Locating the Global
February
24-26, 2000
"Globalization" is a term that is
often used but only imperfectly understood because it is unclear what
developments are implied by globalization. Making matters still more
confusing is the variety of contexts and disciplines, from the social
sciences to the popular media, in which globalization is a central category
of analysis. Globalization has become a term designating transformations
in a number of areas: the internationalization of capitalism, the ascendance
of information technologies, a new understanding of the state in the
global economic system, and the contemporary movement of populations
across national borders. But what are the relationships between these
developments, and how are these attributes organized and understood
within and outside the academy? How, in short, do we make sense of globalization
and assess its consequences for the future?
The analysis of globalization raises
timely and important questions about the institutional and disciplinary
rubrics with and through which we understand this controversial term.
A significant challenge for academics, for instance, lies in teaching
and writing about globalization within and across disciplines of analysis.
How is globalization changing the protocols for research and learning
in the social sciences, and how is this term getting defined and used
within specific disciplines? How do different disciplines conceive the
relation, for example, between the contemporary flows of commodities
and of populations across national borders? How far must the study of
ethnic or national identities derive its categories of analysis from
economic and social transformations at the international level? And
how does globalization change the way social scientists and humanists
conduct analyses of a city, a culture, a region, or even a nation-state?
Nor is it solely within the academy
that these questions are felt to be pressing: the bewildering variety
of issues raised by participants and protesters at the recent World
Trade Organization meetings in Seattle indicates how fully globalization
has become a term under dispute. Indeed, one of the chief ironies of
globalization is that a term which has come to designate unifying trends
in trade, communications, and management has generated so little consensus
about its scope and probable consequences.
Drawing on voices from a number
of fields, our seminar will collectively address the task of locating
the global in the new century. Our aim is not so much to provide a cohesive
definition of globalization as it is to investigate the problems its
definition poses for our (academics and non-academics alike) understanding
of ever-evolving regional and world structures. Central to our inquiry
will be the institutional sites from which our sense of the "global"
is defined, negotiated, and contested. Speakers will also address the
impact of globalization studies across research and curricular fields
of inquiry.
Speakers will include Arjun Appadurai
(Anthropology), Farhat Haq (Government, Monmouth College), Rashid Khalidi
(Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and History), Alan Kolata (Anthropology),
Moishe Postone (History), Saskia Sassen (Sociology), Lisa Wedeen (Political
Science), and James Winship (Political Science, Augustana College).
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University of Chicago