The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
Studies as a New Field of Inquiry
The impetus for The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies stems from our early experiences as young researchers faced with the enormously daunting task of doing research projects that involved global-scale issues. At the time—the early 1990s—only a few scholars were talking about globalization and grappling with its multifaceted implications. Most of them were fixated on the processes, flows, speed, and impacts of new digital communications, new forms of cultural exchange and homogenization, economic market penetrations, McDonaldization, time-space compression, and so on (Harvey 1990; Urry 2003; Appadurai 1996). A few others were beginning to study a range of new global concerns such as climate change, mass migrations, diverse capitalisms, pandemics, regional genocide, religious terrorism, and the worldwide dismantling of the welfare state. Together global processes and global problems raised new challenges and demanded new solutions. Yet at the turn of the century, no single academic discipline seemed to offer sufficient theories, methods, and training to grapple with these complex and interconnected concerns. From the perspective of the individual researcher, how was one to develop appropriate research questions and design a viable research topic? How did one begin the formidable task of doing global research?
Today, in contrast to twenty years ago, many scholars across the humanities and social sciences are engaging with the interdisciplinary challenges presented by the pressing global issues of the twenty-first century. We argue that the collective turn of the disciplines to engage with contemporary and historical processes of globalization, and their related global issues, represents something more than just a substantive concern shared across disciplines. Rather, it is a fundamental shift in analytical perspectives that requires a thorough retooling of our modernist and disciplinary modes of analysis (Appadurai 2000; Bauman 1998). We call this shift the “global turn.” Engaging global contexts requires scholars to think globally and to develop new global theories and perspectives on issues that were previously understood as either universal, national, or local (Moraru 2001; Juergensmeyer 2014a). The global turn is also an engagement with scholars beyond the Euro-American academy that transforms the way global scholarship is done (Burawoy 2009; Casid and D’Souza 2014). And beyond this, it is an engagement with diverse societies, other ways of knowing, and the marginalized majorities that are increasingly shaping and reshaping our collective futures (Kupchan 2012: 183). In these aspects and more, the global turn has profound political, economic, sociocultural, historical, legal, and ethical implications that global scholars are just beginning to explore.
This book is designed for scholars who recognize that engaging with the global is vital in order to ensure their work remains relevant and applicable in the coming decades. This book should be useful to a wide range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as those doing research in professional schools such as law or medicine. Specifically, the audience for the book is (1) undergraduate and graduate students that want to study global processes, (2) scholars who are new to the field of global studies and want to design global studies research, and (3) scholars in more conventional disciplines who want to engage with global issues.
We wrote this book because we found that despite the escalating attention being given to globalization, there has been very little conversation within academia to date about how one should go about studying global-scale processes and their myriad forms and ramifications. While scholars increasingly acknowledge that contemporary processes of globalization call for new theoretical and methodological approaches, there is a void in the literature about what these new theories, analytics, methods, and pedagogies would actually entail. As a result, studying global-scale processes and impacts remains a daunting task for most scholars and for the many students that universities seek to train.
We see this book as filling a gap in existing literature and scholarly conversations. It underscores the importance and necessity of global studies research and the exciting opportunities and challenges such work entails. More significantly, this book provides a practical guide for designing and doing this kind of research. It elaborates a coherent approach that we have developed and tested in both the classroom and the field over the past five years. We have found that this approach makes studying complex global issues much more accessible and less intimidating for people new to engaging with the positive and negative impacts of global processes that characterize our contemporary era.
EMBRACING THE GLOBAL
The first point we want to make is that the global and a global imaginary, however one defines them, favor a holistic approach to understanding contemporary global issues and the deep global histories that shape the present. These holistic approaches can change the way we see the world. For example, embracing deep histories and holistic interconnections make a global imaginary different from international and transnational imaginaries. The international speaks to the interactions between nation-states—think of the United Nations (UN), for instance—while the transnational speaks to the interactions beyond the nation-state. These interactions may be conducted by states or nonstate actors such as corporations, but the national still frames and anchors the imaginative reach of analysis.
In contrast, a global imaginary includes nation-states, but also a huge array of nonstate actors, organizations, collectivities, processes, relations, ways of knowing, and modes of interaction across, between, and within national and transnational contexts (Steger 2008). The global should thus be thought of as conceptually and epistemologically more encompassing than the transnational and the international, which are anchored to the core concept of the nation-state. A global imaginary exists in uneasy tension with a national imaginary and, in fact, intrinsically challenges the latter’s presumptive authority and centrality. A global imaginary offers us alternative ways of thinking about social relations and behaviors that are not limited by state systems and concepts of sovereignty, territoriality, citizenship, and nationalism. This includes non-Western worldviews, cosmologies, religions, aesthetics, ethics, values, ways of being and communicating, and perhaps even different ways of thinking about what it means to be “human” (Tobin 2014; Grusin 2015; Dayan 2011; Smith 2012: 26).
The second point we want to make is that we need to complicate how a global imaginary is typically talked about in mainstream society and media. Most people think of the global in geopolitical terms and correlate it to processes and concepts that transcend the borders of the nation-state. The global is often talked about as involving a global—as in worldwide—spatial reach. It has become synonymous with processes of globalization and economic transnational activities. In contrast to this overarching geographical conceptualization of the global, we suggest that it is not simply a matter of spatial scale or geopolitical reach that makes any issue or process global. “Global” doesn’t just mean “big.” The local and global are mutually constitutive, creating and recreating each other across conceptual fields in a constant dynamic. This means that the global is found not only in macro processes but also in the full range of human activities. We don’t find global processes only in large cosmopolitan cities and multinational corporations, but also in villages and neighborhoods, workplaces and private homes. Our argument is that the global is present where global-scale processes become manifest in real-world contexts, in the lives of ordinary people. Put another way, what makes an issue or process global are the questions one asks that reveal its global dimensions, even if on the surface it appears very small scale and localized (Darian-Smith 2013a; Eslava 2015). One implication of this is that scholars that do not think of their work as “global” can reconceptualize their current projects as global research by asking the kinds of questions that engage a global perspective.
A global perspective involves more than a view of geopolitical scales and jurisdictional levels nested from the local or small scale up through the levels of the national, regional, international, transnational, and global (Sassen 1991; Brenner 2004; Darian-Smith 2013c). The vertical nesting hierarchy of spatial scale has been the dominant way of thinking about political and economic relations between individuals, nation-states, and the international order for decades. This hierarchical way of thinking is often linked with the writings of the American international relations specialist Kenneth N. Waltz, who delineated three levels—systemic/international, national/regional, and individual/local—in his book Man, the State, and War (1959).
While