The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 2012), that global studies gains the potential to recognize and engage with the many facets of the most serious global issues facing the world today (Featherstone and Venn 2006; Darian-Smith 2014).

      Valorizing and legitimating non-Western epistemologies, however, involves much more than either passive moral support or active material support. Western scholars must overcome their ethnocentrism and be prepared to have their own worldviews changed by pluralistic ways of knowing (Santos 2007, 2014). This is very difficult for some scholars in the global north, who remain convinced of their own intellectual superiority. Yet unpacking dominant paradigms should be considered positively, as a creative, constructive, and inclusive process and an opportunity to overcome the “provincial, arrogant, and silly” posturing of Western scholars who assume their work applies to the entire world (Rehbein 2014: 217). More significantly, it is the surest path to surmounting the inherent limitations of Western scholarship, making new, productive avenues of inquiry possible, uncovering new ways of looking at global issues, and leading to more just and sustainable outcomes.

      This recognition of the fundamental need to promote, embrace, and learn from people outside the Euro-American worldview builds upon the sociology of knowledge literature, which points to the need to think beyond the nation-state. Michael Burawoy notes that this new interdisciplinary approach “has to be distinguished from economics that is primarily concerned with the advance of market society and political science that is concerned with the state and political order—Northern disciplines ever more preoccupied with modeling a world ever more remote from reality” (Burawoy 2014: xvii). Adding to this conversation, Nour Dados and Raewyn Connell argue that “the epistemological case for a remaking of the social sciences has been firmly established. The great need now is to develop substantive fields of knowledge in a new way, using perspectives from the South and what might be called a postcolonial theoretical sensibility” (Dados and Connell 2014: 195). This requires, declares Boike Rehbein, “not more and not less than a critical theory for the globalized world” (Rehbein 2014: 221).

      As critical global studies scholars, we must be highly attuned to the dominance and exclusivity of knowledge produced in the global north. Refusing to embrace and learn from non-Western knowledge aligns us perilously with former colonial eras of oppression and discrimination, where ignorance, arrogance, and the silencing of others ruled the day. We must remain vigilant and curb our universalistic presumptions if we are to avoid replicating, albeit in different ways, the colonial and imperial violence of our Western intellectual forebears (Darian-Smith 2016; Smith 2012; Kovach 2009).

      Developing Global Ethics

      Kwame Anthony Appiah has written extensively about the idea of a shared global ethic in his influential book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). As the world becomes ever more complex and interconnected, there is a commensurate need to take global ethics very seriously. Appiah urges us to “learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another” (Appiah 2006: 78; see also Beck 2006; Beck and Sznaider 2006).

      In the context of global studies, getting used to one another necessarily entails making room at the table for people normally excluded from the processes of knowledge production. It means actively fostering new forms of agency, participation, and expression within the wider contexts of our rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape (Falk 2014). It may even require, as revolutionary black feminist Audre Lorde wrote decades ago, learning how “to make common cause with those identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths” (Lorde 1984: 113). This means explicitly acknowledging that any global process, event, problem, or issue involves a plurality of ethics, and that respecting, learning, and engaging with others from different ethical perspectives is essential in striving to live in a world of peace and mutual support.

      CHARACTERISTICS OF GLOBAL STUDIES RESEARCH

      There are certain characteristics associated with a global studies approach, some that are unique to the newly emerging field and some that are adapted from various disciplines. We argue that these elements are important for understanding global issues, as well as making the field more coherent, applicable, and accessible to a wide range of scholars irrespective of their intellectual training.

      Holistic Approaches

      Global studies seeks to recover a holistic approach to analyzing societies and the peoples that constitute them. This means approaching one’s research with the big picture in mind, consciously integrating the political, economic, and sociocultural elements that may not be immediately obvious within a conventional nation-state framing and modernist analytical paradigm. Unfortunately, a holistic approach to studying societies has been in decline within the academy for several decades. It has largely been overwhelmed by the modern rush toward specialization and discrete categories of expert knowledge. The impulse toward holism can still be found within in certain disciplines, such as anthropology, and some interdisciplinary fields, such as social psychology. These disciplines and interdisciplinary fields have long sought to reintegrate that which has been disintegrated by the ever-increasing rationalization of Western society and its educational institutions.

      Modern scholars typically approach topics such as economics, politics, culture, and law as singular fields of analysis. Global studies scholars, in contrast, seek to thread apparently discrete phenomena back into the fabric of relations—social, political, economic, historical, and geographic—from which they have been artificially extracted and abstracted (Wolf 1982). What can appear as discrete institutions and realms of productive activity in society are necessarily functioning parts of a whole. Treating such elements as separate, independent units fundamentally misrepresents the interdependence of their functions within the entire social system.

      Social structures and functions are not fixed or morally neutral. They endure and provide some level of historical continuity, but they do not entirely prevent change and transformation. They produce and reproduce society, but they also reproduce discrimination and inequality. It is essential to remember that fields like law and health care may seem like distinct areas of value-neutral activity, but in fact they are contested social constructs that cannot be removed from their sociocultural contexts and must always be situated within the fabric of social, political, and economic relations that inevitably involve conflicts over power and self-interest.

      The preference for a holistic approach shapes many aspects of global studies scholarship and is the conceptual platform upon which the approach that we present here is built. The drive to present a more holistic picture, or what others have called a “big picture,” can be found in nearly every chapter of this book and in most global studies literature. This holistic impulse is a core principle of the global case study method that we describe in detail in Chapter 6.

      Transgressive and Integrative

      Thinking holistically, we further argue that global processes and the tools we use to analyze them are essentially transgressive and integrative. By transgressive we mean breaking down boundaries, in the spatial sense of crossing geopolitical boundaries (north/south, south/south, south/east) and in the temporal sense of crossing what are often presented as discrete historical periods (Sachsenmaier 2006; Nederveen Pieterse 2012). This transgressive impulse seeks to go beyond conventional, Eurocentric modes of thinking and violate scholarly conventions that obstruct or reign in attempts to think more inclusively about the world and its complex processes. Transgressing conventional modes of thought and related sensibilities—when done with sensitivity—blurs disciplinary boundaries and many fundamental categories of Enlightenment thinking, presenting opportunities for new modes of intercultural conversation.

      By integrative we mean more than an interdisciplinary synthesis: recognizing multiple connections between what are often thought of as discrete social, СКАЧАТЬ