The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
Hybridity and Fluidity
In addition to a strong preference for binaries, Western scholarship has a particular fondness for fixed categorical distinctions. It assumes that categories such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, or nationality accurately describe people’s identities and how people classify themselves. The implicit assumption behind these kinds of schemas is that they are both comprehensive and mutually exclusive. But such categories have many overlapping variations and are never truly fixed, stable, or complete.
Categories are assumed to be mutually exclusive when a person cannot fit into more than one category. With increasing immigration and a better understanding of the deep histories of human movement, it is clear that our tidy racial and ethnic categories are overly simplistic and essentializing. Similarly, national identities have become complex, hyphenated, and multiple. There have always been groups that don’t fit neatly into the available categories, and globalization is making it increasingly difficult to ignore the limitations of nation-states’ categorical schemata. As Nederveen Pieterse argues, “We have been so trained and indoctrinated to think of culture in territorial packages of assorted ‘imagined communities’ that to seriously address the windows opened and questions raised by hybridization in effect requires a decolonization of imagination” (Nederveen Pieterse 2009: 57).
Developing new terminology that more accurately reflects the range of possible identities in a globalized world is not sufficient. Any new understanding of hybrid identities also needs to take into account the transient nature of identity production itself. People have the ability to take on different identities in different social settings. People in hybrid racial, ethnic, and national categories can shift back and forth between categories, or occupy their hybrid identities, depending on the context. According to Zygmunt Bauman, “if the modern ‘problem of identity’ is how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open” (Bauman 1996: 18; see Darian-Smith 2015). This kind of fluidity indicates that scholars need to increase the range of variation of their conceptual frames, making allowances for overlapping categories as well as movement between categories that in turn may alter the essentialized construct of the category itself.
GLOBAL STUDIES AS OPPORTUNITY
The inclusive nature of global studies as a field enables scholars to be interested in a wide range of substantive topics. These include, but are not limited to, human rights and global governance; human trafficking, sex trade, and slavery; conflict, violence, terrorism, and genocide; crime, security, and policing; poverty and inequality; economic and community development; global cities and urban slums; global markets and regional trade agreements; fair trade and supply chain issues; labor, sweatshops, and workers’ rights; the environment, natural resources, and the global commons; energy and sustainability; global social movements, women’s movements, and microfinance; food systems, food security, and traditional agriculture; humanitarian aid and disaster relief; philanthropy; immigration, diaspora, refugees, and asylum; global health, pandemics, nutrition, and epidemiology; education and transnational knowledge production; religions and religious nationalisms; and science, technology, and media (see Anheier and Juergensmeyer 2012).
In addition to engaging with their own substantive research, many global scholars are active on their campuses developing exciting new curricula, making connections with scholars in other disciplines, and building institutional support for innovative interdisciplinary collaborations. Beyond the campus, they engage with their communities as global citizens, public intellectuals, and activist scholars. They often have enduring interests in world affairs, intercultural exchanges, and the promotion of intercultural understanding. Many also nurture this kind of global citizenship among their students by mentoring students and encouraging them to participate in study abroad, language programs, and field research, and to respect other cultures and historical traditions.
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