, airline ticket, or social-media post.
Trace its global story.
Identify where its materials, labor, financing, technology, culture, environmental impacts, and consumption patterns originate. Connect the object to at least three chapters in this book.
End with the question:
What does this object reveal about my place within global systems?
5. Global Futures: 2050
Develop three possible scenarios for the world in 2050:
- Business as Usual
- Fragmentation and Crisis
- Cooperation and Flourishing
For each scenario, explain how at least four global systems discussed in this book would change.
Then identify three decisions being made today that could make one future more likely than another.
Students may submit the project as a written scenario analysis, illustrated timeline, digital exhibit, or narrated presentation.
6. Letter to the Next Global Issues Student
Write a letter to someone taking this course next year.
Do not summarize every chapter.
Instead, explain:
- the idea that most changed how you understand the world;
- one assumption you reconsidered;
- one global connection you had never noticed before;
- one question you are leaving the course with;
- one piece of advice for studying global issues without becoming overwhelmed by their complexity.
End your letter by completing this sentence:
“If there is one thing I hope you understand about living on this spaceship, it is…”