New Geographies, New Pedagogies: Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley
In Keywords, Raymond Williams' famous meditation on the subtle historical metamorphoses of the English vocabulary, every keyword is distinguished by a complexity of meaning which is inextricably bound up with the problems it is used to discuss. While it does not appear in Williams' book, "globalization" has clearly become one of the keywords of the late 20th century. The word global has possessed some currency in the English-speaking world for almost five hundred years but globalization or globalism did not gain common usage until the 1960's. It tumbled into academic discourse, later still in the 1980's. At its core, globalization invokes the idea of inter-dependent material, political and symbolic flows and interchanges in which the constraints of geography -- the frictions of distance -- have receded and in which people are increasing aware of this recession (Waters 1995). Almost from the beginning it has generated suspicion and in some cases hostility -- not least because it appears, like its predecessor "modernization," to provide a justification for the spread of Western capitalist modernity. Globalization is, in a descriptive sense, not new at all; the genesis of a thirteenth or sixteenth century world system, or the late nineteenth age of classical imperialism can all be seen as instances or moments of the longue duree of globalization. What distinguishes the present is the pace, speed and character of globalization: there is an overwhelming sense of acceleration. What seems unequivocal is the fact that many aspects of what Max Weber called the "life orders" of modernity have been permanently refigured. It takes "only the merest acquaintance" says Appadurai "with the facts of the modern world to note that it is now an interactive system in a sense that is strikingly new" (1996, p.27). Globalization can be construed as central to what we are calling "the New Geographies."
There is, however, a compelling paradox at the heart of globalization which turns on the differing ways in which material exchanges, forms of governance and authority, and symbolic interchange stand in relationship to place, territoriality or region. Globalization cannot simply be grasped as a solvent, or as an unalloyed force of cultural homogenization or geographical deterritorialization.1 For every instance of footloose financial services as a global space of flow and movement, there are other productive sectors characterized by economic rigidity and localization. For every case of the "retreat of the state" there are equally compelling cases of enhanced state capacity. For every instance of global civil society or multilateral governance there are new configurations of national, local or regional politics. For every global technological or cultural diffusion there is an equal and opposite intermixing and locally inventive appropriation. For every case of global cosmopolitanism and flexible citizenship there is a resurgence of local identity and "militant particularism." For every integrated global network there is, as Manuel Castells (1996) says, a black hole of displacement, exclusion and marginalization. Globalization seems to necessarily contain its opposite: the power of place and local identity, the ever-present local disjuncture and irruption, the multiplication of new forms of difference and heterogeneity.
The significance of these paradoxes for revitalizing area studies are sixfold. First, globalization with its emphasis on the interactive world is not antithetical to the area -- the region, the locality, the place, the nation -- but reaffirms it in new and different ways. Second, globalization is an uneven, contradictory and complex set of processes perhaps best understood in quite specific "globalized research sites." Third, globalization challenges the classic notions of how to conduct studies -- i.e., training and knowledge production -- and calls for rethinking theory and method in "doing area studies in globalized sites." Fourth, globalization creates a compelling need for serious cross-area comparisons -- for confluences and cross-regional divergences -- which the realities (i.e., the differences) of contemporary globalization facilitate and demand. Fifth, globalization can be studied at home. Its footprints are on our own doorsteps such that the United States can and should be explicitly on the area studies agenda, and that training for research in globalized sites can and should begin at home. And sixth, globalization challenges the historic privileging of Western social theory and calls for rethinking and reconstructing social theory from more balanced comparative perspectives and materials.
Next: What was Learned from Phase One?
1. See for example Michael Storper, The Regional World, New York, Guilford, 1997, Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Volume I-III, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995; Allen Scott, Regions and the World Economy, London, Oxford University Press; Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, New York, Norton, 1998; Linda Weiss, The Mythof the Powerless State, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998; Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1996; A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1996.
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