Like the field of women’s studies, global studies is a “global scholarly enterprise” and a “vastly exciting and innovative program of study.” And like women’s studies, global studies is developing a comprehensive field with its own unique curriculum and theoretical and methodological profile, which may take time to fully mature and coalesce (Campbell, Mackinnon, and Stevens 2010; O’Byrne and Hensby 2011; McCarty 2014a). We view this book as contributing to this process.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a spate of essays asking “What is global studies?” have accompanied the rapid growth in global studies programs, promoting lively debate and commentary (see Juergensmeyer 2011, 2014b; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Gunn 2013; Duve 2013; Sparke 2013; Darian-Smith 2014; McCarty 2014c; Middell 2014; Steger and Wahlrab 2016). These essays reflect a need to move beyond an earlier preoccupation with defining historical and contemporary phases of globalization to analyzing its many processes, facets, and impacts (Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 2012). As Mark Juergensmeyer argues, there is a need to move from “globalization studies,” which studies globalization from various disciplinary perspectives, to “global studies,” “the emerging transdisciplinary field that incorporates a variety of disciplinary and new approaches to understanding the transnational features of our global world” (Juergensmeyer 2013a, 2013b). This transition toward what we call a global transdisciplinary framework reflects the increasing awareness that global issues, and the theoretical and analytical tools required to study them, are emerging and manifesting within and across local, regional, national, and transnational arenas that require new modes of inquiry and new forms of knowledge production.
It could be argued that global studies programs—at least those interdisciplinary programs that include the humanities and social sciences—have the potential to recast the liberal arts curriculum. In this sense the field has become greater than the sum of its parts. Global studies’ interdisciplinary and integrated approach to multiple epistemologies, its holistic understanding of humanity’s now-global interconnection and interdependence, and its attention to intercultural understanding and ethical practice suggest a reconfigured liberal arts philosophy (Hutner and Mohamed 2015; Roth 2015; Zakaria 2016).4 Whether or not one wants to characterize global studies in this way does not detract from the fact that it is one of the fastest growing academic fields in the world. There is a rapidly growing body of academic work that explicitly addresses the processes of globalization, and, more recently, a nascent body of literature has taken up the field of global studies itself (see Steger and Wahlrab 2016; Loeke and Middell forthcoming). Global studies has an increasing number of dedicated peer-reviewed journals, book series, encyclopedias, and professional associations, all producing literature that is explicitly global in orientation (e.g., Anheier and Juergensmeyer 2012, see also appendix B). That being said, we hesitate to label global studies a new discipline. Like the enormously complicated global processes scholars study, conversations describing and analyzing this complex should be messy, dynamic, passionate, and constantly open to rethinking. Suggesting that global studies be treated as a discipline runs the risk of closing off intellectual curiosity and stifling its creativity in the urge to establish a literary canon and adopt the trappings of conventional disciplines. In our view, it is essential that global studies remain interdisciplinary and that scholars continue to argue and debate what the field is and could be rather than arriving at a definitive answer in an effort to claim the status of being a cohesive subject of study (Darian-Smith 2014).
The openness to debating and constantly rethinking the field of global studies is also an ethical position. It underscores that Western scholars may not have all the answers to the world’s problems and that other people may have new things to say and innovative solutions to offer. As we will discuss more fully in the next chapter, the emerging field of global studies acknowledges the need for new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing global issues. This necessarily entails embracing new forms of knowledge within one’s own society as well as beyond from non-Western communities in an effort to think “outside the box.” Global studies, perhaps more so than any other arena of inquiry within the Euro-American academy, recognizes that what is happening “over there” in terms of poverty, inequality, exploitation, environmental degradation, and new types of warfare could also happen back home in what David Held calls a world of “overlapping communities of fate” (Held 2002: 57; Roy and Crane 2015). In foregrounding the message that “us” and “them” are intimately interconnected, global studies as a new field of inquiry is both dependent upon and deeply committed to learning from and respecting others. In other words, global studies views intercultural communication as an essential key to better understanding ourselves and our collective futures.
In the next chapter, we outline the significance and characteristics of global studies research. These features have several important theoretical, methodological, and analytical implications. By extracting an integrated global studies approach that builds on the transdisciplinary theoretical framework in Chapter 3, we propose a way of asking provocative questions that helps distill research into a unique set of methodological inquiries. In Chapter 4 we walk the reader through the steps of designing a global studies research project; in Chapter 5 we introduce mixed methods and global methodological strategies; and in Chapter 6 we discuss the specific advantages of a global case study, one that enables the researcher to analyze and engage with the complexity of global issues using a manageable research methodology. In Chapter 7 we illustrate our discussion with specific examples of global studies research that successfully deploys what we call a “global case study method.”
2Why Is Global Studies Important?
In recent years a number of scholars have sought to characterize the essential features of global studies scholarship and articulate why the field is so important for understanding our current era (Juergensmeyer 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Duve 2013; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Gunn 2013; Sparke 2013; McCarty 2014b; Middell 2014; Steger 2015). Building on these conversations, in the first part of this chapter we list the main reasons why we feel global studies as a field of inquiry is important. Some of these reasons may seem obvious but others not so much, and hence we feel that the list below is a necessary exercise in establishing the value of the global studies enterprise. The points are intended to help scholars communicate why the field is important to students as well as to colleagues in other disciplines, university administrators, funding agencies, and so on.
In the second part of the chapter we list the main characteristics associated with a global studies approach that underscore the breadth and depth of what we identify and depict as global studies scholarship. Together these two lists are meant to help the reader quickly grasp the significance of global studies and its signature characteristics that collectively distinguish it as a new field of inquiry. In later chapters we explore how these characteristics feature in designing, implementing and analyzing global studies research projects (Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
WHY IS GLOBAL STUDIES IMPORTANT?
New Solutions to New Problems
A global studies approach offers new ways of thinking that have the potential to generate solutions to the kinds of global-scale problems that our rapidly globalizing world faces. Pressing issues such as climate change, economic development, regional violence, and resource depletion are among the new issues that call for innovative, perhaps previously unthinkable solutions. Global studies scholar Saskia Sassen, echoing many others in the field, argues that we are currently confronted with “limits in our current master categorizations,” and as a result fail to see beyond what we already recognize and assume to be important. She argues for the need to look for and “detect conceptually subterranean trends that cut across our geopolitical divisions” and open up new ways of seeing, confronting, analyzing, and interpreting the world (Sassen 2014: 8). For example, author and activist Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything connects disparate issues such as climate change, neoliberal market fundamentalism, democratization, and global health to argue for fundamental changes in capitalist societies (Klein 2014). Identifying global-scale issues, finding patterns in and connections between them, and proposing new ways to address these issues are
