Social and Cultural Foundations in Global Studies

Eve Stoddard, John Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780765641250
• eBook ISBN: 9781317509769
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

From the Foundations in Global Studies series, this text offers students a fresh, comprehensive, multidisciplinary entry point to the study of the social and cultural aspects of global studies. After a brief introduction to global studies, the early chapters of the book survey the key concepts and processes of globalization as well as a critical look at the meaning and role globalization. Students are guided through the material with relevant maps, resource boxes, and text boxes that support and guide further independent exploration of the topics at hand. The second half of the book features interdisciplinary case studies, each of which focuses on a specific issue.

Part One
Background, Theories, and Contexts

1
What Is Global Studies?

Scholars working in global studies are interested in America’s war on terror and in the global marketing and fan base of Manchester United, in the theory and practice of human rights and in the discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and life-chances between North and South, in the democratizing possibility of global information and communication systems and in migration patterns, labour exchanges and friendship networks.

(O’Byrne and Hensby 2011, 4)

In late 2012, the video for the Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” a song that provides ironic commentary on the lavish lifestyles associated with the South Korean elite, became the first video to receive one billion hits on YouTube. In the popular media, this quintessential twenty-first-century milestone was greeted with great fanfare for the way it showed not only the global popularity of the entire “Gangnam Style” phenomenon—the song, the original video, the dance moves contained in it, the memes, the hundreds of versions and parodies created by YouTube users—but also the remarkable power of social media itself. If CNN’s live coverage of the 1991 Gulf War had served as a declaration of how twenty-four-hour cable news was taking over the news industry, the transnational success of Psy’s video confirmed the remarkable ascendance of YouTube and other social media platforms, particularly their ability to act as distributors and multipliers of cultural content and cultural trends.

Two months before the video reached the one billion mark, Psy had followed in the footsteps of other global cultural icons such as Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, in meeting personally with the secretary-general of the United Nations. Further evidence of his global notoriety came in the form of invitations to speak at major universities, offer his opinions on hot-button political issues such as the tensions between North and South Korea, and perform on major television programs and at political rallies. Not surprisingly, given the amount of cultural and political translation involved in the spread of something like “Gang-nam Style,” the singer and his work quickly became enmeshed in a variety of controversies, particularly as others began to use the song and the video for purposes related to their own “local” political agendas and desires for cultural expression.

The interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary academic field known as global studies is uniquely positioned to make sense of this kind of cultural phenomenon by connecting its cultural aspects with a whole set of broader social, political, and economic processes. In this respect, while “Gangnam Style” may be an unusually popular and influential example, it is hardly a unique one. On the contrary, the same kinds of issues raised by studying it—issues having to do with the globalization of culture, the music industry, social media, the power of music videos, the rise of East Asia, class conflict, user-generated content, satire, celebrity, and so on—inevitably come to the fore as soon as we begin to apply global studies theories and methods to the study of any cultural or social phenomenon. So what exactly is global studies, and what makes it particularly well suited to study the complex social processes of our twenty-first-century world?

In many ways, global studies fits the general pattern established by other, earlier interdisciplinary fields. All such fields of study emerge out of a process of dissatisfaction with inherited academic divisions and categories. At the same time, no field is ever completely original. Even the most radical inventions are built upon a process of selectively incorporating elements of other fields, combining them in new ways (not unlike the way many people today enjoy “mashing up” sound, image, and video to create new cultural texts), and subjecting them to critical scrutiny in order to push beyond traditional boundaries. New fields also emerge in response to changes in the world, changes that require novel approaches to the pursuit of knowledge. A good example is the field of environmental studies, whose emergence was closely connected with the rise of the environmental movement and the growth of ecological awareness among scholars, activists, and ordinary citizens. Other fields, such as women’s studies and various forms of ethnic studies, have similar histories, and all have shown the ability to evolve in response to changing conditions.

Global studies is the product of sustained efforts to understand the complex, dynamic realities of globalization, from changes in the structure and distribution of political and economic power to changes in the creation and circulation of cultural forms and social practices. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to offer an overview of how, when, and why global studies came into being as a distinct intellectual field; how it is connected with, but also different from, existing disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields (especially international relations, international studies, and area studies); and what distinguishes its particular approach to studying social and cultural processes often associated with globalization. The chapter addresses key elements of epistemology, methodology, and ethics, before concluding with a brief discussion of the educational benefits of global studies.

The Emergence of Global Studies

The creation of global studies programs is the latest stage in a longer process through which colleges and universities have sought to “internationalize” their curricular offerings, student bodies, and campus cultures. The creation and promotion of off-campus study opportunities, the recruiting of international students, the introduction of initiatives to promote diversity and multiculturalism, the building of new courses and programs that expose students to non-Western perspectives (e.g., world literature and history, ethnic studies)—all of these are part of this broad effort to transform higher education. Programs labeled “Global Studies”—whether academic units offering majors and minors or offices designed to coordinate study abroad and international student recruitment—are an important marker of the ways in which many colleges and universities have gradually become more “international” or “global” in their outlook in recent decades.

As a field of academic research and teaching, global studies is also organically related to globalization, and both are famously difficult to define. Globalization is an emergent phenomenon, constantly changing as the world is woven together ever more tightly through a wide range of political, economic, cultural, social, and technological processes. In a similar way, global studies is an emergent academic field, always seeking to make sense of these changes and what they mean for people all over the world. Understanding global studies, therefore, requires that we take a look at globalization itself.

While there is significant disagreement among scholars about the origins of globalization—a topic covered in greater depth in Chapter 2 of this book—the work of Roland Robertson and others reveals a general consensus that the widespread awareness of globalization is a newer phenomenon than globalization itself. Awareness of globalization, however, is really just the latest phase of a much longer process through which humans have come to understand what it means to view the world as a single unit. This gradual process includes important milestones in astronomy (e.g., the Copernican Revolution), geography (e.g., the maps and travel-ogues created by the early Chinese, Arab, and European explorers), transport (e.g., the invention of the airplane), warfare (e.g., the invention of the atomic bomb and the threat of planetary annihilation), communication (e.g., the invention of the telegraph), religion (e.g., the global spread of Christianity), politics (e.g., the creation of the United Nations), economics (e.g., the development of the concept of the market), social movements (e.g., the emergence of a labor movement built upon global workers’ solidarity), and even photography (e.g., NASA’s famous “Blue Marble” image of the earth taken from outer space).

The term globalization really entered into popular discourse shortly after the end of the Cold War. As scholars, policymakers, business elites, activists, and journalists worked to make sense of post-1989 global realities, globalization quickly became a buzzword. While its exact meaning was (and is) contested, it often served as a shorthand way of describing all sorts of emerging transnational realities that didn’t fall easily into old paradigms dominated by nation-states and the relations among them. Issues such as free and fair trade, the “McDonaldization” of culture, outsourcing, and the cultural and economic shifts associated with new waves of transnational migration became hot-button public issues and subjects of intense investigation by scholars during the 1990s. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent declaration of a “global war on terrorism” by the United States inaugurated a new phase in the awareness of globalization and its many ripple effects.

Global studies is an intellectual and academic product of all of these post–World War II changes in the world and of our perception of them. In particular, one can point to several recent factors shaping the emergence of global studies, such as

• the continued extension of capitalism, along with the social relations associated with it, throughout the world;
• the growing role of financial markets and financial elites in shaping national and supranational economic policies in ways that tend to favor approaches associated with neoliberalism;
• the phenomenon of time/space compression, in which the world begins to feel increasingly small, thanks to the operation of new communications and transportation technologies that accelerate social and economic relations and the rhythm of social life in general;
• changes in global intellectual culture set in motion by the transnational migration of people from the Global South to the Global North during and after formal colonization; and
• the work of influential scholars who pinpointed globalization itself as an issue of general concern.

An important milestone in the development of global studies as an academic field was the creation of the Global Studies Association (GSA) by scholars in the United Kingdom in 2000. A North American branch of the GSA was founded two years later. Both organizations hold annual conferences, and both are affiliated with important global studies journals, including Global Networks and Globalizations. For more information, see the following websites:

• Global Studies Association (https://globalstudiesassoc.wordpress.com)
• Global Studies Association North America (http://www.net4dem.org/mayglobal/index.html)
• Global Networks (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1471—0374)
• Globalizations (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rglo20/current#.UYfGJ7pXtIo)

Many well-established academic fields, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, have long sought to investigate “global” issues and themes. These include anthropology, area studies, environmental studies, geography, history, international relations, political economy, and sociology. Global studies draws on many of these approaches while also seeking to chart a distinct intellectual course that enables scholars and students to “debate the processes and dynamics impacting upon all aspects of contemporary social life” (O’Byrne and Hensby 2011, 4). Such an agenda is obviously ambitious and necessarily broad, as the quote from O’Byrne and Hensby at the start of this chapter indicates.

An important part of a global studies approach is the recognition that all contemporary global processes have deep historical roots. So, for example, when looking at the growing global popularity of a company like Starbucks Coffee, a global studies scholar would find it necessary to explore this topic in light of various issues, including

• · the global history of coffee production and its role in the expansion of European empires;
• the history of how coffee drinking in general emerged and spread throughout the world as a cultural habit associated with particular forms of work, social organization, taste formation, leisure, consumption, and so on;
• the more recent history of how the awareness and consumption of different forms of coffee has become a marker of personal identity, an object of intensive consumer marketing, and a way of distinguishing one’s social class; and
• the longer history of “global brands” (e.g., Coca-Cola, Nike, Disney) and their interaction with and influence on local cultures throughout the world.

This brief example also illustrates why, for global studies scholars, social and cultural processes can never be separated fully from political and economic processes. For this reason, readers will find that many of the case studies in this book often include information about how political economy fits into the analysis.

Political Economy: Definition and Scholars

The term political economy refers to the social system that shapes the conditions governing the circulation, accumulation, and distribution of wealth, capital, and power. This system always includes a range of interlocking institutions, social relationships, and structures. Political economy also refers to the academic field focused on the study of these processes. Some of the most important classical and modern scholars of political economy are Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Susan Strange, and David Harvey.

Useful resources on political economy may be found at these websites:

• Centre for Global Political Economy (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cgpe/)
• Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/)
• New Political Economy (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/aboutThisJournal?show=aimsScope&journalCode=cnpe#.Ua9H-rq0Ovc)
• World-Systems Archive (http://wsarch.ucr.edu/)

With all of this in mind, how can we locate global studies in relation to the academic universe that gave birth to it and that continues to surround it? We know that global studies scholars seek to produce knowledge that is marked by a high level of integration. One school of thought characterizes global studies as an interdisciplinary field that creates intellectual integration by addition—that is, by combining elements of existing disciplines. There is also another school of thought, however, that seeks to create integration by deliberately questioning the value of dividing knowledge into disciplines in the first place. From this transdisciplinary perspective, which is addressed in more detail later, disciplines play a key role in supporting power and knowledge structures that tend to privilege certain perspectives, ways of knowing, and social groups over others.

A classic example is the creation of economics and political science as separate disciplines more than a century ago, a shift that broke apart the older, more integrated field of political economy. This split served not only the interest of the British and other European empires, but also the interests of elites in general by obscuring the political nature of wealth and capital accumulation. Political economy, in other words, was a more integrated way of studying how power works. A global studies scholar using an interdisciplinary approach to studying power might emphasize the need to supplement the analysis of political power with analysis of economic forces in order to achieve a more holistic understanding. A scholar using a transdisciplinary approach would question whether it is possible (even for analytical purposes) to identify “political” and “economic” as two separate spheres of social activity. The goal would instead be to go beyond disciplines, their categories, and their assumptions by making power itself the central focus of analysis. Taking such a step, many transdisciplinary scholars argue, is an important move toward social transformation because it pushes us to imagine alternative ways of organizing the world.

Both of these frameworks, the interdisciplinary and the transdisciplinary, continue to play a key role in the development of global studies. Regardless of which school of thought a particular scholar may prefer, it is important to emphasize that even as global studies scholars seek to maximize integration and breadth, they also make great efforts not to sacrifice depth (e.g., an in-depth understanding of a particular place, culture, or institution).

While global stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About This Book and Series
• Part One: Background, Theories, and Contexts
• Part Two: Case Studies
• Index