The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ studies approach offers scholars a unique, coherent, and more holistic way of understanding ongoing global affairs.

      Global perspectives empower scholars and students to understand the world in new ways, as well as to act as citizens of the world (Gaudelli 2016). Teaching the next generation of scholars to reach beyond nationalism to embrace the wider humanity, and encouraging them to think seriously about the possibilities of global citizenship, can transform their fundamental understanding of the individual’s role in society and our collective place in the world.

      Critical Thinking

      In general terms, critical thinking means a willingness to think openly, challenge one’s own assumptions and concepts, reflect upon the structures of knowledge that guide human actions, and question the implicit bias involved in specific forms of communication. As Michael Scriven and Richard Paul have argued,

      Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. (Scriven and Paul 1987)

      Being a critical thinker is not about being negative or trying to dismantle everything, as some unsophisticated scholars are apt to claim. Rather, being a critical thinker is about refusing to be complacent in the surety of one’s understanding of a problem or concept, and asking new questions in order to both test one’s ideas and seek new ways of knowing and explaining. Critical thinking is taught in many national curricula at the high school level and is viewed as essential to fostering engaged intellectual exchange and reflective contextualization. At the university level, critical thinking lies at the core of pioneering and progressive scholarship, be it in the social sciences, humanities, or physical sciences.

      The term critical thinking has its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century and is typically associated with neo-Marxist thought and its criticism of the rational actor model fundamental to modern liberal economics. In the twentieth century, critical thinking is associated with the Annales School and Frankfurt School of the interwar period. Members of the Annales School included Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Fernand Braudel. Together, these scholars introduced a new historiography that took a more holistic approach in its serious engagement with cultural and social historical analyses of all classes of society, including peasants, farmers, and the poor. The Frankfurt School’s members included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Other important critical thinkers include Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, and Jürgen Habermas, to name a few of the more well known. Many of the members moved to Columbia University in New York to escape the persecution of Nazi Germany. These intellectuals were disillusioned with the ideologies of capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism and sought to understand the structures and mechanisms of class conflict and social inequality. In theoretical terms, they strove to overcome the limitations of established positivist and observation-based thinking, which, they argued, constrained innovative political thought and action.

      Today critical theory informs a vast array of theoretical perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literary criticism, hermeneutics, semiotics, cultural studies, subaltern studies, world-systems theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory (Collins 1990). These critical perspectives differ to the degree that they explicitly seek social transformation. That being said, each shares in the quest to interpret social meaning, to expose underlying forms of consciousness and narratives of subjectivity, and to reflect upon the power dynamics between structure and agency (Mulnix 2012). In all of these scholarly endeavors, it is important not to equate critical thinking with moral virtues or some set of predetermined objectives. As Jennifer Wilson Mulnix argues,

      Critical thinking, as an intellectual virtue, is not directed at any specific moral ends. That is, it does not intrinsically contain a set of beliefs that are the natural outcomes of applying the method. For instance, two critical thinkers can come to hold contrary beliefs, despite each applying the skills associated with critical thinking well and honestly. As such, critical thinking has little to do with what we think, but everything to do with how we think. (Mulnix 2012: 466)

      Within the field of global studies, critical thinking is recognized as an essential element in fostering new questions and new kinds of research applicable to global-scale issues and processes (Appelbaum and Robinson 2005; Juergensmeyer 2011; Lim 2017; Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 147–81). Critical thinking is present in the ways global studies scholarship inter-rogates the logics, categories, ideologies, and assumptions that reinforce hierarchies of power and the status quo. It surfaces in global studies’ commitment to interdisciplinarity and its intrinsic challenge to established disciplinary forms of knowledge. For example, global studies probes the limits of the nation-state and the international relations paradigm, problematizing nationalism and monolithic national identities (Anderson 1983). Global studies also critiques mainstream economics, free-market ideologies, and the assumptions behind economic modernization and development models that center Europe and relegate everyone else to the periphery (Escobar 1995). Critical thinking is further evident in the field’s questioning of new forms of imperialism and structural and institutional modes of discrimination, exploitation, and violence. Global studies hence interrogates concepts such as rationalism, nationalism, secularism, modernity, individualism, liberalism, development, and democracy as well as naturalized categories of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity.

      Being critical should not be understood as a destructive or negative impulse, but rather as a constructive and inclusive impulse. Unpacking dominant paradigms is often analytically productive. So while opening up scholarship to multiple and alternative viewpoints can be threatening in that it challenges established truths and ways of understanding, it can also be a creative process, producing new avenues of inquiry and pointing toward new syntheses and solutions (Nederveen Pieterse 2013: 7). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, critical thinking highlights the need for inclusivity in global studies scholarship through promoting the voices of the oppressed, recognizing non-Western epistemologies, and incorporating the global south in the production of new forms of knowledge.

      Non-Western Epistemologies and Multiple Voices

      The field of global studies reflects a growing scholarly appreciation for the fact that our contemporary world calls for new theoretical, analytical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches. More profoundly, some scholars are now acknowledging that the Euro-American academy may not have all the answers to comprehending and dealing with our increasingly interconnected world. There is a growing recognition that Western paradigms of knowledge may not be able to solve the problems the West has created.

      According to ethnic studies scholar George Lipsitz, “New social relations around the world are rapidly producing new social subjects with their own particular archives, imaginaries, epistemologies, and ontologies …. epistemic upheavals require us to rethink fundamental categories about place, time, and knowledge” (Lipsitz 2010: 12–13). Taking a cue from ethnic studies, a global studies approach requires us to reconsider dominant forms of knowledge production and engage with critical voices and plural epistemologies that are not typically represented in Western scholarship and pedagogy (see Freire 2000; Ngũgĩ 1986). Global analyses should include marginalized experiences and voices speaking in non-English vernaculars, many of which may bear witness to the injustices in a global system that includes gross inequality, extreme poverty, human rights abuses, exploitation of human and natural resources, environmental degradation, regionalized violence, and genocide (Lim 2017; McCarty 2014b). Reciprocal intellectual exchanges, bilingual translations, and joint research projects provide avenues for inclusion of different perspectives. It is only by deliberately making room for critical voices and alternative epistemologies, as well as sharing editorial power with non-Western scholars in СКАЧАТЬ