Institute of International Studies; University of California Berkeley
'What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Line?'
So the Bellman would cry; and the crew would reply,
'They are merely conventional signs'!
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark
New: Grant proposals for 2003:
Grant proposals for 2002:
The purpose of the "New Geographies, New Pedagogies" project is to employ the challenges presented by globalization in its myriad forms as a means to revitalize area studies through innovative forms of doctoral training on the Berkeley campus.
Globalization is not displacing or undermining the obvious strengths of a deeply rooted area studies training, but highlights the fact that much area studies research is being conducted in "globalized sites." If the flows, networks, and movements which seem to be the hallmarks of globalization have not erased place or locality or region, they have nonetheless generated new problems -- theoretical, methodological and conceptual -- for the area studies student who, as a political scientist working in a south Indian village or as an anthropologist living in a French urban ghetto, must engage with transnationalism as a challenge for research design. Globalization, in short, makes demands on the prosaics of "doing field research."
Doctoral training is a key entry point for revitalizing area studies. It focuses on the next generation of area studies scholars and practitioners at a formative moment in their professional life. Moreover, this project will concentrate on what is arguably the most demanding, and yet the most systematically neglected (see Bowen and Rudenstein 1992), moment of training, namely the formulation of a research proposal -- and the knotty problems of how research is to be conducted. And not least, the project will provide a venue for faculty to simultaneously explore their own research interests in rigorous cross-disciplinary and cross regional contexts in which self-reflexive questions of knowledge-production in a globalizing world are systematically explored. The project is administered and directed by the Institute of International Studies (IIS) whose mission on the Berkeley campus is to foster comparative and transnational studies. In working jointly with the International and Area Studies Program (IAS), the project has access to 18 area studies programs and six undergraduate teaching programs. In collaborating with the Townsend Humanities Center, IIS and IAS can offer a set of activities which link the social sciences, the humanities and the professional schools in innovative ways.
This project begins from the contradictory realities of globalization, recognizing that the rise of a global network society and of transnational flows of capital, people, information and cultural practices have created complex connections between the global and the local; what we refer to as "new geographies." Most area studies students are already perforce engaged with these new geographies -- as the European Union, the industrial district, the diasporic community, the transnational environmental network, the cross-border region. The New Geographies proposes two sets of training and pedagogic activities joined by year-long substantive themes (what we call "Traveling Theory"). For each theme which features a seminar series, working groups, and an annual workshop, there are two pedagogic activities. First, a year-long doctoral research practicum which involves conducting research in one of the Bay Area's many "ethnic" communities as globalized research sites (to revitalize area studies at the point of doctoral training and knowledge production). This practicum, taught by two faculty from differing disciplinary and regional backgrounds, will be complemented by dissertation workshops and working group activities. And second, mechanisms by which the results of the research practicum and "traveling theory" activities can be integrated into undergraduate area studies curricula (to revitalize area studies through undergraduate teaching).
All of these activities will be grounded in three year-long substantive "global" themes, the purpose of which is to generate a series of scholarly activities focused on theoretical innovation and new conceptual approaches to phenomena and social processes which cross regions and areas. To enrich and accelerate these processes, visiting scholars, with distinctive intellectual agendas and perspectives, will be invited to Berkeley as Residential Fellows to ensure that new and "Traveling Theory" goes both to as well as from American academia.
See the full proposal of the program to the Ford Foundation, contents below:
The program is funded by the Ford Foundation.
© Copyright 1999, Regents of the University of California
Site questions: Email iis_webmgr at berkeley.edu.