The Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh advances interdisciplinary research, teaching, and community engagement through initiatives that reflect how global processes are lived and contested in diverse regions and communities. Each initiative addresses urgent questions of justice, inequality, resilience, and transformation, while together they form a holistic framework for understanding globalization.
This framework emphasizes places in the physical world: ecologies, cities, and migrations, alongside the flows of commerce, commodities, and culture that structure global life. It also incorporates security, production, and the commodification of agricultural change, as well as large-scale economic shifts, trade, and marketing, all of which transform landscapes, livelihoods, and identities across time and space. Crucially, the framework incorporates the role of digital technologies, from surveillance and algorithmic governance to digital finance and global communications, that mediate these processes and generate new forms of inequality, shared ideas, and change. Together, these initiatives reflect issues that are urgent in the present, rooted in long histories of power and exchange, and central to imagining how the world may look in the future.
Within this broad vision, the Center also developed two cross-cutting initiatives of Global Appalachia Learning Alliance (GALA) and Seas of Connection: The Mediterranean and Indo-Pacific in Global Perspective, to highlight how regions both shape and are shaped by global forces. By situating thematic work in dialogue with regional perspectives, the Center underscores that globalization is not abstract or placeless but deeply rooted in physical, historical, and cultural geographies. It is experienced in coal towns and coastal cities, in contested waters and border crossings, in digital infrastructures and ecological crises. Global Appalachia Learning Alliance and Seas of Connection serve as integrative platforms that ground these thematic initiatives, ensuring that the Center’s work remains simultaneously locally anchored, globally connected, and transnational in scope.
The Transformation of Place or Landscapes initiative brings together three interrelated areas of inquiry—Contested Cities, Migrations, and Critical World Ecologies—to examine the shifting landscapes of justice, inequality, and resilience in the 21st century.
The Global Studies Center’s Global Health & Community Thriving brings together research, teaching, and engagement at the intersection of health, human rights, and social justice. It seeks to understand how patterns of wellbeing, illness, and care are shaped not only by biology and medicine but also by deeply entrenched political, economic, cultural, and historical forces. By integrating a human rights lens, the initiative highlights health as a fundamental dimension of justice and dignity, while exploring the inequities that persist across populations worldwide.
The Global Studies Digital Technology & Global Change initiative explores the transformative role of digital technologies in shaping global processes, identities, and inequalities. Digital innovations—from artificial intelligence and big data to social media platforms, surveillance systems, and digital finance—are remaking the ways people work, govern, communicate, and mobilize across borders.
The Global Appalachia Learning Alliance (GALA) expands and reframes the study of Appalachia by situating the region within global contexts and conversations. Appalachia, formally defined in the 1960s as a 13-state region from southern New York to northern Mississippi, has often been approached through an inward-looking lens focused on poverty and cultural isolation. GALA challenges this view by highlighting how Appalachia is both shaped by and deeply connected to broader global forces.
The Seas of Connection initiative explores the Mediterranean and the Indo-Pacific as dynamic regional designations that are reshaping global politics, economics, and culture in the 21st century. Long regarded as crossroads of commerce, migration, and empire, both regions are once again at the forefront of world-historical change—sites where strategic rivalries, environmental vulnerabilities, and cultural exchanges converge.