The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

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      The point is that as a global scholar you can take your research in nearly any direction and engage with nearly any combination of global issues. Moreover, each global topic is deeply complex and no one scholar, or even group of scholars, can possibly hope to master any one of them fully. So we end up with the question with which we began Chapter 1: How does one begin the formidable task of doing global research? Our argument in this chapter and throughout this book is that rather than going in infinite directions and being totally overwhelmed, it is possible to do global studies research in an orderly and manageable way. Our overall goal is to convince the reader that doing global research can be enormously rewarding and well worth the time, energy, and challenge. More profoundly, contemporary researchers cannot afford to sit back and fail to engage with historical and contemporary global processes if their work is to remain relevant and applicable to the academy.

      As a critical new field of inquiry, global studies stands poised to help dislodge the global north’s epistemological universalism. To put it another way, global studies has the potential to become the intellectual platform upon which scholars forge theoretical and methodological contributions that decolonize Western expertise. Global research may seem formidable, but we view it as an extraordinary opportunity to shape new modes of inquiry that are of the utmost imperative to every one of us living in an increasingly interconnected world.

3A Global Theoretical Framework

      In this chapter we argue that the Euro-American academy is entering a new integrative paradigm that is moving scholarly practice beyond the disciplinary/interdisciplinary divide. Drawing on the development of interdisciplinary approaches over the past four decades, we suggest that the theoretical and analytical boundaries between conventional disciplines are becoming less relevant in the creation of lines of inquiry and production of knowledge that expressly seek to explore today’s complex global world.

      This chapter links the reasons why global studies is important (Chapter 2) to wider theoretical developments in the social sciences and humanities. We trace the historical development of innovative intellectual conversations within the Euro-American academy, focusing on interdisciplinary approaches that have developed across the humanities and social science disciplines since World War II. Referring to Jean Piaget’s 1970 concept of transdisciplinarity as emblematic of these developments (Piaget 1972), we argue that combining transdisciplinary theoretical innovations with the unique perspectives emerging within the field of global studies creates the groundwork for a new coherent, accessible, and inclusive paradigm that we call a global transdisciplinary framework. The framework makes it possible to study multifaceted, global-scale issues in a holistic fashion, deploying various perspectives at multiple levels and across spatial and temporal dimensions. The framework also intentionally includes previously marginalized perspectives and epistemologies in the production of new forms of knowledge. What is being forged, we conclude, is a new paradigm that is 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 and foster inclusive, productive, and relevant globally informed scholarship.

      To be clear, we are not suggesting that traditional disciplines and their specialized knowledge and methods are becoming obsolete or less important. Nor are we suggesting that transdisciplinary scholarship is widespread in the academy—we recognize that some scholars resist any efforts toward it. Still, we argue that leading intellectuals are—and have been for many decades—actively engaged in integrative scholarship that seeks to transcend disciplinary distinctions. By building on these intellectuals’ lead, and layering on global studies’ additional insights, we can begin to develop new ways of theorizing and designing research projects that speak to the world’s current complexities.

      THE DISCIPLINARY/INTERDISCIPLINARY DEBATE

      The Euro-American academy continues to be plagued by well-rehearsed debates over the relative value of interdisciplinary scholarship. These debates consume a great deal of time and energy and tend to rehash disciplinary antagonisms that have remained unresolved for decades. Scholars who defend the traditional disciplines imply that interdisciplinary scholars are dilettantes or argue that interdisciplinary research makes only superficial connections across theoretical approaches and bodies of literature. Moreover, interdisciplinary scholarship is often seen as unwieldy, unaccountable, fragmented, and difficult to assess for the purposes of merits and promotions (Jacobs and Frickel 2009; see also Strathern 2005). On the other side, the champions of interdisciplinary scholarship portray the disciplines as self-marginalizing dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. These debates can get bitter as communities of scholars fight over funding and limited resources within their institutions. In the United States, this has been very much the case in recent years as university administrators have tried to deal with the impact of the economic recession. As a result, support for interdisciplinary scholarship has generally declined across many university campuses in the Euro-American academy.¹

      Whether one is a supporter or a critic of interdisciplinary scholarship, one of the central problems in debates about its relative value is that these debates are entrenched in modernist concepts and logics such as individualism, nationalism, rationalism, and secularism (Ludden 2000). Just as international studies implicitly reaffirms the national, interdisciplinarity implicitly reaffirms the modern disciplines. Interdisciplinary approaches can only extend so far beyond the disciplines against which their innovation and purpose are measured. In an effort to move past disciplinary/interdisciplinary debates and “today’s arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity”’ (Fitzgerald and Callard 2014: 4), this chapter focuses on broader trends affecting not one discipline, or the interactive space between any two disciplines, but many disciplines concurrently.

      As the intellectual debate over interdisciplinarity has raged unabated over the past four decades, fundamental changes have overtaken academic practice. Leading intellectual contributions have emerged at the intersections between established disciplines, including the contributions of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and more recent scholars such as Bruno Latour, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As we discuss in Chapter 1, these changes reflect a new worldview that began to emerge following World War I and reached a peak in the aftermath of World War II.

      In the postwar period, the Euro-American academy questioned its belief in stability and fixity of accepted knowledge. Building on the social and legal changes wrought by the civil rights movements in North America, Europe, and Latin America, many of the ways of thinking that had dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century academia began to be challenged. Interdisciplinary programs emerged throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and included area, environmental, ethnic, feminist, gender, religious, and science and technology studies (Ferguson 2012). Interdisciplinary scholarly innovations jumped again in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War, increasing awareness of international processes, and new, integrative forms of political, economic, and cultural globalization. To meet these emerging challenges, scholars forged new, previously unimaginable connections across disciplines. These divergent academic endeavors have more recently coalesced into a transdisciplinary framework that in some ways makes both disciplinary boundaries and the concept of interdisciplinarity itself less relevant.

      Interdisciplinarity is long established in the physical sciences, engineering, and medicine. Neuroscience is a salient example of transdisciplinarity. As a burgeoning field of inquiry, neuroscience “has become a combination of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biology, pharmacology, and genetics with a profound concern for culture, ethics, and social context … To survive in the twenty-first century the neurosciences will have to link all of their parts even further and bring genetics, the environment, and the sociocultural context together in order to develop more СКАЧАТЬ