This academic year, DePauw’s Global Studies Fellows Program welcomes its newest Visiting Scholar, Jennifer Mike. She joined DePauw from the American University of Nigeria, where she is an assistant professor of law and director of the Center for Governance, Development and Human Rights. She has described her time at DePauw so far as welcoming, intellectually stimulating and fulfilling, albeit in unexpectedly warm weather.
Mike’s perspective on the program is that “the field of Global Studies essentially delves into the intricate and multifaceted issues that define our interconnectedness around the world.” She is currently teaching "Introduction to Human Rights," which examines the concept of human rights from African, Asian and Western perspectives. Mike incorporates international, regional and local perspectives and invites students to bring their unique contexts and positionalities to the class. By learning students’ personal contexts in this way, she creates fruitful discourse through the lens of Global Studies that seeks to provide students with a critical and comprehensive understanding of the world.
Students in this class come from multidisciplinary majors and various identities, but Mike recognizes that in an American context, certain examples of human rights violations are not relatable to them. Mike mentioned she has to be sensitive when exploring select topics and find ways to cater to cultural differences in classes.
Next semester, she is offering a course on Gender Law and Womanism/African Feminism, which she aims to approach from “a relatable point of view.” Mike highlighted the foundational significance of the concept of masculinity in this course, as it encompasses the experiences of all genders in a predominantly patriarchal global society.
She further stated that she would be “careful not to offend people’s sensibilities” since people have a variety of life experiences and hence different reactions to the content. From a Global Studies perspective, she intends to position feminist and gender issues in contexts across the world and analyze how influencing factors can vary.
While Mike admitted that the transition from teaching law school students to undergraduates with little or no legal background has been tricky, she has made efforts to provide students at DePauw with deeper conceptual, theoretical and practical context for the legal aspects of human rights issues in her class. Although the legal viewpoint had to be significantly reduced for this current course, she plans to retain contextual legal frameworks in discussing gender rights in the US, such as the abortion ban.
Interacting with both faculty and students has been an exciting time for Mike, and she especially appreciates that professors stop by her office to chat and get to know her. She was a speaker at the “Dialogue on Conflict, Peace and Human Rights” event in Africa in late September. Mike looks forward to attending more “Global Insight Events” at DePauw.