The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies
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The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520966307 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 319,169 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Philip C. McCarty is Lecturer in Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. His recent publications include Integrated Perspectives in Global Studies, “Communicating Global Perspectives” in Global Europe: Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective and “Globalizing Legal History” in Rechtsgeschichte.
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The Global Turn
Theories, Research Designs, And Methods for Global Studies
By Eve Darian-Smith, Philip C. McCarty
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29302-1
CHAPTER 1
Global 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 imaginar ies. 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.
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).
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Global Turn by Eve Darian-Smith, Philip C. McCarty. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of FiguresForeword
1. Global Studies as a New Field of Inquiry
2. Why Is Global Studies Important?
3. A Global Theoretical Framework
4. Global Research Design
5. Global Methods and Methodologies
6. A Global Case Study Method
7. Examples of Global Studies Research
Conclusion
Appendix A. A Global Case Study Outline
Appendix B. List of Global Studies Journals
References
Index