New Geographies, New Pedagogies: Institute of International Studies; UC 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
The purpose of the "New Geographies, New Pedagogies" project is to employ the intellectual challenges posed by globalization in its myriad forms as a vehicle to revitalize area studies through innovative forms of doctoral training on the Berkeley campus. Animating "New Geographies" is the notion that globalization is not displacing or substituting for the compelling strengths of a rigorous area studies training, but rather it foregounds the incontestable fact that much contemporary area studies research is being conducted in "globalized sites." If the flows, networks and movements, which are the hallmarks of globalization, have not erased place or locality or region, they have nonetheless generated new conundrums -- 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 the analytical imperatives of transnationalism. Globalization, in short, makes new 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 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.
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. First, a year long doctoral research practicum which includes 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.
Next: Paradoxes and Challenges
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