The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
flourished in numerous countries including Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each of these programs developed within specific institutional and cultural contexts and as a consequence has its own unique intellectual profile (Juergensmeyer 2014b; Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 25–52; Loeke and Middell forthcoming). Alongside these interdisciplinary programs dedicated to global studies, subdisciplinary fields that engage specifically with global issues—e.g., global history, global literature, global sociology, and global legal studies—have also emerged within conventional disciplines (see fig. 4). In short, the field of global studies, and its various institutional and disciplinary manifestations, has grown rapidly, and there is now burgeoning institutional support for global scholarship at leading universities.2
Figure 4. Disciplines Engaging Globalization.
Many of the early global studies programs, particularly those in the United States and United Kingdom, emphasized macro processes of economic globalization and international institutions that reflected international relations/international studies scholarship. Alongside this trend, other global studies programs stressed a more humanistic approach and focused on global history, postcolonial studies, cultural diversity, and intercultural exchange. For example, the world and global history approaches at the University of Leipzig laid the groundwork for what is now the Global and European Studies Institute (GESI). Another example is the Globalism Institute (now Centre for Global Research) at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, which from its inauguration paid particular attention to global political and economic transformations and related political theory (see Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 41–47). One of the pioneering programs was the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founded in 1999. From the start this program included an interdisciplinary curriculum and faculty from both the humanities and social sciences.3
Today, among the many global studies programs around the world, there is a concerted effort to develop a more inclusive curriculum that increasingly promotes socially engaged research as well as historical and qualitative methods in an effort to foster culturally informed knowledge production (see, for instance, Appelbaum and Robinson 2005; Khagram and Levitt 2008; Amar 2013). Drawing on a broad range of scholarship, including anthropology, comparative literature, critical race studies, economics, ethnic studies, feminist studies, geography, history, law, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, and subaltern studies, a global studies approach highlights the need to rethink our analytical concepts, methods, and approaches to ask new questions about globally integrated processes and dependencies (see fig. 5).
Figure 5. Global Studies.
As you would expect, because global scholars borrow elements from conventional disciplines, global studies is impacted by and, over time, may have some impact on those disciplines. But in general interdisciplinary scholars can never entirely satisfy scholars that are deeply entrenched in conventional disciplines. For example, global research often engages with history. Historical context is a necessary dimension to understanding global issues. For the global scholar, history—or economics, geography, linguistics, or any of the other disciplines—informs one of the many dimensions relevant to global analysis (compare fig. 5 to fig. 12 in Chapter 6). Global scholars draw upon disciplinary perspectives and methods selectively, as needed, to understand multifaceted issues. As an interdisciplinary project, however, global scholarship cannot be entirely contained within disciplines.
Developing a unique interdisciplinary global studies curriculum poses specific challenges that echo the history of the then new women’s studies departments of the 1970s. At that time, scholars working in traditional disciplines added feminist content to their regular classes in an attempt to mainstream women, sexuality, and feminist issues more generally. Bonnie Smith, professor of history and women’s studies at Rutgers University, recounts, “At the beginning, Women’s Studies came to offer a cafeteria-like array of disciplinary investigations of the past and present conditions under which women experienced, acted, and reflected upon the world” (Smith 2013: 4). Over the decades, however, women’s studies converged into a comprehensive field with its own unique curriculum and an expansive array of scholarly inquiries that ranged well beyond the initial scholarly focus on women. Smith notes:
From the beginning Women’s Studies engaged the entire university population. It usually brought in those who were the most intellectually adventurous, whether the course took place in Seoul, South Korea or Los Angeles, US. In short, Women’s Studies is a global scholarly enterprise with sparks of energy crossing the disciplines and uniting communities of students and teachers. All this makes Women’s Studies a vastly exciting and innovative program of study. (Smith 2013: 4)
Conventional disciplines are mainstreaming the study of global issues within regular courses in a similar fashion. As noted above, today there exist a range of subdisciplinary fields such as global history, global literature, global sociology, and global legal studies. But this cafeteria-like smorgasbord of course offerings that are grounded in specific disciplinary theory and methods is quite different from the distinct interdisciplinary global studies curriculum that leading global studies departments around the world are developing. Like the field of women’s studies, global studies is a “global scholarly enterprise” and a “vastly exciting and innovative program of study.” And like women’s studies, global studies is developing a comprehensive field with its own unique curriculum and theoretical and methodological profile, which may take time to fully mature and coalesce (Campbell, Mackinnon, and Stevens 2010; O’Byrne and Hensby 2011; McCarty 2014a). We view this book as contributing to this process.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a spate of essays asking “What is global studies?” have accompanied the rapid growth in global studies programs, promoting lively debate and commentary (see Juergensmeyer 2011, 2014b; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Gunn 2013; Duve 2013; Sparke 2013; Darian-Smith 2014; McCarty 2014c; Middell 2014; Steger and Wahlrab 2016). These essays reflect a need to move beyond an earlier preoccupation with defining historical and contemporary phases of globalization to analyzing its many processes, facets, and impacts (Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 2012). As Mark Juergensmeyer argues, there is a need to move from “globalization studies,” which studies globalization from various disciplinary perspectives, to “global studies,” “the emerging transdisciplinary field that incorporates a variety of disciplinary and new approaches to understanding the transnational features of our global world” (Juergensmeyer 2013a, 2013b). This transition toward what we call a global transdisciplinary framework reflects the increasing awareness that global issues, and the theoretical and analytical tools required to study them, are emerging and manifesting within and across local, regional, national, and transnational arenas that require new modes of inquiry and new forms of knowledge production.
It could be argued that global studies programs—at least those interdisciplinary programs that include the humanities and social sciences—have the potential to recast the liberal arts curriculum. In this sense the field has become greater than the sum of its parts. Global studies’ interdisciplinary and integrated approach to multiple epistemologies, its holistic understanding of humanity’s now-global interconnection and interdependence, and its attention to intercultural understanding and ethical practice suggest a reconfigured liberal arts philosophy (Hutner and Mohamed 2015; Roth 2015; Zakaria 2016).4 Whether or not one wants to characterize global studies in this way does not detract from the fact that it is one of the fastest growing academic fields in the world. There is a rapidly growing body of academic work that explicitly addresses the processes of globalization, and, more recently, a nascent body of literature has taken up the field of global studies itself (see Steger and Wahlrab 2016; Loeke and Middell forthcoming). Global studies has an increasing number of dedicated peer-reviewed journals, book series, encyclopedias, and professional associations, all