New Geographies, New Pedagogies: Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley

What was Learned from Crossing Borders Phase One?

See Crossing Borders website

During the Spring and Fall of 1998 the first phase of the Crossing Borders project saw the development of five semester long international seminars or working groups and a major international conference. In each case, one or two Berkeley area studies centers took the lead in organizing a substantial activity focused on a key issue of local global interaction particularly salient in their area of the world Thus the Center for African Studies organized a working group on Multiple Capitalisms and the "Reterritorialization" of Africa; The Center for Latin American Studies along with the African American Studies Program organized a working group on the African-American Diaspora and Pan-Indian Movements; the Centers for Middle East Studies and Western European Studies jointly convened a major conference on Islam and Changing Identities in Europe; the Canadian Studies Program organized a speaker series and workshop on Federalism and Sovereignty focused on the Quebec problem, indigenous peoples, and transborder links; the Center for Southeast Asian Studies organized a working group on Transnational Enviromentalism, Civil Society, and Social Networks: Green Activism in Asia and California; and the Center for Russian and East European Studies convened a working group on Traveling Theory and Ethnographies of the Post-Communist Transition. In nearly all cases, faculty and graduate students concerned with other regions of the world also joined in these activities.

While the topics varied with the academic interests of the participants and the current issues facing the particular fields, several broad generalizations emerged from this collection of activities.

• the mutually constitutive nature of global and local phenomena
• the value of intensive research on the history, structures and dynamics of specific localities in order to delineate the meaning of global forces
• the great value of carefully constructed comparative approaches
• the necessity to command local languages in order to understand the social and cultural meanings of local-global interactions
• the need to rethink the received wisdom of much social science in light of the experience of non-western societies
• the need to re-address presumptions about American society -- both its particularity, and its universality -- on the basis of comparisons with other societies.

In various ways all of these broad generalizations have fed back into the design and emphasis on research training in this second phase project on the "New Geographies." At the heart of Phase I is the recognition that globalization is indeed a central challenge for "doing area studies" but it does so in complex ways which necessitate the extension and deepening of what area studies does best. The challenges presented by globalization highlight the need for

1. new and more systematic forms of cross-region comparison,
2. a deeper sensitivity to the theoretical and methodological demands on graduate training as students inevitably work in different forms of "globalized research site," and
3. a recognition of the necessary and complex two-way flow of theory which decenters the role of the West.²

Next: Globalization at Home: The Rationale and Purpose of "The New Geographies"

2. The Post-Communist Transitions group of Crossing Borders I came, for example, to the following conclusion: "If in the early years theory flowed Eastward, its sullied waters now flow back depositing layers of grime on Western shores" (Michael Burawoy and Victoria Bonnell).

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