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Оглавление1Global Studies as a New Field of Inquiry
The impetus for The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies stems from our early experiences as young researchers faced with the enormously daunting task of doing research projects that involved global-scale issues. At the time—the early 1990s—only a few scholars were talking about globalization and grappling with its multifaceted implications. Most of them were fixated on the processes, flows, speed, and impacts of new digital communications, new forms of cultural exchange and homogenization, economic market penetrations, McDonaldization, time-space compression, and so on (Harvey 1990; Urry 2003; Appadurai 1996). A few others were beginning to study a range of new global concerns such as climate change, mass migrations, diverse capitalisms, pandemics, regional genocide, religious terrorism, and the worldwide dismantling of the welfare state. Together global processes and global problems raised new challenges and demanded new solutions. Yet at the turn of the century, no single academic discipline seemed to offer sufficient theories, methods, and training to grapple with these complex and interconnected concerns. From the perspective of the individual researcher, how was one to develop appropriate research questions and design a viable research topic? How did one begin the formidable task of doing global research?
Today, in contrast to twenty years ago, many scholars across the humanities and social sciences are engaging with the interdisciplinary challenges presented by the pressing global issues of the twenty-first century. We argue that the collective turn of the disciplines to engage with contemporary and historical processes of globalization, and their related global issues, represents something more than just a substantive concern shared across disciplines. Rather, it is a fundamental shift in analytical perspectives that requires a thorough retooling of our modernist and disciplinary modes of analysis (Appadurai 2000; Bauman 1998). We call this shift the “global turn.” Engaging global contexts requires scholars to think globally and to develop new global theories and perspectives on issues that were previously understood as either universal, national, or local (Moraru 2001; Juergensmeyer 2014a). The global turn is also an engagement with scholars beyond the Euro-American academy that transforms the way global scholarship is done (Burawoy 2009; Casid and D’Souza 2014). And beyond this, it is an engagement with diverse societies, other ways of knowing, and the marginalized majorities that are increasingly shaping and reshaping our collective futures (Kupchan 2012: 183). In these aspects and more, the global turn has profound political, economic, sociocultural, historical, legal, and ethical implications that global scholars are just beginning to explore.
This book is designed for scholars who recognize that engaging with the global is vital in order to ensure their work remains relevant and applicable in the coming decades. This book should be useful to a wide range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as those doing research in professional schools such as law or medicine. Specifically, the audience for the book is (1) undergraduate and graduate students that want to study global processes, (2) scholars who are new to the field of global studies and want to design global studies research, and (3) scholars in more conventional disciplines who want to engage with global issues.
We wrote this book because we found that despite the escalating attention being given to globalization, there has been very little conversation within academia to date about how one should go about studying global-scale processes and their myriad forms and ramifications. While scholars increasingly acknowledge that contemporary processes of globalization call for new theoretical and methodological approaches, there is a void in the literature about what these new theories, analytics, methods, and pedagogies would actually entail. As a result, studying global-scale processes and impacts remains a daunting task for most scholars and for the many students that universities seek to train.
We see this book as filling a gap in existing literature and scholarly conversations. It underscores the importance and necessity of global studies research and the exciting opportunities and challenges such work entails. More significantly, this book provides a practical guide for designing and doing this kind of research. It elaborates a coherent approach that we have developed and tested in both the classroom and the field over the past five years. We have found that this approach makes studying complex global issues much more accessible and less intimidating for people new to engaging with the positive and negative impacts of global processes that characterize our contemporary era.
EMBRACING THE GLOBAL
The first point we want to make is that the global and a global imaginary, however one defines them, favor a holistic approach to understanding contemporary global issues and the deep global histories that shape the present. These holistic approaches can change the way we see the world. For example, embracing deep histories and holistic interconnections make a global imaginary different from international and transnational imaginaries. The international speaks to the interactions between nation-states—think of the United Nations (UN), for instance—while the transnational speaks to the interactions beyond the nation-state. These interactions may be conducted by states or nonstate actors such as corporations, but the national still frames and anchors the imaginative reach of analysis.
In contrast, a global imaginary includes nation-states, but also a huge array of nonstate actors, organizations, collectivities, processes, relations, ways of knowing, and modes of interaction across, between, and within national and transnational contexts (Steger 2008). The global should thus be thought of as conceptually and epistemologically more encompassing than the transnational and the international, which are anchored to the core concept of the nation-state. A global imaginary exists in uneasy tension with a national imaginary and, in fact, intrinsically challenges the latter’s presumptive authority and centrality. A global imaginary offers us alternative ways of thinking about social relations and behaviors that are not limited by state systems and concepts of sovereignty, territoriality, citizenship, and nationalism. This includes non-Western worldviews, cosmologies, religions, aesthetics, ethics, values, ways of being and communicating, and perhaps even different ways of thinking about what it means to be “human” (Tobin 2014; Grusin 2015; Dayan 2011; Smith 2012: 26).
The second point we want to make is that we need to complicate how a global imaginary is typically talked about in mainstream society and media. Most people think of the global in geopolitical terms and correlate it to processes and concepts that transcend the borders of the nation-state. The global is often talked about as involving a global—as in worldwide—spatial reach. It has become synonymous with processes of globalization and economic transnational activities. In contrast to this overarching geographical conceptualization of the global, we suggest that it is not simply a matter of spatial scale or geopolitical reach that makes any issue or process global. “Global” doesn’t just mean “big.” The local and global are mutually constitutive, creating and recreating each other across conceptual fields in a constant dynamic. This means that the global is found not only in macro processes but also in the full range of human activities. We don’t find global processes only in large cosmopolitan cities and multinational corporations, but also in villages and neighborhoods, workplaces and private homes. Our argument is that the global is present where global-scale processes become manifest in real-world contexts, in the lives of ordinary people. Put another way, what makes an issue or process global are the questions one asks that reveal its global dimensions, even if on the surface it appears very small scale and localized (Darian-Smith 2013a; Eslava 2015). One implication of this is that scholars that do not think of their work as “global” can reconceptualize their current projects as global research by asking the kinds of questions that engage a global perspective.
A global perspective involves more than a view of geopolitical scales and jurisdictional levels nested from the local or small scale up through the levels of the national, regional, international, transnational, and global (Sassen 1991; Brenner 2004; Darian-Smith 2013c). The vertical nesting hierarchy of spatial scale has been the dominant way of thinking about political and economic relations between individuals, nation-states, and the international order for decades. This hierarchical way of thinking is often linked with the writings of the American international relations specialist Kenneth N. Waltz, who delineated three levels—systemic/international, national/regional, and individual/local—in his book Man, the State, and War (1959).
While this vertical nesting hierarchy provides a neat analytical shorthand for what we are exploring, it is conceptually and materially inadequate (Howitt 1993; Brenner 2001). Rather, a global perspective involves a new conceptualization of practices within a global imaginary. This entails, as global studies scholar Saskia Sassen argues, new assemblages of authority and power that do not privilege one spatial orientation over another (Sassen 2008). Depending on the questions one asks and the issues one is engaged with, the local may occupy the foreground and in fact eclipse the global in terms of analytical and methodological priority and material significance (fig. 1). This recasting of social, economic, political, legal, social, and cultural relations creates opportunities to rethink conventional linear notions of cause and effect since we cannot assume automatically that the issues with the most encompassing geospatial reach will have the biggest impact. Such rethinking disrupts our instrumentalist view of economic, political, and social processes, which in most scholarship still emanate primarily from the nation-state and are interpreted as making an impact up and down a vertical axis of substate, nation-state, and transstate relations.
Figure 1. Overlapping Assemblages and Relations across Time and Space.
As global scholars, we think it is essential to be flexible thinkers and interrogate our taken-for-granted assumptions about the workings of power and related social, legal, economic, and political concepts. In short, we need to decolonize the basic building blocks that have dominated the past three centuries of Western thought (Santos 2007, 2014; Mutua and Swadener 2011). As global scholars, we should be careful not to reify or unduly privilege the nation-state by viewing everything as operating either above or below its framing parameters. In other words, we need to analytically decenter the nation-state despite some states remaining very powerful actors. And as global scholars, we want to suggest that it is entirely appropriate, if not imperative, to foreground people living within local and intimate communities. This does not mean that the local is somehow intrinsically good or a more important arena of study, but analyses of global processes should always take into account the people and communities who ultimately feel the impact of those processes even when impacts are unintended or unforeseen. We should be anxious to explore the global dimensions of the local and how local forces may be both resisting and reconstituting national contexts (fig. 2).
Figure 2. Conceptual Imaginaries.
Perhaps most important, as global scholars we should embrace a global imaginary without naïvely believing—as was the case in the post–World War II era—in Western industrialized states as the driving force and only source of emancipatory possibility. This means recognizing alternative, non-Western epistemologies and pluralist political, legal, and economic systems, and promoting—as the World Social Forum seeks to do—how another world may be possible (Santos 2007). As Toni Morrison reminded us years ago, embracing the imagination of another can be one way of sharing the world (Morrison 1992). Adopting a global imaginary means appreciating that what happens in one part of the world affects and influences what happens in other parts of the world. Aspirations of global democracy necessarily involve “us” and “them” because another person’s insecurity is only a few steps removed from our own. Finally, as global scholars, adopting a global imaginary means understanding the overlapping and intersecting social contexts across times and spaces in which all of our work is situated. This is the case whether one’s primary research is engaged with family relations, local communities, global cities, national governments, multinational corporations, international agencies, or global governance institutions. Depending on the research questions one asks, all or some of these dimensions may be in play, in some cases simultaneously.
DECENTERING THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE
The current challenges presented by our complex world require global scholars to embrace new ways of thinking. We argue that decentering is an important way of thinking about global challenges. To “decenter” something means to displace it from a primary place, from a central position or role, or from an established center of focus. French philosopher Louis Althusser introduced the idea of a “decentered structure” to structural theory (Althusser 1990: 254–55). Jean Piaget used the idea in his theory of cognitive development. In his work, decentering refers to the stage of cognitive development when a child relinquishes an egocentric world for a more objective world shared with others, and develops the ability to logically consider multiple aspects of a situation (Silverman 1980: 106). In social theory, decentering can mean “to disconnect from practical or theoretical assumptions of origin, priority, or essence” (Merriam-Webster 2015).
The decentering theme will be used in several ways in this book. For example we argue, as others before have argued, that Euro-American scholars need to decenter Western conceptions of history. Further, we argue that to engage with global issues, Western scholars need to decenter the fundamentally modernist and rationalist imperatives to categorize and dichotomize what are essentially decentered social processes. Scholars need to recognize and overcome prevailing logics that put everything into hierarchies, ordered positions, center and periphery models, and developmental progressions with directional flows and linear causalities that start at an origin point and evolve in one direction.
Embracing a decentered world and learning to consider it from multiple perspectives implies a decentering of the production of knowledge that has been, at least for the past four centuries, historically associated with the rise of modernity that emerged out of Western Europe and through processes of colonialism, industrialization, and imperialism spread around the world. Today the Euro-American academy still dominates the production of scholarly knowledge, in part by ignoring long-standing and rapidly growing bodies of non-Western scholarship. There is a pressing need for research dealing with global issues to incorporate knowledge produced outside the Euro-American academy, and to understand this scholarship as a vital source of inspiration and innovation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Grosfoguel 2011; Keim et al, 2014). As Australian and US scholars ourselves, we have to constantly deal with this issue. We have found that there are a number of ways to engage scholarship in other languages and cultures. Scholars can read translated works, have their own work translated, participate in reciprocal scholarly exchanges, copublish, conduct field research, and ideally become conversant in foreign languages. This requires a lot of work, but we find each collaboration is more rewarding than we could have imagined.
Postcolonial scholar Edward Said was an early proponent of the need to create a more inclusive intellectual landscape, one that does not privilege the perspective of industrialized Western societies. Reflecting on the unprecedented escalation of merging systems of knowledge and traditions in the second half of the twentieth century, Said wrote, “We are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of” (1993: 328). Said went on to say, “To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the cultural challenge of the moment” (Said 1993: 331; see also Said 1983). Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn add that “as we move into the 21st century, it is clear that the boundaries, limits and classifications of the world are shifting” (Featherstone and Venn 2006: 1). More recently, global scholar Saskia Sassen has argued, “When we confront today’s range of transformations—rising inequality, rising poverty, rising government debt—the usual tools to interpret them are out of date” (Sassen 2014: 7). Global scholars, and the emerging field of global studies, should be at the forefront of this engagement and developing new theoretical and conceptual tools for understanding global processes.
In this context, the book Imagined Globalization by Néstor García Canclini, a Latin American theorist, is pertinent. He writes:
In this second decade of the twenty-first century neoliberal thought, normalized on a worldwide scale, has deteriorated, and in several regions it has been seen that not only is another world possible but that many worlds and forms of social organization are possible, as are different relations between men and women, between technology, territory, and investments. This decentered multifocality is what is interesting to me because it changes the terms of explanation and interpretation and discredits the geopolitical predominance. (García Canclini 2014: 209)
A decentered and more inclusive production of knowledge can help scholars everywhere transcend the limitations of existing theories and explanatory paradigms, to more fully grasp the many aspects of global issues, and begin the work of elaborating new, more inclusive, and realistic solutions.
BEYOND MULTIDISCIPLINARY AND INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
One way in which universities have addressed the need to develop global modes of inquiry has been to bring together scholars from various disciplines into a single department or research hub for multidisciplinary, perhaps even interdisciplinary, collaborations. Funding agencies have also responded to this need by connecting experts with different specialties to work on specific global projects. For a variety of reasons, however, bringing together disciplinary experts to talk to each other does not necessarily guarantee innovative approaches or theories appropriate for the complexity of our globalizing world. As Eric Wolf noted in his groundbreaking book Europe and the People without History: “An [integrated] approach is possible, but only if we can face theoretical possibilities that transcend our specialized disciplines. It is not enough to become multidisciplinary in the hope that an addition of all the disciplines will lead to a new vision” (Wolf 1982: 19).
The Global Turn explores how scholars may overcome the limitations of disciplinary scholarship in order to study global-scale processes and impacts. We argue that moving beyond multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches is necessary: however innovative they are, they are nonetheless bound to the conventional disciplines from which they draw their conceptual differentiation. To be truly global, global scholarship must break free from modernist and Eurocentric concepts and assumptions. This includes moving beyond the prevalent geopolitical state frameworks that are inadequate for examining today’s postnational global processes.
In this book we propose a theoretical and methodological synthesis that engages with the multifocal and multidimensional problems of our current times. We propose a global transdisciplinary framework that is more than a simple amalgamation or combination of mainstream disciplinary perspectives. Rather, the proposed framework posits a holistic global perspective and teases out new theoretical, analytical, and methodological modes of inquiry that are better suited to understanding evolving processes of globalization and their accompanying reconfigurations of social, cultural, economic, and political relations. We argue that it is not enough for contemporary scholarship to continue to replicate questions embedded within specific disciplines and specialized expertise. What is also needed is to reach beyond the disciplines toward innovative interdisciplinary questions that are relevant to twenty-first-century global research. We suggest that a global transdisciplinary framework has the potential to make scholarly knowledge increasingly relevant to pressing global challenges.
The elements of global studies—which we outline in Chapter 2—call for this transdisciplinary framework to include previously marginalized epistemologies and scholarship in the production of new knowledge. What is being forged across the disciplines, we argue, is a new synthesis that has the potential to become applicable and accessible to many scholars, even when their research interests are not explicitly global in nature. In the longer term, it also has the potential to open up Western scholarship to non-Western modes of thinking, knowing, and categorizing. Given the enormity of these potential implications, one of the central objectives in this book is to describe what we mean by a global transdisciplinary framework—which we do in Chapter 3—and explore the ways it may be incorporated into research agendas across the humanities and social sciences.
Building on the notion of a global transdisciplinary framework, we go on to outline a multidimensional methodology that makes it possible to design and implement a viable research agenda that reflects these theoretical developments. We would like to assure researchers that the study of global-scale issues is both an immensely important objective and one that even a beginning scholar can achieve. We are not suggesting that scholars should be deeply conversant in multiple disciplines. We are aware that everyone doing global research will have specific challenges relating to their own project. We believe, however, that by engaging in the conversations, insights, ideas, and examples laid out in this book, the reader will come away feeling motivated to think creatively, ask new questions, embrace new knowledge, grapple with new methodological approaches, and write new kinds of research relevant for understanding our increasingly globalized world.
This book provides novice and advanced scholars with a coherent conceptual, theoretical, and methodological lens through which to better understand unfolding processes of global significance and their impacts. It has been possible to write it because new ways of thinking about globalization in recent years have offered, and continue to offer, us new ways to study it. As we discussed above, for research to be global does not mean that its object of study is necessarily big in a spatial sense or that it must intrinsically have a worldwide reach. Many scholars now appreciate that it is not enough to describe the large-scale forces, processes, and flows that transcend national borders. We must also seek to understand the impact of those forces, processes, and flows on ordinary people in sprawling cities and rural towns, in vast urban slums, permanent refugee camps, border zones, gated communities, detention centers, and so on (Ong and Collier 2004). Many of these sites are subsumed within the national framework, just as many others transcend national borders and underscore the arbitrary and sometimes obsolete nature of nation-states. It is the dynamic, multidimensional interplay of issues along a local-global continuum that provides the unique framing of a global studies approach (see Chapter 2).
Emphasizing the local-global continuum allows scholars across the social sciences and humanities to focus on the ways in which global processes affect small communities and localized social, cultural, economic, legal, and political relations both positively and negatively. Even the largest and most abstract global process becomes tangible and accessible when and where it touches down and is refracted through specific locales and the people who live in them. Being able to see the global through the local and the local through the global is an important way of understanding our globalizing world. This moves scholarly conversations beyond tedious definitional arguments, such as debates on whether the phenomena we study are local, national, regional, international, transnational, or global. Recognizing the entire local-global continuum allows us to see that issues play out at multiple levels simultaneously and thus equips us to take on the interconnected and integrated realities of global processes.
AN EMERGING GLOBAL WORLDVIEW
The field of global studies is typically associated with studies of globalization that began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies of contemporary globalization were matched with a growing number of studies focusing on globalization in earlier historical periods (Sachsenmaier 2011). According to Manfred Steger’s narrative of the history of global studies, “it is no accident that the academic origins of the new field of inquiry [global studies] coincide with the explosion of the keyword [globalization] in both academic and public discourses in the 1990s” (Steger 2016: 238). We contend, however, that the intellectual trajectory that informs the transdisciplinary field of global studies started long before the 1990s. We suggest that the emergence of a new global worldview is linked to the moment of opportunity and optimism that was incongruously opened up by the devastating world wars of the twentieth century (Herren, Rüesch, and Sibille 2012). In this postwar moment, the modern Western understanding of the world was profoundly shaken and concepts such as state sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism were called into question. An emerging worldview reflected a postwar yearning for peace, stability, and multilateral political cooperation between countries and peoples from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and ideological backgrounds.
Building on the multilateral conversations that surrounded the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, and the first attempt at a League of Nations, the United Nations was successfully established in 1945. The UN played an important role in connecting millions of displaced people after the war, and heralded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. These events ushered in an unprecedented era of global optimism about countries’ ability to work together to avoid future wars. Unique to this brief post-WWII period was Western countries’ inclusion of the so-called Third World in this global venture. Support for decolonization underscored international efforts to create a more just and equitable world that contributed to decolonization and the “liberation” of many millions of people from Anglo-European control.
An event that encapsulated people’s newfound capacity to think in terms of global democracy and freedom was the opening of the New York World’s Fair in 1964. The fair billed itself as a “universal and international” exposition. For the 51 million visitors that poured through its gates, the World’s Fair represented the promise of technology and advanced communications to link people around the world in new ways. It featured a new ride by Walt Disney called “It’s a Small World”; a rotating “Carousel of Progress” demonstrating new technologies such as televisions, computers, and kitchen appliances; and high-tech trains and architectural wonders that brought to life science fiction’s futuristic world (see Samuel 2007; Tirella 2014)
Among these wonders of modern technology, the Unisphere was the fair’s key attraction (fig. 3). This was an enormous stainless steel model of Earth that reached twelve stories high and was designed to celebrate “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” Like the Statue of Liberty, which had been built in France and erected in New York Harbor eighty years earlier, the Unisphere was intended as a symbol of freedom and global democracy (Mitchell 2014). Importantly, the Unisphere also reflected the growing popular excitement associated with a new space age. It foreshadowed the Apollo 8 mission that would take place a few years later, in 1968, and enable its three-man crew to see Earth for the first time from an outer-space perspective. Astronaut William Anders’s famous Earthrise photograph, and which some have labeled the most influential environmental photo ever taken,1 invoked a new way of thinking about man’s vulnerability in the universe and humankind’s common and interlinked future on a single planet.
Figure 3. Unisphere, New York World’s Fair, 1964–65.
Events such as the establishment of the UN, the World’s Fair, and the success of Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, which put man on the moon, together reflected a remarkable period in which a new global imaginary of mankind’s interconnectedness emerged and took on weight in the popular imagination, particularly in the United States. The growing environmental movement furthered this imaginary, spurred on by Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara, California, oil spill. In response to the spill, an estimated 20 million Americans took to the streets in 1970 in defense of the global environment, celebrating the first Earth Day. This mass mobilization forced the US federal government to establish the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and helped launch Green Party politics in Australia and then Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Germany (Spretnak and Kapra 1986; Wall 2010).
At the same moment that the UN Charter established a platform upon which to “maintain international peace and security,” however, the superpowers of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom were already mobilizing against the Soviet Union and setting up the conditions for the Cold War that posited capitalism against communism. Against the upbeat rhetoric of global inclusion that flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century, it is impossible to ignore the oppressive historical realities that underpinned and perhaps explain the desire for an optimistic global imaginary. The jubilant Unisphere imagery of the World’s Fair elided the fact that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated only five months before the world exposition opened. It also obscured the Cold War realities of the 1960s, which witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall (1961), mounting fears of nuclear warfare in incidents such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), looming and ongoing regional wars (Korea and Vietnam), and the USSR’s suppression of the liberation movement known as the Prague Spring (1968). In Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world, the 1960s witnessed extreme violence in response to liberation movements, deeply tainting the global optimism surrounding decolonization that flourished immediately after World War II. Self-determination was often accompanied by waves of oppression and brutality as ethnic and religious communities were artificially divided and cordoned off into new nation-states across Asia and Africa.
In the wake of genocide and nuclear warfare, or what Eric Hobsbawm has called “total war,” the foundations of modern rationality were profoundly shaken within intellectual circles in this postwar era (Hobsbawm 1994). Many societies developed deep-seated anxieties about the failings of modernity’s promises of science, development, progress, democracy, and self-determination, which had dominated Euro-American thought since the Enlightenment. These anxieties manifested within twentieth-century European art and literature movements, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, that bridged the post-WWI and WWII periods, as well as in the existentialist, absurdist, and nihilist movements in philosophy and literature. Artists and intellectuals, many of whom had fled Europe for the United States in the late 1930s, grappled with the sensation that nothing was predictable, stable, or fixed in a world turned upside-down that had become in many ways unrecognizable.
Within the Euro-American academy, leading intellectual figures began reaching out beyond the conventions of academic disciplines to explore a turbulent postwar period that had brought women into the labor force, released black and brown societies from colonial rule, and revealed the violence and depravity of ostensibly civilized European societies. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, this was a period when the “centrist liberal geoculture that was holding the world-system together” was essentially undermined (Wallerstein 2004: x).
Against rapidly shifting social and political contexts, scholars began “deconstructing” or questioning the basic assumptions underpinning modernity. Taken-for-granted categories of nationality, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity became sites of controversy, exploration, and experimentation. As a result, new intellectual conversations emerged between scholars from across the disciplines who were drawn together in a quest to understand enduring real-world problems at home and abroad—problems of racism, inequality, development, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism. Opportunities for dialogue among Third- and First-World scholars developed at the fringes of these conversations, introducing new ideas, alternative perspectives, and competing epistemologies into the Western academy that broadened its knowledge base and underscored its Eurocentric bias (Wallerstein 1996: 48).
Pressures mounted for universities to look beyond their national borders as well as to reexamine domestic agendas and respond to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The decades that followed saw a proliferation of interdisciplinary programs on university campuses, including area, ethnic, women, gender, religious, and environmental studies (Ferguson 2012). Cultural, ethnic, and area studies programs ushered new conversations into universities. Some of these programs focused on non-Western regions, issues of race and class, and some on alternative viewpoints and voices of minority peoples. Among these programs, area studies represented an explicit effort to initiate new knowledge about non-Western countries and places.
Within the United States the international studies programs were sponsored in large part by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, who worked collectively to support interdisciplinary area studies as a matter of public policy (Lagemann 1989; Chomsky et al. 1998; Ludden 2000; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Szanton 2004; Schäfer 2010). Under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the introduction of Title VI grants, funding was made available to approximately 125 universities to support area studies, language studies, and education abroad programs, which were known as National Resource Center Programs. This resulted in a diverse number of academic units being developed, such as African Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, East Asian Studies, European Studies, and Pacific Studies. Together they reflected Cold War tensions and the United States’ expanding neocolonial reach and development aspirations into other parts of the world.
In the United Kingdom Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall established Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 in an explicit attempt to grapple with issues of race, class, and power. Heavily influenced by socialist and Marxist thought, these social theorists and historians began exporting their critical interdisciplinary ideas to the United States, where cultural studies blossomed in the 1980s. At approximately the same time, postcolonial and subaltern studies began to flourish. These fields pushed Western scholars to interrogate their essentialist cultural assumptions and view the history of the world from a bottom-up perspective that foregrounded the experiences of non-European peoples and their often very different readings of the past. While many of these conversations were marginalized on university campuses, they nonetheless opened up intellectual space within the Euro-American academy to develop critical perspectives and foster alternative epistemological positions (see however Spivak 2003; Chow 2006).
The cross-pollination of ideas between these various interdisciplinary programs cultivated a wide range of ideas about subjectivity, identity, governmentality, postcoloniality, and so on. As we discuss in Chapter 3, the concept of transdisciplinarity, coined by Jean Piaget in 1970, encapsulates these dynamic theoretical exchanges within and between the global north and the global south in the second half of the twentieth century (Piaget 1972). These exchanges informed a new set of thematics that transcended disciplinary thinking and that have reshaped conventional disciplines within the academy over the past three decades. Transdisciplinarity provides the theoretical platform upon which global studies as a new field of inclusive inquiry is currently building.
DEBATING GLOBALIZATION
The flourishing of new ways to analyze complex social relations between nations and peoples in the postwar period was followed by the emergence of globalization as a focus of study. While there have been many periods of globalization over the centuries, twentieth-century globalization blossomed under geopolitical and technological conditions unique to the current era (Nederveen Pieterse 2012). Global processes in the 1970s took the interconnectedness between nation-states, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and a host of other nonstate and civil society actors to new levels. Globalization first became topical within the international finance and trade sectors, in new articulations of global capitalism. As markets opened up, new economic theories and policies substantiated what has come to be called the age of neoliberalism. Encapsulating neoliberalism as an economic logic, Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, declared in 1970 that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970).
The United States and United Kingdom led the charge in implementing neoliberal economic policies that favored business interests, maximized private corporate power and profits, and devalued the role of the state in regulating exploitative financial practices that jeopardized labor safeguards and public interests. China began its own push toward market liberalization (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2007). New digital technologies heightened the speed and capacities of economic exchange around the world and facilitated a sense—at least in the global north—of a new era of free-market globalization. The financial cycles of the 1980s and 1990s and the formation of international business elites underscored the rise of a new “global imaginary” (Steger 2008). During this period, the United States emerged as the global economic superpower, taking advantage of emerging economies in countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (collectively referred to as BRICS). Today, of course, the political and economic landscape is very different. The size of China’s economy has grown rapidly and the United States is no longer the undisputed world leader. Neoliberalism has come under attack, and it is largely blamed for undermining democratic processes in its promotion of unsustainable greed. The 2008 global economic crisis can be seen as the culmination of a long, slow process of global privatization and deregulation that brought the financial world to its knees, dismantled the middle classes, and created unprecedented levels of global inequality and insecurity (Beck 1992, 2009; Chomsky 1999).
It is important to note that globalization was not entirely driven by transnational economic exchange and international financial practices, as economists, with their determinist theories, are inclined to claim (see Appadurai 1996). In the 1980s and 1990s the world also experienced huge shifts in ideological affiliations with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism, the rise of postcolonial aspirations through self-determination, and the evolution of new cultural and social networks that were both transnational and subnational in nature. Put differently, in the latter half of the twentieth century new forms of community and subjectivity that transcended standard nationalist ideologies and allegiances emerged. The rise of a global environmental movement and Green Party politics, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa through global political pressure, the call for a global response to the AIDS epidemic—all of these events highlighted people’s global interdependence and affirmed that a global worldview was essential for dealing with issues that could not be managed or contained by any one country. These events, and other global challenges, disrupted the centrality, stability, and ideology of the sovereign nation-state, ushering in what some commentators have labeled our current postnational or “post-Westphalian” age (Falk 2002).
As neoliberal economics picked up traction and dismantled welfarism and regulatory state bureaucracies throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so too did notions of democracy come under attack within both Western and non-Western societies. Ideological and political shifts across the world diminished people’s sense of an active public sphere and a strong secular state system that could defend the rights of workers, women, and ordinary people against greedy capitalists and deregulated financial markets. These shifts helped to bolster the rise of religious fundamentalism and extremism around the world among Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and other religious communities. Religious extremism has offered new forms of authority that have attracted millions of people in lieu of the nation-state paradigm, which has proven unable to protect the rights of citizens and in the process diminished many people’s sense of national loyalty (Juergensmeyer 2000; Juergensmeyer, Griego, and Soboslai 2015; Yang 2008). This period also saw a return to ultranationalism, racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant hysteria (Brown 2014).
In the post–Cold War era, scholars in various disciplines were trying to understand globalization and the “intensification of worldwide social relations” (Giddens 1990: 64; Robertson 1992; Axford 1995; Castells 1996; Friedman 1999; Stiglitz 2002). There were heated debates about the definition of globalization and how best to describe and analyze it (Steger and James 2014). Since the 1990s scholars have split into three main camps: the so-called “hyperglobalists,” “skeptics,” and “transformationalists” (Held et al. 1999: 2–10; Ferguson and Mansbach 2012:17–26). The diverse opinions about the nature of globalization that characterize each of these camps reflect the expertise and training of individual scholars from across the social sciences and, to a lesser degree, the humanities. In general terms, hyperglobalists focus on the economy, arguing that since the Cold War the world has experienced unprecedented levels of integration and a new form of global capitalism that have profoundly changed its organization and how it is experienced. Skeptics argue against this position, stating that economic internationalism occurred to the same degree in the nineteenth century and that contemporary economic expansion does not represent an entirely new era or reflect real historical change. Skeptics also assert that global phenomena do not have a worldwide reach, as hyperglobalists claim, and are in fact only regional—e.g., European, East Asian—in geospatial terms.
Transformationalists, or what Luke Martell calls the “third wave” of globalization theorists, stress the interconnections between economics, politics, society, and culture (Martell 2007). Over the years, tranformationalists have presented more nuanced, multilinear, and multicausal analyses of global processes than the hyperglobalists or skeptics. In part this is a result of the global north now experiencing many of the devastating impacts of neoliberalism that it exacted for decades on the global south, as the plummeting social and political circumstances of Greece, Spain, and other European countries have shown. Transformationalists agree that the world is currently undergoing massive change, but the precise nature of that change is still very much in question.
FROM GLOBALIZATION TO GLOBAL STUDIES
Against the backdrop of scholarly debate about the various meanings and impacts of globalization, global studies emerged as a new field of inquiry that broadened the focus beyond economic forms of globalization. The first global studies programs were established in the late 1990s, and over the last twenty years stand-alone programs and research hubs have flourished in numerous countries including Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each of these programs developed within specific institutional and cultural contexts and as a consequence has its own unique intellectual profile (Juergensmeyer 2014b; Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 25–52; Loeke and Middell forthcoming). Alongside these interdisciplinary programs dedicated to global studies, subdisciplinary fields that engage specifically with global issues—e.g., global history, global literature, global sociology, and global legal studies—have also emerged within conventional disciplines (see fig. 4). In short, the field of global studies, and its various institutional and disciplinary manifestations, has grown rapidly, and there is now burgeoning institutional support for global scholarship at leading universities.2
Figure 4. Disciplines Engaging Globalization.
Many of the early global studies programs, particularly those in the United States and United Kingdom, emphasized macro processes of economic globalization and international institutions that reflected international relations/international studies scholarship. Alongside this trend, other global studies programs stressed a more humanistic approach and focused on global history, postcolonial studies, cultural diversity, and intercultural exchange. For example, the world and global history approaches at the University of Leipzig laid the groundwork for what is now the Global and European Studies Institute (GESI). Another example is the Globalism Institute (now Centre for Global Research) at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, which from its inauguration paid particular attention to global political and economic transformations and related political theory (see Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 41–47). One of the pioneering programs was the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founded in 1999. From the start this program included an interdisciplinary curriculum and faculty from both the humanities and social sciences.3
Today, among the many global studies programs around the world, there is a concerted effort to develop a more inclusive curriculum that increasingly promotes socially engaged research as well as historical and qualitative methods in an effort to foster culturally informed knowledge production (see, for instance, Appelbaum and Robinson 2005; Khagram and Levitt 2008; Amar 2013). Drawing on a broad range of scholarship, including anthropology, comparative literature, critical race studies, economics, ethnic studies, feminist studies, geography, history, law, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, and subaltern studies, a global studies approach highlights the need to rethink our analytical concepts, methods, and approaches to ask new questions about globally integrated processes and dependencies (see fig. 5).
Figure 5. Global Studies.
As you would expect, because global scholars borrow elements from conventional disciplines, global studies is impacted by and, over time, may have some impact on those disciplines. But in general interdisciplinary scholars can never entirely satisfy scholars that are deeply entrenched in conventional disciplines. For example, global research often engages with history. Historical context is a necessary dimension to understanding global issues. For the global scholar, history—or economics, geography, linguistics, or any of the other disciplines—informs one of the many dimensions relevant to global analysis (compare fig. 5 to fig. 12 in Chapter 6). Global scholars draw upon disciplinary perspectives and methods selectively, as needed, to understand multifaceted issues. As an interdisciplinary project, however, global scholarship cannot be entirely contained within disciplines.
Developing a unique interdisciplinary global studies curriculum poses specific challenges that echo the history of the then new women’s studies departments of the 1970s. At that time, scholars working in traditional disciplines added feminist content to their regular classes in an attempt to mainstream women, sexuality, and feminist issues more generally. Bonnie Smith, professor of history and women’s studies at Rutgers University, recounts, “At the beginning, Women’s Studies came to offer a cafeteria-like array of disciplinary investigations of the past and present conditions under which women experienced, acted, and reflected upon the world” (Smith 2013: 4). Over the decades, however, women’s studies converged into a comprehensive field with its own unique curriculum and an expansive array of scholarly inquiries that ranged well beyond the initial scholarly focus on women. Smith notes:
From the beginning Women’s Studies engaged the entire university population. It usually brought in those who were the most intellectually adventurous, whether the course took place in Seoul, South Korea or Los Angeles, US. In short, Women’s Studies is a global scholarly enterprise with sparks of energy crossing the disciplines and uniting communities of students and teachers. All this makes Women’s Studies a vastly exciting and innovative program of study. (Smith 2013: 4)
Conventional disciplines are mainstreaming the study of global issues within regular courses in a similar fashion. As noted above, today there exist a range of subdisciplinary fields such as global history, global literature, global sociology, and global legal studies. But this cafeteria-like smorgasbord of course offerings that are grounded in specific disciplinary theory and methods is quite different from the distinct interdisciplinary global studies curriculum that leading global studies departments around the world are developing. Like the field of women’s studies, global studies is a “global scholarly enterprise” and a “vastly exciting and innovative program of study.” And like women’s studies, global studies is developing a comprehensive field with its own unique curriculum and theoretical and methodological profile, which may take time to fully mature and coalesce (Campbell, Mackinnon, and Stevens 2010; O’Byrne and Hensby 2011; McCarty 2014a). We view this book as contributing to this process.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a spate of essays asking “What is global studies?” have accompanied the rapid growth in global studies programs, promoting lively debate and commentary (see Juergensmeyer 2011, 2014b; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Gunn 2013; Duve 2013; Sparke 2013; Darian-Smith 2014; McCarty 2014c; Middell 2014; Steger and Wahlrab 2016). These essays reflect a need to move beyond an earlier preoccupation with defining historical and contemporary phases of globalization to analyzing its many processes, facets, and impacts (Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 2012). As Mark Juergensmeyer argues, there is a need to move from “globalization studies,” which studies globalization from various disciplinary perspectives, to “global studies,” “the emerging transdisciplinary field that incorporates a variety of disciplinary and new approaches to understanding the transnational features of our global world” (Juergensmeyer 2013a, 2013b). This transition toward what we call a global transdisciplinary framework reflects the increasing awareness that global issues, and the theoretical and analytical tools required to study them, are emerging and manifesting within and across local, regional, national, and transnational arenas that require new modes of inquiry and new forms of knowledge production.
It could be argued that global studies programs—at least those interdisciplinary programs that include the humanities and social sciences—have the potential to recast the liberal arts curriculum. In this sense the field has become greater than the sum of its parts. Global studies’ interdisciplinary and integrated approach to multiple epistemologies, its holistic understanding of humanity’s now-global interconnection and interdependence, and its attention to intercultural understanding and ethical practice suggest a reconfigured liberal arts philosophy (Hutner and Mohamed 2015; Roth 2015; Zakaria 2016).4 Whether or not one wants to characterize global studies in this way does not detract from the fact that it is one of the fastest growing academic fields in the world. There is a rapidly growing body of academic work that explicitly addresses the processes of globalization, and, more recently, a nascent body of literature has taken up the field of global studies itself (see Steger and Wahlrab 2016; Loeke and Middell forthcoming). Global studies has an increasing number of dedicated peer-reviewed journals, book series, encyclopedias, and professional associations, all producing literature that is explicitly global in orientation (e.g., Anheier and Juergensmeyer 2012, see also appendix B). That being said, we hesitate to label global studies a new discipline. Like the enormously complicated global processes scholars study, conversations describing and analyzing this complex should be messy, dynamic, passionate, and constantly open to rethinking. Suggesting that global studies be treated as a discipline runs the risk of closing off intellectual curiosity and stifling its creativity in the urge to establish a literary canon and adopt the trappings of conventional disciplines. In our view, it is essential that global studies remain interdisciplinary and that scholars continue to argue and debate what the field is and could be rather than arriving at a definitive answer in an effort to claim the status of being a cohesive subject of study (Darian-Smith 2014).
The openness to debating and constantly rethinking the field of global studies is also an ethical position. It underscores that Western scholars may not have all the answers to the world’s problems and that other people may have new things to say and innovative solutions to offer. As we will discuss more fully in the next chapter, the emerging field of global studies acknowledges the need for new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing global issues. This necessarily entails embracing new forms of knowledge within one’s own society as well as beyond from non-Western communities in an effort to think “outside the box.” Global studies, perhaps more so than any other arena of inquiry within the Euro-American academy, recognizes that what is happening “over there” in terms of poverty, inequality, exploitation, environmental degradation, and new types of warfare could also happen back home in what David Held calls a world of “overlapping communities of fate” (Held 2002: 57; Roy and Crane 2015). In foregrounding the message that “us” and “them” are intimately interconnected, global studies as a new field of inquiry is both dependent upon and deeply committed to learning from and respecting others. In other words, global studies views intercultural communication as an essential key to better understanding ourselves and our collective futures.
In the next chapter, we outline the significance and characteristics of global studies research. These features have several important theoretical, methodological, and analytical implications. By extracting an integrated global studies approach that builds on the transdisciplinary theoretical framework in Chapter 3, we propose a way of asking provocative questions that helps distill research into a unique set of methodological inquiries. In Chapter 4 we walk the reader through the steps of designing a global studies research project; in Chapter 5 we introduce mixed methods and global methodological strategies; and in Chapter 6 we discuss the specific advantages of a global case study, one that enables the researcher to analyze and engage with the complexity of global issues using a manageable research methodology. In Chapter 7 we illustrate our discussion with specific examples of global studies research that successfully deploys what we call a “global case study method.”
