This course will consider five globalization paradigms. None constitute the truth about what we call globalization; at best each captures only a part of a complex unfolding reality. We will cover four conventional paradigmatic approaches to understanding today’s interconnected world, i.e., the sociological, economic, political, and environmental perspectives. These constitute the current mainstream efforts to gain insight into our rapidly changing social and natural worlds that any educated citizen and policy maker should understand. But, as will be evident, there is a lot of cross-fertilization between these different fields because any effort to understand global processes demands an understanding of how different spheres in the social and natural worlds interact.