This class serves as an introduction to Global Studies. Introduction does not mean the course is elementary. Rather, harking back to the word’s etymology, it “leads” (ducere) you inside (intro) a complicated world—our global system today—and seeks to unravel its logics, explore its origins, and gain insights into how it functions. How did we get to where we are today, and should—and can—we respond to its contradictions, horrors, and opportunities? The first half of the class investigates the production of the global system today through charting how we think about time, space, territory, power, self and other. The global cannot be studied as an already existing object, but as a process that produces particular configurations of political, social, and cultural intersections at any given time. We pay special attention to how our contemporary moment is forged and refracted through the lens of colonial and post-colonial encounters. The second half looks specifically at consequences of this configuration as it impacts people today: moving across borders, responding to suffering and inequality, acting on fears and hopes. In the process we consider the classic relation between order and justice, which appears in our journey as a dynamic relationship between territory and identity, and attendant questions of responsibility and ethics at the collective and personal level. To get at the dizzying reality of the global, we will often jump scale, zooming in to the micro-level of an individual’s ordeal and zooming out to discern the structures in which we are all implicated. To this end we embrace an ethnographic perspective that aims to illuminate the way the “global” impacts the real human lives that are inevitably at the center of our investigations. This course is meant to open paths for future study, paths that may lead to very different places, but nonetheless remain deeply influenced by the issues we confront.