Published by De Gruyter

Volume 14 Issue 3 - Editors’ Forum: Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global; Guest-editors: Hilary E. Kahn, Zsuzsa Gille, and Jonathan L. Larson

December 2020

Issue of New Global Studies

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Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available December 9, 2020

Articles

December 2, 2020

Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global: An Introduction

Hilary E. Kahn, Zsuzsa Gille

Page range: 221-236

Abstract

While Global Studies has been pursued for research and teaching purposes for a few decades, there is little agreement on what substantiates the field. The Framing the Global project tackles this question by arguing for a renewed engagement with the empirical. It asks global scholars to step back from the analytic, to return to a space where pre-conceived methods, theories, and disciplines do not guide our findings. In this way, scholars must engage in a pre-analytic un-framing before they can define the particularities of their global. Each author in this forum enters into the global through an entry point, a point of specific empirical significance – whether a diaspora, a classroom, a biennale circuit, the AIDS regime, or plastic buckets and masks – that guides the way they trace what is global. In addition to exploring the need for un-framing Global Studies, Kahn and Gille also explain how un-framing and re-framing might help us understand global pedagogies and pandemics, by demonstrating how critical an engagement with the empirical is for contemporary global challenges that require us to excavate our understandings and shatter concepts that predominate rather than engage.

December 1, 2020

Contesting Hyperglobal Framings: An Analytical Approach

Rachel Harvey

Page range: 237-261

Abstract

Since the term globalization erupted in public and academic discourses in the late-1980s, the hyperglobal perspective has been a prominent framing offered to understand global phenomena. Despite important challenges, it has remained extremely popular with its rhetoric exerting a powerful influence across the political spectrum, and in business and policy circles. This article argues that one reason for this durability is its inadvertent reproduction by the traditional understandings of “local” and “global” utilized in frameworks critiquing the hyperglobal perspective. More specifically, as scholars have noted, the global-local tends to be marked by dichotomous binaries and placed in a scalar hierarchy where the global overpowers the local. To side-step the issues emerging from the global-local approach, a conceptual rubric focusing on the “global-particular” relationship is offered as an alternative. This orientation helps prevent the importation of the dichotomous binaries and scalar hierarchies that reproduce hyperglobal imaginaries. As a result, it is easier to retain the complexity and contingency of global dynamics, and by extension, challenge hyperglobal framings. A case study of the global foreign exchange market is used to elaborate on the framework and to show why it provides a stronger point of departure for researching and theorizing globalization.

December 1, 2020

Grasping Terroir while Teaching Online: Resituating the “Field” in Pedagogies of the Global

Jonathan L. Larson

Page range: 263-286

Abstract

Framing the global in U.S. undergraduate education has significantly entailed “field” experiences. How have such activities prepared students to understand the interaction of daily life with larger institutions, structures, and processes? How to incorporate attention to the contradictions and untenable translations of a locale and its global entanglements into pedagogical responses to a pandemic that has significantly halted physical mobility and personal contact? This article takes up questions of how a certain conceptualization of ethnography could inform efforts to design new pedagogies for global studies. Building off a recent discussion in anthropology, I argue that the concept of ethnographic “sensibility” provides a productive entry point to discovering and articulating insights into the forms and dynamics of a population and place as shaped by interactions with other populations and places in time and space. I draw from my own experiences with the pre-pandemic piloting of an online course in media ethnography. I highlight examples of student work that point in one direction for how to engage students of global studies in profound field experiences, perhaps even when accessed digitally. This article employs the articulation of entry points for global research for the crafting of entry points for pedagogy.

November 23, 2020

Oriental Sensitivity: Towards a Poetics of Global Studies

Sean Metzger

Page range: 287-305

Abstract

This essay elaborates “Oriental sensitivity” as a methodology for studying Chinese cultural flows in locations outside of that nation-state as an index of globalization. The article specifically draws on research that investigates the practice of tai chi on Martinique in dialogue with a larger discourse of Chinese currents in the Atlantic. Oriental sensitivity expands but also specifies Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism in relation to several of his commentators and in relation to the case study by emphasizing the ways in which individual bodies might knowingly and unknowingly structure an Orientalist encounter. The methodology facilitates an analysis of the convergence of ecology, kinship, migrant labor and phenomenology in thinking about how transnational Chinese movements might matter.

November 27, 2020

On Global Plasticity: Framing the Global Through Affective Materiality

Deirdre McKay, Elyse Stanes, Nicole Githua, Xiaoyu Lei, Simon Dixon

Page range: 307-326

Abstract

As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the “stuff” of potential global prosperity, plastics are substances that people inscribe with varied cultural meanings. Deploying four conceptual “entry points” for global research, we explore how global plastics have become not only a site of an emergent socioecological crisis but themselves a point of leverage for a more humanized globalization. We approach the problem first as an exercise in reframing, shifting our viewpoint away from debates on waste to re-examine ideas of culture and symbolism. Then, working through the entry points of the particular, materiality and affect, we ground our argument in examples from the contemporary pandemic response, earlier ethnographic work, and our own ethnographic projects. We show how plastics have failed people’s desires for a durable modernity, but nonetheless come to shape the ways they feel and think about themselves and each other as sharing responsibility for a global world.

December 7, 2020

Art and Global South: “Playing Venice” at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)

Manuela Ciotti

Page range: 327-351

Abstract

This article employs artifacts from the KMB’s “material culture” as a lens into this institution’s branding process and, within it, its interaction with the Venice Biennale. It analyzes larger questions about the career of the biennale cultural form as it re-territorializes in a new location that is added to the art world map “in progress.” Historically, geographical location has been crucial for many biennales in the Global South to articulate their origin, identity, and claims vis-à-vis the global art world. Moreover, biennale proliferation especially in the South has produced cartographic re-imaginings aiming to destabilize the “center-periphery” configuration of the art world map. The article shows that the KMB does not reiterate ideological standings put forward by Southern biennales but crafts its positionality on different grounds. These entail simultaneously anchoring the KMB to histories of circulation in and out of South India tracing back at least two millennia and strategically weaving a relation with the archetypical Venice Biennale in the present.

Open Access November 24, 2020

Framing the Material Global: The Grounded Politics of HIV Testing Scale-Up

Po-Chia Tseng

Page range: 353-371

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Abstract

Drawing on the framework of transnational materiality (Gille 2014), a conceptual contribution from the Framing the Global project, this article examines how HIV testing and counselling services became a site of political contestation in Taiwan since expanding service delivery was proposed as a response to the HIV epidemic by global health institutions in the 2000s. This global scheme, the study argues, not only reshaped the organization and practices of HIV service delivery, but also generated vulnerability as these practices connected to HIV-positive people’s lives were largely governed by global models and national programs that may not fully reflect local concerns. In response, local NGO workers politicize service delivery in part by transnationally adopting and promoting practices that attend more carefully to localized forms of vulnerability. Using qualitative data collected in Taiwan, the analysis reveals a grounded politics of HIV service delivery that highlights the materialization of vulnerability and its management.

Review Essay

October 7, 2020

William Rankin: After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

Daniel Brownstein

Page range: 373-382

Book Reviews

August 7, 2020

Walter Mattli: Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power in Global Capital Markets

Selin Ece Guner

Page range: 383-385

August 3, 2020

Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla: Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668

Jeremy Black

Page range: 387-388

August 6, 2020

Hassan Malik: Bankers & Bolsheviks: International Finance & The Russian Revolution

Brittany Holom

Page range: 389-392

About this journal

Objective
Local, universal, world-historical, world-systemic, or global historiographies as well as work in sociology, anthropology and international relations have shed increasing light on the common history of humankind. Only comparatively recently, however, has human global self-awareness broken through the confines of scholarly specialization, and begun to enter the everyday popular life, action, psyche, imagination and consciousness on a mass, global scale. The step into space and the resultant view of the planet, the new computer and media technologies of mass communication, the global spread of multinational corporations and human rights, the unprecedented environmental changes and challenges, the promise and threat of nuclear power and explosions, all have led to the increasing self-experiencing of the globe as a “spaceship earth.”

The field of interest of New Global Studies (NGS) therefore is both multidisciplinary and global. New Global Studies interprets globalization with a historical and sociological angle as opposed to history or sociology with a global angle. The journal addresses the process going on around us as a whole, and developing over time. It addresses globalization with a holistic perspective, which gives us a view on the past and present of the globalizing phenomena that will be invaluable to all who seek to comprehend this fundamental aspect of our society and its development. Our focus is unabashedly on the new globalization that has manifested itself so vigorously in the period starting sometime after World War II. Starting from this relatively contemporary perspective, we are fully aware that there are deep roots in the past that must be explored. Nevertheless, and in contrast with most historical journals, our primary emphasis is on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Topics
We welcome articles on all aspects of globalization: economic, social, cultural, and political. In particular, we encourage analyses, both theoretical and empirical, of the following:

Transnational manifestations of culture, and cultural synthesis
Patterns and local effects of economic globalization
Elite and popular perceptions of, and reactions to, global change
Global institutions and organizations, both public and private
The global media, and the emergence of a "global society"
The degradation and preservation of the global environment
Global pedagogy

Article formats
Research articles, Review essays, Book reviews, Documentations, Commentaries

Volume 14 Issue 3 - Editors’ Forum: Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global; Guest-editors: Hilary E. Kahn, Zsuzsa Gille, and Jonathan L. Larson

Issue of New Global Studies

Frontmatter

Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global: An Introduction

Abstract

Contesting Hyperglobal Framings: An Analytical Approach

Abstract

Grasping Terroir while Teaching Online: Resituating the “Field” in Pedagogies of the Global

Abstract

Oriental Sensitivity: Towards a Poetics of Global Studies

Abstract

On Global Plasticity: Framing the Global Through Affective Materiality

Abstract

Art and Global South: “Playing Venice” at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)

Abstract

Framing the Material Global: The Grounded Politics of HIV Testing Scale-Up

Abstract

William Rankin: After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

Walter Mattli: Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power in Global Capital Markets

Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla: Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668

Hassan Malik: Bankers & Bolsheviks: International Finance & The Russian Revolution