A decentered and more inclusive production of knowledge can help scholars everywhere transcend the limitations of existing theories and explanatory paradigms, to more fully grasp the many aspects of global issues, and begin the work of elaborating new, more inclusive, and realistic solutions.
BEYOND MULTIDISCIPLINARY AND INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
One way in which universities have addressed the need to develop global modes of inquiry has been to bring together scholars from various disciplines into a single department or research hub for multidisciplinary, perhaps even interdisciplinary, collaborations. Funding agencies have also responded to this need by connecting experts with different specialties to work on specific global projects. For a variety of reasons, however, bringing together disciplinary experts to talk to each other does not necessarily guarantee innovative approaches or theories appropriate for the complexity of our globalizing world. As Eric Wolf noted in his groundbreaking book Europe and the People without History: “An [integrated] approach is possible, but only if we can face theoretical possibilities that transcend our specialized disciplines. It is not enough to become multidisciplinary in the hope that an addition of all the disciplines will lead to a new vision” (Wolf 1982: 19).
The Global Turn explores how scholars may overcome the limitations of disciplinary scholarship in order to study global-scale processes and impacts. We argue that moving beyond multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches is necessary: however innovative they are, they are nonetheless bound to the conventional disciplines from which they draw their conceptual differentiation. To be truly global, global scholarship must break free from modernist and Eurocentric concepts and assumptions. This includes moving beyond the prevalent geopolitical state frameworks that are inadequate for examining today’s postnational global processes.
In this book we propose a theoretical and methodological synthesis that engages with the multifocal and multidimensional problems of our current times. We propose a global transdisciplinary framework that is more than a simple amalgamation or combination of mainstream disciplinary perspectives. Rather, the proposed framework posits a holistic global perspective and teases out new theoretical, analytical, and methodological modes of inquiry that are better suited to understanding evolving processes of globalization and their accompanying reconfigurations of social, cultural, economic, and political relations. We argue that it is not enough for contemporary scholarship to continue to replicate questions embedded within specific disciplines and specialized expertise. What is also needed is to reach beyond the disciplines toward innovative interdisciplinary questions that are relevant to twenty-first-century global research. We suggest that a global transdisciplinary framework has the potential to make scholarly knowledge increasingly relevant to pressing global challenges.
The elements of global studies—which we outline in Chapter 2—call for this transdisciplinary framework to include previously marginalized epistemologies and scholarship in the production of new knowledge. What is being forged across the disciplines, we argue, is a new synthesis that has the potential to become 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, knowing, and categorizing. Given the enormity of these potential implications, one of the central objectives in this book is to describe what we mean by a global transdisciplinary framework—which we do in Chapter 3—and explore the ways it may be incorporated into research agendas across the humanities and social sciences.
Building on the notion of a global transdisciplinary framework, we go on to outline a multidimensional methodology that makes it possible to design and implement a viable research agenda that reflects these theoretical developments. We would like to assure researchers that the study of global-scale issues is both an immensely important objective and one that even a beginning scholar can achieve. We are not suggesting that scholars should be deeply conversant in multiple disciplines. We are aware that everyone doing global research will have specific challenges relating to their own project. We believe, however, that by engaging in the conversations, insights, ideas, and examples laid out in this book, the reader will come away feeling motivated to think creatively, ask new questions, embrace new knowledge, grapple with new methodological approaches, and write new kinds of research relevant for understanding our increasingly globalized world.
This book provides novice and advanced scholars with a coherent conceptual, theoretical, and methodological lens through which to better understand unfolding processes of global significance and their impacts. It has been possible to write it because new ways of thinking about globalization in recent years have offered, and continue to offer, us new ways to study it. As we discussed above, for research to be global does not mean that its object of study is necessarily big in a spatial sense or that it must intrinsically have a worldwide reach. Many scholars now appreciate that it is not enough to describe the large-scale forces, processes, and flows that transcend national borders. We must also seek to understand the impact of those forces, processes, and flows on ordinary people in sprawling cities and rural towns, in vast urban slums, permanent refugee camps, border zones, gated communities, detention centers, and so on (Ong and Collier 2004). Many of these sites are subsumed within the national framework, just as many others transcend national borders and underscore the arbitrary and sometimes obsolete nature of nation-states. It is the dynamic, multidimensional interplay of issues along a local-global continuum that provides the unique framing of a global studies approach (see Chapter 2).
Emphasizing the local-global continuum allows scholars across the social sciences and humanities to focus on the ways in which global processes affect small communities and localized social, cultural, economic, legal, and political relations both positively and negatively. Even the largest and most abstract global process becomes tangible and accessible when and where it touches down and is refracted through specific locales and the people who live in them. Being able to see the global through the local and the local through the global is an important way of understanding our globalizing world. This moves scholarly conversations beyond tedious definitional arguments, such as debates on whether the phenomena we study are local, national, regional, international, transnational, or global. Recognizing the entire local-global continuum allows us to see that issues play out at multiple levels simultaneously and thus equips us to take on the interconnected and integrated realities of global processes.
AN EMERGING GLOBAL WORLDVIEW
The field of global studies is typically associated with studies of globalization that began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies of contemporary globalization were matched with a growing number of studies focusing on globalization in earlier historical periods (Sachsenmaier 2011). According to Manfred Steger’s narrative of the history of global studies, “it is no accident that the academic origins of the new field of inquiry [global studies] coincide with the explosion of the keyword [globalization] in both academic and public discourses in the 1990s” (Steger 2016: 238). We contend, however, that the intellectual trajectory that informs the transdisciplinary field of global studies started long before the 1990s. We suggest that the emergence of a new global worldview is linked to the moment of opportunity and optimism that was incongruously opened up by the devastating world wars of the twentieth century (Herren, Rüesch, and Sibille 2012). In this postwar moment, the modern Western understanding of the world was profoundly shaken and concepts such as state sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism were called into question. An emerging worldview reflected a postwar yearning for peace, stability, and multilateral political cooperation between countries and peoples from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and ideological backgrounds.
Building on the multilateral conversations that surrounded the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, and the first attempt at a League of Nations, the United Nations was successfully established in 1945. The UN played an important role in connecting millions of displaced people after the war, and heralded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. These events