The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
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 the production of new knowledge (Smith 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,