From Fellow Deirdre McKay: Affect is my entry point. By affect I mean that primal energy that flows between people and attaches us to each other, our ideas and institutions and relationships. I choose affect as an entry point because I was doing a research project with migrant workers from the Philippines who were living in London. I was fascinated by the intensity of my respondents’ feelings of connection – and fallings out – with each other, with family back in the Philippines, and with their UK-based employers.

Key Terms

• Imaginary - A space of desire where hope, possibility and the future exist as potentials; the global is an imaginary.
• Affect - That primal energy that flows between people and attaches us to each other, our ideas and institutions and relationships. Un-named but communicable, affect is manifested desire that underpins people’s emotions, behaviors and actions.
• Emotion - A specific expression of a particular aspect or valence of affect. An emotion is named within a particular language frame and embodied in a specific – but culturally-variable – location.

Discussion Questions

1. How would/could you distinguish between emotion and affect in your own experience and observations? Can you give some examples?
2. This chapter argues that the global is something that people desire, despise, seek out, or avoid and to which they attribute experiences and ascribe meanings.
   1. How does the global manifest in your experience as something you feel?
   2. How is the global an idea that you feel something about?
   3. How are the two processes – the global you feel and the global you feel about – related?

Supplemental Readings

• On Affect:

1. Anderson, B. (2014). Encountering Affect. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
2. Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text 22(2), 121-39.

• On How Global Affect Works, Airport Security:

1. Adey, P. (2009). Facing airport security: Affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the Mobile Body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(2), 274-95.
2. Richard, A, and Rudnyckyj, D. (2009). Economies of affect. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, 57-77.
3. Rosaldo, R. (2004). Airport in Shock and Awe: War on Words, ed. B. van Eekelen, J. Gonzalez, B. Stozer, and A. Tsing (Eds.). Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Books.

• On Emotion, Cross-Culturally:

1. Beatty, A. (20050. Emotions in the field: What are we talking about?” Journal of the Royal Institute of Anthropology 11, 17-37.
2. Pain, R. (2009). Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics” Progress in Human Geography 33(4), 466-86.

Connected Concepts

• Displacement - Both chapters, Affect and Displacement, discuss migration, but from different perspectives. Does thinking of the global as made through affect, as well as produced by political economy, give us any deeper understanding of globalization and its human outcomes?
• The Particular - The particular is not the same as the local!  How are the affective flows that make up globalization particular to specific circuits, experiences or groups? The Affect chapter discusses Filipino migrant workers, but what other groups might you consider?

TV/Film

CHAIN OF LOVE is a film about the Philippines’ second-largest export product – maternal love – and how this export affects the women involved, their families in the Philippines, and families in the West.

On airport security (and deeply problematic, but good to analyze), the ‘security strategy for the privileged’ scene from ‘Up in the Air’ (2009).

Assignments

Taking the experience of encountering airport security as an example (see suggested readings, above):

1. Is what (an imagined) ‘we’ feel when we encounter airport security always ‘fear’? 
2. Is it always ‘something’ that we feel?
3. How is this feeling conveyed to us or evoked in us?
4. How do we pick up on this energy?
5. Where does this feeling manifest in our bodies?
6. What does this lived and felt experience tell us about our own global imaginary?
7. What do the readings tell us about how universal this experience is?

From Framing Fellow Faranak Miraftab: My entry point in the Global Framing volume is “Displacement.” I chose displacement because it offers a clear example of how our framing matters and why we need a relational approach and theorization.

What within one frame would be represented as migration, suggesting a voluntary movement of people across localities within and across national borders; within another frame is represented as displacement –involuntary movement of people from one location to another forced by social, economic, political, cultural or environmental causes.

Key Terms

• Accumulation by Dispossession and Displacement: 

The expansion of capitalism has its roots in the interconnected processes of dispossession and displacement that occur at multiple local, regional, and global spaces and scales. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the creation of colonies by dispossessing indigenous peoples of their land and resources gave European capital a jump start for accumulation. Through colonial-era dispossessions, capital enjoyed free or extremely cheap labor.

This early form of accumulation, which Marx called “primitive accumulation” or “the original sin of capital,” was not a onetime occurrence, as David Harvey argues (2005). The contemporary neoliberal policies of privatization continue this original sin through processes that dispossess people from their communal goods and assets—be it privatization of communal land or of municipal services. In such instances, capital accumulates by taking assets from the public. Harvey calls this “accumulation by dispossession.”

If the colonial dispossessions allowed capital to enjoy free displaced labor through enslavement, the contemporary processes of accumulation by dispossession allow global capital to enjoy displaced laborers as “wage slaves.” In this light migrant labor is unpacked. It is not always individuals’ act but part of systematic and global processes of dispossession and displacement.

• Social Reproduction: 

In a traditional sense going back to the classic Marxian definition by Fredrick Engels, social reproduction of a labor force was discussed in terms of the cost, activities and resources needed to reproduce at a low cost the labor force that capital enjoys. Feminist scholarship has expanded the notion of social reproduction beyond its cost to highlight the care work needed, and primarily performed by women, to maintain and reproduce labor force.

I expand the definition of social reproduction beyond biological care work. As I discuss in my work among transnational migrants, for social reproduction one needs not just biological care and existence (shelter, clothing food and education) but also a sense of self and humanity—including cultural obligations, imaginations, and the ability to gain respect and dignity.

Discussion Questions

1. Is emigration the result of individuals’ decisions and life choices? Is an individual’s decision to emigrate an outcome of broader policies that have impacted their lives? What processes took place and impacted their lives before they made the decision to leave?
2. What global and local policies and processes impacted the educated Togolese or Mexican farmers to emigrate to the US? What practices kept these workers in jobs that are hard and that many US born workers do not want?
3. Once families are displaced are they victims? Do displaced people make new homes in places of destination? Do these global migrants contribute to their home communities’ development? Do their friends, relatives, and institutions back in their communities of origin contribute to the development of places that receive immigrants—places like Beardstown? How? Discuss and explain.
4. How do global inequalities play out in the immigration stories we read in this chapter? Can we stop emigration and immigration in a highly unequal world? What does building tighter border controls do for people who have nothing to lose but their lives? In whose interest is to criminalize immigrant workers?
5. Imagine a world without national borders, what would be different? Discuss in your groups and write down all the various things that you can think of or imagine that would be different in a borderless world?

Supplemental Readings

1. Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not)getting by in America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
2. Romero, M. (2002). Maid in the USA. New York, NY: Routledge.
3. Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A. (Eds). (2003). Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York, NY: Henry Holt.
4. Bacon, D. (2008). Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
5. Harvey, D. (2005). New Imperialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters

• Gille (Materiality) for understanding how to link global and regional policies to local experiences.
• McKay (Affect) for global nannies and global chain of care work and affect.
• Mascarenhas (Sovereignty) for international development industry (that is policies, discourse and institutions) that ultimately dispossess and lead to displacement and uprooting of people in the global South from their home communities. His chapter gives us a glimpse of a tiny fraction of processes that down the line produce cheap and “illegal” workers for consumption in global labor market by employers like Cargill in the Rustbelt US.

Assignments

In your daily lives record how you benefit from the work of an immigrant worker. From clothes you are wearing to food that is served, to cleaning of your college corridors, think about the aspects of your life  that are improved by  the availability of low cost immigrant labor.

1. What is the global cost of the benefits you identify above?
2. Identify relationships and institutions that pay for your privilege? They could be here or in the distant locations.
3. How would you help to organize for a more just and equal global community?

From Fellow Manuela Ciotti: I chose ‘form’ because it goes to the very heart of the workings of the global art world — I see art institutions such as ‘biennale’, ‘museum’, ‘gallery’, ‘auction house’, and ‘art fair’ among others as global cultural forms.

These forms have been circulating, multiplying, and have been appropriated endlessly around the world — especially over the past two decades — and especially outside the regions where these institutions have historically been situated (Europe and the US).

Discussion Questions

1. Think of the appropriation of a pair of different cultural forms (i.e. an art institution and a beauty pageant competition) and trace the consequences of this process: what are the differences and similarities? Which cultural form’s appropriation causes resistance and which one is welcomed?
2. How does place inflect the appropriation of a cultural form?
3. How important are social media in the circulation and appropriation of a given cultural form?

Supplemental Readings

1. Adams, L.L. (2008). Globalization, universalism, and cultural form. Comparative Studies in Society and History 50(3), 614-640
2. Appadurai, A. (2010). How histories make geographies: Circulation and context in a global perspective. Transcultural Studies 1, 4-13
3. Belting H. et al. (eds.) 2013.The global contemporary and the rise of new art worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
4. Belting, H. et al. (2012). Global studies. Mapping contemporary art and culture. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag.
5. Ciotti, M. (2014). Art institutions as global forms in India and beyond: Cultural production, temporality and place in H. Kahn (Ed.) Framing the global. Entry points for research. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 51-66.
6. Dimitrakaki A. (2012). Art, globalisation and the exhibition form. Third Text 26(3), 305-319.
7. Filipovic E., Van Hal M., Øvstebø S. (Eds.) (2010). The Biennal reader. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag.
8. Hoad, N. (2004). World piece: What the Miss World pageant can teach about globalization. Cultural Critique 58, 56-81
9. Jackson, P. (2009). Capitalism and global queering. National markets, parallels among sexual cultures, and multiple queer modernities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15(3), 357-95
10. Thornton S. (2009). Seven days in the art world. London, UK: Granta Publications

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters

• Materiality
• The Particular
• Location
• Frames

The chapter on materiality is very important to define the theoretical underpinnings of what we mean by ‘materiality’ which is very helpful when one teaches the art world as a site of globalization. ‘The particular’ provides the analytical framework to understand the role of the work of the particular (artistic production, local appropriation of a cultural form) and its relation with ‘global’. ‘Location’ problematizes the ways in which ‘places’ are made global through cultural production – thus shedding light on a critical dimension in the life of cultural forms. Finally, ‘Frames’ helps the teacher to introduce the question of non-western positionings and conceptual taxonomies and their representational and other outcomes.

Websites

• Biennial Foundation
• College Art Association

News Sources

• Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art & its Discontents
• The Art Newspaper
• Art Forum

Assignments

1. Compare the Facebook page of different art world institutions: where does the emphasis lie, which audiences are targeted, what are the aspects (venue, contents, artists) remarked upon?
2. Use the Google Art Project to look for research data on the working of global forms. For example, look at the museum exhibitions included in there: what does this repository tell us about how museums function across the worlds?
3. Map the art worlds in two different countries and compare which art institutions/cultural forms are part of these (preferably compare the global north with the global south).

From Fellow Katerina Teaiwa: My entry point is “Framing,” because the ANU, and Australia-based research on the Pacific in general, is widely known for either producing or sustaining fairly negative framings of the Islands — some grown in this region and others imported from analyses of what many view as the “developing” parts of the world.

These frames consistently focus on what scholars and policy makers see as a Pacific Islands deficit or lack and include terms such as “the Doomsday Scenario,” “Arc of Instability,” “Arc of Crisis,” and “Failed States.” While much research in the disciplines of History, Anthropology and Linguistics focuses more on complexity and indigenous cultures, it is predominantly from a non-reflexive, “laboratory-like,” authorial position and with very few Pacific Islander scholarly voices or critiques.

Key Terms

• Framing: Framing in the context of my chapter refers to the process of bounding and representing a particular place, people, geographic zone or practice according to the perspective or opinions of those doing the framing. These perspectives have often become normalised across popular, public, scholarly and policy domains. The framing of peoples and places according to dominant ideas about race, gender, class, scale and geopolitics has major economic, social and political consequences. How you “see” and “frame” a people or place can shape major aid, development, migration, defence, environment and other policies or decision making processes. The framing of Oceania as “underdeveloped,” for example, has resulted in a proliferation of aid agencies, projects and programs shaped more often than not by donors, rather than Pacific Islanders. See for example: ‘Too many’ aid agencies in Pacific development organization says. 

• Indigeneity: There is no single definition of indigenous peoples or indigeneity but the United Nations system has adopted the following broad understanding:
  • Self- identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member.
  • Historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies
  • Strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources
  • Distinct social, economic or political systems
  • Distinct language, culture and beliefs
  • Form non-dominant groups of society
  • Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.

The Pacific provides an interesting contrast to some aspects of this definition because with the exception of a small number of countries such as New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i, indigenous peoples or their descendants are also the dominant groups in society and government. The declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples was adopted in September 2007.

See: UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples factsheet

• Agency: This generally refers to the capacity of an individual or group for choice or action. In the context of globalisation, colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy, there are structural impediments to the agency of subordinated nations, states, individuals or groups such as small island developing states, indigenous peoples, slaves, people of diverse sexualities and genders, and women. A study of agency in this context thus looks for ways in which peoples, especially on the ground navigate the systems in which they are disempowered finding creative and meaningful ways of claiming and expressing their agency. In the Pacific, Epeli Hau’ofa’s seminal essay “Our Sea of Islands” (1994) was seen as a call for Pacific Islander agency in a postcolonial (or neocolonial) context. His approach particularly called for resistance and revitalisation of Pacific identities and histories through the arts.
• Oceania: The Pacific covers one third of the planet and is the largest geographic zone on earth. Most world maps are produced to emphasise landmasses resulting in a distorted view of the earth as dominated by terrestrial rather than aquatic spaces. There are 27 nations, states and territories spread across the Pacific from Guam to Hawai’i, to West Papua, Australia, New Zealand and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). 20% of all the world’s languages are spoken in this region and it has the highest linguistic diversity per capita.

Discussion Questions:

1. Before you read this chapter what kinds of images or words sprung to mind when you thought of Oceania or the Pacific Islands? What is your impression now and do you see a Pacific presence in your own hometown or state?
2. Think about your own local or national context. Who are the marginalised groups and how are they framed in public or popular discourse? What are the impacts of framing disempowered or minority groups
3. What kind of acts of creative agency or resistance emerge from these spaces?

From Fellow Prakash Kumar: I used “genealogies” as an entry point with the intent to investigate the historical depth of social movements in India around GMOs. I am currently working on two book length projects on postcolonial agriculture in India.

The first deals with the history of the “green revolution” up to 1971 and the second with the arrival of an even more globally oriented, modernist phase in Indian agriculture from the 1980s. The progressivist role of the India state and elites, the connections of Indian agriculture with American expertise, and the deeper drive for autonomy in agrarian movements in India are recurrent in nature.

The trope of genealogies enabled me precisely to analyze such unapparent precedents.

Key Terms

• Biotechnology: The technique of transferring genes across species for creating a new cell that can in turn be used to develop full-blown plants and animals.
• Hybrids: New plant varieties developed through controlled breeding to develop desired characteristics among new lines of plants.

Discussion Questions 

1. What aspects of the past are difficult to capture through archive-based tellings of history?
2. Is science “constructed”?

Supplemental Readings 

1. Bose, S. (2006). A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2. Chaplin, J. (2012). Round the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
3. Chatterjee, P. (2012). The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
4. Connelly, M. (2008). Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5. Cullather, N. (2010). The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Hunger in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6. Ferguson, J. (1994). Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
7. Lake, M. and Reynolds, H. (2008). Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Inequality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
8. Karl, R. (2002). Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
9. Ogborn, M. (2008). Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
10. Pratt, M.L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York, NY: Routledge.

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters 

• Mascarenhas/Land: For ethnographic studies of activists.
• Gille/Materiality: For understanding commodity histories.
• Bartley/Rules: For an understanding of agro-ecological concerns within the template of free-market capitalism.

Websites

• Richard White’s Spatial History Project

Assignments

1. Compare the evolution of Vandana Shiva’s worldview by consulting any ONE article each written by her in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
2. Document all newspaper reports on the fight over the neem patent.
3. Document all newspaper reports on the fight over the basmati patent.

From Fellow Anne Griffiths: I have chosen land because of its importance in multiple domains. It not only forms a crucial resource for families’ and households’ livelihoods and capital accumulation in a local context, but also forms a core component of macro perspectives that center on national, international and transnational engagement with trade and commerce in the global market place.

Thus land embodies spaces that are not only physical and territorial in nature, but that are also more intangible, embodying the product of social relationships. Law plays an important part in these processes dealing with the regulation of land over time.

Key Terms

• Governance: Covers the wide range of norms and techniques that are used to regulate people’s access to and control over land. These vary according to both formal and informal legal mechanism that cover both written, statutory law and unwritten, oral customary law and the norms that apply to the distribution and transfer of land.

• Development: A concept that deals with notions of enhanced economic progress for states, as well as for its citizens. The forms that it takes are heavily contested, especially those promoted by international agencies dealing with enhanced livelihoods and well-being of the world’s populations and notions of ‘sustained development.

See: Lund, C. (2010). Approaching development – An opinionated review. Progress in Development Studies, 10(1), 19-34. https://doi.org/10.1177/146499340901000102

• Methodology and forms of inquiry: Social scientific and anthropological perspectives on law offering alternative perspectives on deciphering what constitutes law and how it is experienced from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective.

See: Griffiths, A. (2005). Using Ethnography as a Tool in Legal Research: An Anthropological Perspective. In R. Banakar, & M. Travers (Eds.), Theory and Method in Socio-Legal Research (pp. 113-131). (Onati International Series in Law and Society). Hart Publishing.

Discussion Questions

1. Why is it important to explore the global importance of land from a ‘bottom’ or ‘ground’ up perspective that engages with ‘local contexts’? What alternative insights do these perspective offer with respect to more formalis approaches applied to law and development in this arena?
2. Why is it important to take account of legal pluralism or law’s plurality in addressing questions about the normative regulation of access and and distribution of land?
3. Why is it important to take account of the role of history in providing a context for linking people’s, especially women’s, current experiences in relation to control over land with the past? How is ‘history’ constructed and whose views does it privilege over others that are silenced or excluded?

Supplemental Readings

1. Appadurai, A. (2003). Sovereignty without Territorialiality: Notes on a Post-national Geography in S. M. Law and D. Lawrence-Zuniga (Eds.), The Anthropology of Space and Placce: Locating Culture, pp 337-349. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
2. Commisision on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. (2008). Report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor: Making the law Work for Everyone, Vol 1. Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor and the United Nation’s Development Programme.
3. Cooper, F. (2005). What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective reprinted in F. Cooper Colonialism in Questions; Theory, Knowledge and Hisotry, pp 91-112. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press.
4. Cotula, L., Toulmin, C. and Hess, C. (2004). Land Tenure and Administration in Africa: Lessons of Experience and Emerging Issues, International Institute for Environment and Development (iied), London.
5. Cotula, L., Oya, C., Codjoe, E.A., Eid, A., Kakraba-Ampeh, M., Keeley, J.,  Kidewa, A.L., Makwarimba, M., Seide, W.M., Nasha, W.O., Asare, R.O., and Rizzo, M. (2014). Testing Claims about Large Land Deals in Afica: Findings from a Multi-Country Study. The Journal of Development Studies, 50(7), 903-925.
6. de Sousa Santos, B. and Rodriguez-Garanto, C. (2005). Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
7. Dezeley, Y. and Garth, B. (2012). Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice: Law, Development and Globalization. New York, NY: Routledge.
8. Kyed, H.M. (Guest Ed.) (2011) Legal Pluralism and International Development Interventions, Special Issue of Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 43(63).
9. Stewart, A. (2011). ‘From anonymity to attribution; producing food in a global value chain’ pp 129-161 in A. Steward (2011) Gender, Justice and Law in a Global Market. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
10. von Benda-Beckmann, F,  and K and Griffiths, A. (2009). The Power of Law in a Transnational World: Anthropological Enquiries. New York, NY: Berghahn

Websites

Oral History Network — University of Warwick

Films

1. Documentary: Dead Birds

2. Documentary: Waiting for Harry

3. Documentary: Land Rush 

From Fellow Stephanie DeBoer: I chose location as my entry point. Location, alongside concerns for the formation of place or space, has been a central term through which the significance of film and media has been debated in their global frames (by producers, curators, directors, artists, critics, state workers, and citizens alike).

Understanding the contested formation of media locations is key to adequately interrogating the impacts of global cultural forms and processes.

Discussion Questions

1. For this chapter, what factors, actors, and powers are at play in the formation of media locations?
2. Why is important for the author to emphasize the “struggle” and negotiation through which media locations are formed? What does this tell us about global media forms and contexts?
3. This chapter focuses on the formation film and media locations in urban contexts. How might these arguments hold (or not hold) for rural or suburban contexts equally formed in global processes?

Supplemental readings

• Place, Space, Location and Global Studies

1. Appadurai, A. (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2(2), 1-24.
2. Curtin, M. (2003) “Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6(2), 202-8.
3. Massey, D. (1994) “A Global Sense of Place,” Space, Place and Gender.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 146-56.
4. Massey, D. (2007) World City. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Place, Space, Location and Media Studies

1. Berry, C., J. Harbord, and R. Moore, eds. (2013) Public Space/Media Space.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2. Couldry, N. and A. McCarthy (2004) MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age. London and New York: Routledge.
3. DeBoer, S. (2015) “Locating the Global in the Asias of Cinema and Media,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1(1), 33-38.
4. Rhodes, J., and E. Gorfinkel, eds. (2009) Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5. Zhang, Y. (2010) Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China.  Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters

• Form – provides another frame for thinking about how specific structures support the circulation and value of cultural and artistic objects.
• The Particular – provides the analytical framework to understand the work of the particular (as distinct from the local, and not necessarily tied to place) and its relation with global processes.
• Seascapes – examines how landscapes (here, of water) act as a kind of epistemology, an arena across which knowledge accrues, while at the same time connoting a cultural project.
• Frames – underscores the ways in which particular frameworks not only represent and generate meaning, but also emphasize particular material connections.
• Scale – offers a differently situated definition of and argument for the significance of scale in addressing global processes.

Media

Shanghai eArts Festival

From Fellow Zsuzsa Gille: Materiality has become for me the best way to demonstrate how the seemingly ever so mobile, elusive, and fluid processes we associate with globalization need to be grounded somewhere, crafted and maintained by someone for particular reasons and with particular tools.

Specifically, there could be no world commerce in food if it weren’t for the myriad of technical specifications that food commodities have to abide by. The ways in which quality, safety, or ethical concerns are devised is a power-laden process that benefits some and harms others.

Key Terms

• Materiality: Refers to the physical world that surrounds us: nature, man-made objects, our bodies, and even more broadly, the way space is organized around us, and the concrete practices and technologies we employ in our everyday life.
• Socio-material Assemblage: A network of human and nonhuman actors organized in a particular way
• Nonhuman Actors or Actants: Entities that are not human, such as animals or biological entities, objects. These, according to Actor Network Theory, can exert an influence on society and culture in unexpected and often unnoticed ways.
• Logistical Power: Chandra Mukerji’s term for exercising control over people through materiality in a way that seems technologically necessary. This type of domination thus appears neutral and is harder to resist.
• Transnational: A term designating the connections among various organizations (corporations, non-governmental organizations, social movements, etc.) that are located in different nation states; these connections now require little or no mediation by the nation state, which is why the term ‘international’ doesn’t adequately capture these relations. Transnational can also be an adjective referring to such social actors that are routinely present and active in several countries at a time.
• Materializing Politics: Solving political conflicts or achieving political goals with the seemingly apolitical tools of a particular organization of materiality. Like logistical power, this is a less transparent way of exerting political influence.

Discussion Questions

1. Whose interests do standards in food safety, quality, or animal rights serve in theory and whose in practice?
2. How does the materialization of politics work?
3. What is a grounded view of globalization? What does it demonstrate that are invisible in mainstream views of globalization?
4. Do you think animal rights should be prioritized over small farmers’ livelihood? If yes, how would you implement stricter rules about the treatment of farm animals in a way that small farmers are not disadvantaged?
5. Is it fair for a country or organization to impose its moral standards on people living in another country?
6. Who should decide what agricultural practices are ethical and humane?
7. Should national traditions prevail over ethical concerns in the treatment of farm animals?

Supplemental Readings

1. Aistara, G. (2011). Seeds of Kin, Kin of Seeds: the Commodification of Organic Seeds and Social Relations in Costa Rica and Latvia. Ethnography, 12(4), 490-517.
2. Brown, O. (2005). Supermarket Buying Power, Global Commodity Chains and Smallholder Farmers in the Developing World, Human Development Report Office Occasional Paper 2005/4, New York, NY: U. N. Development Programme.
3. Caro, M. (2009). The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World’s Fiercest Food Fight. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
4. DeSoucey, M. (2010). “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review. 75(3), 432-55.
5. Dunn, E.C. (2005). Standards and person-making in East Central Europe in A. Ong and S.J. Collier (Eds.) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (173-194). Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing.
6. Heath, D. and Meneley, A. (2010). The Naturecultures of Foie Gras: Techniques of the Body and a Contested Ethics of Care. Food, Culture & Society, 13(3), 421-452.
7. Latour, B. (1993). The Pasteurization of France. (A. Sheridan and J. Law Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8. Mincyte, D. (2011). Subsistence and Sustainability in Post-industrial Europe: The Politics of Small-scale Farming in Europeanising Lithuania. Sociologia Ruralis, 51(2), 101-118.
9. Mukerji, C. (2010). The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategics, Logistics, and Impersonal Rule. Sociological Theory 28(4), 402-24.
10. Paul, K.T. (2012). The Europeanization of food safety: a discourse-analytical approach. Journal of European Public Policy. 19(4), 549-566.
11. Verdery, K. (1996). What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters 

• Bartley/Rules: The juxtaposition of regulation with deregulation
• Mascarenhas/Land: The power of nongovernmental organizations
• Kumar/Genealogies: Different types struggles around agricultural technologies

Websites

• European Union list of products that received (or have applied for) geographical origin or traditional specialty protection
• Land concentration in the European Union
• How new standards will affect small farmers in the U.S.
• UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). 2012. Culture Sector. Intangible Cultural Heritage List.

Related Films or Television Programs

1. Barber, Dan. 2008. “Dan Barber’s Foie Gras Parable.” Talk at Taste3 conference, filmed July. TED video, 20:19. Posted November 2.
2. Documentary: The Supermarket That’s Eating Britian
3. Documentary: Food, Inc.
4. Documentary (on US farm subsidies): King Corn

Useful News Sources

• “Animal Rights Group Targets Restaurant Serving Up Foie Gras Burgers” — South China Morning Post
• "EU relents and lets a banana be a banana"– New York Times on so-called “bent banana” rule

Assignments

1. Look for evidence of how materiality shapes society in your dorm, your community, or in your classroom.
2. Identify which member country in the European Union has received the most PDO/PGI or TSG protections for its agricultural products using the EU’s portal at https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/quality/door/list.html
3. If you wanted to reduce the number of farmers in a country through logistical power, how would you go about it? List a few possible policies or regulations.

From Fellow Rachel Harvey: My entry point is “The Particular.”  The concept is borrowed from Dennis Wrong (The Persistence of the Particular) and refers to the irreducible specificity of all sociocultural processes in terms of, at the very least, their spatio-temporal location.

Objects and dynamics associated with globalization are not exempt from this condition.

Key Terms

• The Particular: The irreducible specificity of all sociocultural processes in terms of, at the very least, their time-space location
• Methodological Nationalism: The assumption that the nation-state is the necessary unit of analysis
• Globalization: The uneven, and not necessarily continuous or uniform, increasing ecological, social, institutional, and cultural connectedness of the world.
• Global in the Particular: Individual sociocultural processes, to varying degrees and intensities, mediate and are transformed by transnational linkages
• Particular in the Global: Spatially and temporally specific dynamics play critical roles in the emergence and functioning of the global.  This goes beyond mediating or being transformed by globalization.  The particular becomes global in scope.
• Global Particular: The concealment of the particulars producing and reproducing what appear to be self-evidently, placeless, and homogenizing global dynamics.

Discussion Questions

1. What assumptions about global sociocultural phenomena are required in order for hyperglobalist conceptions to be accurate?
2. Do non-hyperglobalist approaches employ a different notion of global sociocultural phenomena?
3. Do the three different perspectives employ varying stances in relation to theory?  What role does their approach to the particular play in this?
4. Are there global phenomena that do not apart to fit within the analytical vantage points presented in the chapter?  If so, why?
5. Is it possible for a phenomenon to only be a global in the particular?  If so, what conditions need to be met?  How does this relate to power?
6. What types of power produce global particulars and the particular in the global?  What types of social, institutional, spatial, and cultural conditions might be necessary to produce each of these?

Supplemental Readings

1. Abbott, A. (2001). Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
2. Agnew, J. (1994). “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy, 1,  53-80.
3. Chernilo, D. (2006). Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality. European Journal of Social Theory 9(1):5-22.
4. Harvey, D.L. and Reed, M. (1996). Social Sciences as the Study of Complex Systems in L. Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott (Eds.) Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences (295-323). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
5. Hay, C. and Marsh, D. (2000). Introduction: Demystifying Globalization in C. Hay and D. Marsh (Eds.) Demystifying Globalization (1-17). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc.
6. Hodgson, G.M. (2001). How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science. New York, NY: Routledge.
7. Nussbaum, M.C. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
8. Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9. Walton, J. (1992). Making the Theoretical Case in C.C. Ragin and H.S. Becker (Eds.) What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry (159-172). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
10. Wrong, D.H. (2005). The Persistence of the Particular. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Useful News Sources

• New York Times
• Al-Jazeera
• The Guardian

Assignments

1. Students do a literature review of research on a global phenomenon. They will identify whether different perspectives on that topic align with the three analytical vantage points (global particular; global in the particular; particular in the global).  The paper will also examine how the different moments impact, enhance, and limit the different theorizations of the specific global dynamic being examined.
2. Students select a “global particular” to be the focus of a research paper. This might be a very specific concept such as a single human right or a broader category like “global finance.”  In the paper students should discuss why the phenomenon selected qualifies as a global particular. This will entail both identifying the central particulars, and discussing the dynamics concealing them.
3. Students select a research topic and investigate its relationship to globalization. They will identify and explain whether the phenomenon in question aligns with any of the three vantage points.  Through this exploration, the students will engage in an analysis and critique of the approach proposed in the chapter.  Is it useful?  What problems does it present?
4. Students use the class readings to write an analysis of the “persistence of the particular in the global” framework. In the paper, the strengths and weaknesses of the perspective in relation to discerning and understanding globalization will be discussed.

From Framing Fellow Alex Perullo: I chose the entry point “rights.” There is a strong argument being put forth that violence in many areas around the world is declining in part because of the strong focus on rights.

Given the global flow and movement of ideas, people, and technology in the contemporary period, rights are a vital means for individuals and communities to promote their own worldviews. The idea that people should not only promote certain rights but also protect them is a far reaching concept.

Key Terms

• Rights: Moral or legal entitlements that guarantee protections for individual citizens or specific groups of people.
• First generation rights: These rights focus on liberty (i.e. freedom of speech) and the ability to live securely within a society.
• Second generation rights: Relate more to collective or group rights, such as the ability to live without discrimination, to organize unions, to earn enough to sustain an adequate standard of living, and receive an education.
• Third generation rights: The most recent and most expansive of the generations of rights, the focus here is a variety of issues, such as the right to development, peace, and a healthy environment.
• European liberalism: Though it had origins prior to the 18^th century, European liberalism is often attributed to the Age of Enlightenment, which pushed against absolute monarchy and hereditary privilege, to espouse stronger notions of liberty for everyone. John Locke, for instance, pushed the notion that everyone has a natural right to protect their life, liberty, and property against the “injuries and attempts of other men.”
• Cultural rights: Increasingly, attention is being paid to the rights of specific communities or ethnic groups. These rights, which can include traditions, customs, and beliefs of a specific population, may differ or even contrast to the rights of other citizens within a specific country.
• Nonprofit Organizations (NGOs): Organizations that exist to support the rights of people in communities and that often have tax exempt status.
• Universal rights: The notion that some rights should be guaranteed to everyone regardless of sex, class, age, race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality.
• Flexible legal structures: The notion that there are various ways of interpreting legal matters based on context, evidence, and cultural interpretations of the legal code. In other words, law is not universally understood or enforced.

Discussion Questions

1. How do you define or understand the meaning of the word rights? What are rights that you believe are important in your daily life?
2. What are the different types of rights discussed in the chapter, such as first, second, and third generation rights?
3. Are rights something that can be universally agreed upon? If yes, what are the rights that everyone agrees upon? If no, what are some of the reasons that the meaning and intentions of rights can become so contentious in cultural, political, and economic circumstances?
4. What is the reason for the dramatic rise in nonprofit organizations throughout East Africa or other parts of the world?
5. Should the British government be able to withhold aid to countries that do not protect gay rights even if the aid is not related to issues of sexuality?
6. Is the contemporary issue of rights simply a new way for foreign powers to control the political and social direction of civil society in African countries?

Additional Materials

• Haki Elimu (nonprofit organization)

Haki Elimu (Educational Rights) is a nonprofit organization based in Tanzania that works on a variety of civil society issues, including creating informed and engaged citizens; making government more open and responsible, and creating an environment where children are actively learning in schools. The organization has produced numerous educational documents, particularly for young people, including a cartoon book series that raises issues about government accountability. 

• The Greenbelt Movement (nonprofit organization)

Founded in 1977 by Wangari Maathai, this grassroots organization created community groups that worked for both social and environmental causes. The organization supported communities in the planting of over 51 million trees in Kenya, while also providing economic stability to local peoples. Read Wangari Maathai’s autobiography Unbowed or watch the documentary film Taking Root about her life and the work of the Greenbelt Movement.

Maathai, W. (2006). Unbowed: A memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Merton, L., Dater, A., Maathai, W., Lampson, M., Haneke, T., Klein, J. and Samite. (2008). Taking root the vision of Wangari Maathai. [Harriman, N.Y.]: New Day Films.

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (International rights document)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a widely used and referenced document of the United Nations. During the 1950s and 1960s, many newly independent African countries adopted elements of the UDHR for their constitutions and legal policies. The UDHR was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 10 December 1948 as a common standard that should be achieved by all nations.

• Human Rights Watch (International nonprofit organization)

The organization Human Rights Watch formed in 1978 as a means to monitor government compliance with the Helsinki Accords. Originally called “Helsinki Watch,” the organization worked to support citizens of the former Soviet bloc through publicly shaming abusive governments through media coverage and engagement with policymakers. Since that time, the organization has expanded to address human rights globally and has been particularly influential in Africa. The organization regularly releases reports about rights abuses, including child labor and environmental hazards affecting local communities, occurring throughout the continent.

• Human Rights NGOs (edited volume on rights)

The edited volume Human Rights NGOs in East Africa examines the impact of NGOs on East African governments, as well as specific issues impacting civil society in the region. The editor Makua Matua notes that East African governments historical held hostile policies against human rights in the region, but that significant changes have occurred in the region since the 1980s.

Mutua, M. (2009). Human rights NGOs in East Africa: political and normative tensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

• East African Cultural Rights (books that focus on cultural rights)

A great deal of human rights conversations focuses on issues impacting major cities, industrial areas, or commercial centers. However, there is an important body of literature on either traditional rights in specific communities or on conceptions of rights among a particular ethnic group. The following books and articles each touch on what might broadly be defined as the cultural rights of specific East African populations.

Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. (2007). Luo culture and women’s rights to own and inherit property. Nairobi: Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

Mugo, M.G. (2004). African orature and human rights in Gikuyu, Shona, and Ndebele zamani cultures. Harare: SAPES Books.

Madsen, A. (2000). The Hadzabe of Tanzania: land and human rights for a hunter-gatherer community. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.

Shivji, I.G., and Kapinga, W.B.L. (1998). Maasai rights in Ngorongoro, Tanzania. London: IIED.

• The Supreme Price (film about rights and gender in Nigeria)

This documentary film looks at a pro-democracy movement in Nigeria that aims to increase the number of women in leadership roles.

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters:

• Anne Griffiths’ chapter on “Land” discusses the central importance of land for the livelihoods of families and households. Having access to land or owning property are often seen as significant aspects of a person’s natural rights.
• Faranak Miraftab’s chapter on “Displacement” examines issues of the rights of workers and migrants who find themselves in a meatpacking industry in Illinois. Miraftab’s discussion of the “global restructuring of the meat industry” illustrates tensions over capital and rights (43).
• Michael Mascarenhas’ chapter on “Sovereignty” addresses the roles of NGOs in working on humanitarian issues. Mascarenhas examines the role of NGOs and the type of sovereignty they practice with regard to the state.

Classroom Assignments

There are a variety of assignments online that provide a useful means to engage students in discussions of rights. The University of Minnesota Human Rights Center, for instance, provides a list of activities that can be used with students of many different ages.

From Fellow Tim Bartley:  My entry point has become “rules.”  I’m not sure if I chose it or if it chose me. I think it was more the latter, in that I came to realize that a lot of the dynamics I am interested could be described as what I call the “puzzle of rules.”

The basic idea is that the global economy is both “unruly” and generative of many new rule-making projects.  In the past, we’ve tended to see the process of globalization through one of the other of these frames.

Key Terms

• Neoliberalism:  A set of ideas stressing the power of so-called “free markets” to increase general welfare and a related political project to tear down barriers to international trade and investment.
• The Double Movement of Capitalism:  The idea, famously theorized by Karl Polanyi, that the expansion of capitalism involves, first a commodification of “fictitious commodities”—land, labor, and money, and second, de-commodifying reactions that re-embed markets in society.

Discussion Questions

1. In what other settings can you see evidence of the expansion of transnational rule-making?
2. To what extent is unruliness, as discussed in the chapter, generated by national and sub-national dynamics versus global and transnational dynamics?

Supplemental Readings

1. Bartley, T., Koos, S., Samel, H., Samel, Setrini, G. and Summers, N.  (Forthcoming).  Consuming Alternatives?  Global Production and the Dilemmas of Conscientious Consumerism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
2. Auld, G. (2014).  Constructing Private Governance: The Rise and Evolution of Forest, Coffee, and Fisheries Certification. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
3. Djelic, M.L. and Quack, S. (2010).  Transnational Communities: Shaping Global Economic Governance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
4. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
5. Quark, A. (2013).  Global Rivalries:  Standards Wards and the Transnational Cotton Trade. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
6. Seidman, G. (2007). Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation / ASA Rose Series.
7. Streeck, W. (2009). Re-forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters 

• Miraftab/Displacement
• Gille/Materiality
• Kumar/Genealogies
• Harvey/The Particular
• Perullo/Rights
• Mascarenhas/Sovereignty

Further Teaching Resources:

Business and Human Rights Resource Centre

Worker Poisoning in the Electronics Industry in China

Related Films or Television Programs

Documentary: Last Train Home

Documentary: Who Pays the Price? The Human Cost of Electronics

Showtime Reporting Series: Years of Living Dangerously

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: The Problems of Fast Fashion

Other Complementary Materials

Google Site for Tim Bartley and co-authors

From Fellows Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier: We’ve been very interested in the Politics of Scale, in particular in relation to the emerging academic field of Big History, a field that takes as its scope a cosmic-scale trajectory from the Big Bang to the present day.

Practitioners of this subfield look for broad historical patterns in human development; they have their own newly-formed international organization, newsletter, journal, and even panels at the American Historical Association conference. Of particular importance is the impact on university curricula.

Discussion Questions:

1. How did post-WWII changes prompt policymakers to think about problems in terms of the global?
2. Summarize the history of the term “global” as used by policymakers and scholars. Do they use it in the same way? How does the use of the term frame the issues of concern to each group?
3. How does understanding  the rise of the term “global” as a frame allow us to be critical about what is included or not in accounts of Global Studies?
4. What were the demands of the Cold War that necessitated a reconsideration of global scale?
5. How did the policies of modernization upset social and political hierarchies?

Class Activities

• Pre-class warmup:

Find where the authors state their argument. Give page number.

Paraphrase argument.

List changes in global politics and social life that happened after World War II.

Give an example from the article of a post-World-War-II change in how policymakers understood the path to economic and political power.

Activities and Supplementary materials:

• Primary source:

Student use the internet to access speeches by U.S. leaders on geo-politics such as Robert McNamara’s Speech (1966) on “Security in the Contemporary World” or Presidential speeches (Eisenhower , Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) on  geo-politics to look for passages that support or contrast Cohen and Frazier’s argument about post WWII U.S. leaders’ understandings of the global.

• Visual Analysis:

Cartographies of the World: Students use the internet to find various mappings of the world from the 1400s to the present. The Wikipedia page “List of World Map Changes” is an interesting place to start. Particularly useful is Matthew White’s Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century (1998-2003) website http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm  and includes the map “Government in the 1960s”

Using internet images, ask students to individually select a “68” image that could illustrate this chapter and to explain why. Students can then, as teams or a class, curate the best images and provide captions explicitly connecting them with the chapter.

Unit Assignments and Teamwork Applications:

Using Cohen and Frazier’s framework for looking at formulations of “the global,” ask students to take a primary source such as Robert MacNamara’s speech and adapt –using markers would be fine– a world map of the period to illustrate his arguments.

Questions linking this chapter to other volume chapters:

• SCALE (Cohen and Frazier, DeBoer) Compare and contrast Cohen and Frazier’s definition of scale to that of DeBoer. How are their understandings of global scale similar or different? What kinds of phenomena can you see with each of the definitions? Compare and contrast Cohen and Frazier with McKay on ways in which Global Studies can think through the forging of connections across groups and across spaces?
• HISTORY (Cohen and Frazier, Prakash Kumar, Sean Metzger) How does considering the question of the global in terms of change over time and historical background help us to specify what is new or not-so-new about the global and to understand when and how the idea of the global becomes important for historical actors?
• POLITICS  (Cohen and Frazier, Tim Bartley, Zsusza Gille) How do policymakers’ understandings of the global impact how challenges are defined and possible solutions?
• RACE (Cohen and Frazier, Sean Metzger, Dierdre McKay) How do ideas about population movements and interactions become framed in terms of racial and ethnic difference?

From Fellow Sean Metzger: Because I am interested both in contemporary manifestations of and historical antecedents to globalization, I chose an entry point that precedes any notion of globalization yet might help define it — that entry point is “seascape.”

A seascape is the watery equivalent of landscape. It is a kind of epistemology, one in which knowledge accrues by visualizing or tracking oceanic flows but one that also connotes an aesthetic project.

Key Terms

• Aesthetic: Relating to art and beauty (aesthetics usually refers to the branch of philosophy dealing with such matters).
• Atlantic: Referring to the Atlantic Ocean but also the flows of ideas, goods, money, and people that circulate through the region (for example, the Atlantic Slave Trade brings a certain coherence to this otherwise large and diverse region because the term directs our attention to the seaways and ports used to ship human cargo from and to various locations).
• Capitalism: For Marx, capitalism meant a mode of production based on private ownership; in more general usage, this term sometimes designates an economic system (or a structure of social organization in which economics plays the key role).
• Chinese: Often understood as a term specifying a relation to China as a nation-state or ethnic group, this essay complicates this word to investigate how this term might actually have quite different and event contradictory meanings.
• Epistemology: The study of knowledge, particularly its nature and limits. How do we know what we know?
• Heuristic: A strategy or means of problem solving or method of learning.
• Seascape: The watery equivalent of landscape (as in, a landscape painting).

Supplemental Readings

1. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2. Arrighi, G. (2007). Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Verso.
3. Dirlik, A. (1998). Introduction: Pacific Contradictions. What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
4. Jameson, F. (1998). “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press
5. Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press

Can be taught with these Framing the Global chapters

• “Forms” and “Location” provide contrasts to facilitate thinking about how specific structures support the circulation and value of aesthetic objects.
• “Affect” and “Displacement” offer points of intersection in terms of thinking about how and why migrants move and what their relationships to different places might be.
• “Frames” offers a different way of considering how a particular oceanic framework generates meaning and the kinds of material connections such a framework emphasizes.
• “The particular” provides a different methodology to think about how different structures of economic organization enable us to perceive processes of globalization.

Media Resources

Race, Place, Space

Richard Fung’s My Mother’s Place (1990)

Jeanette Kong’s Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China (2014)

New York Times Sinosphere

From Fellow Michael Mascarenhas: I have found the notion of sovereignty a particularly useful entry point for understanding the global humanitarian complex.

The unprecedented rise of NGOs, combined with increasing decision-making authority concerning how particular humanitarian conditions are defined, whom is to be helped, and how to go about helping them and, consequently, who can be left behind amounted to a new form of sovereignty or even empire.

Key Terms

• Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs): Weiss and Gordenker (1996) define NGOs as “a special set of organizations that are private in their form but public in their purpose,” thus distinguishing them from intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs).  However, while an NGO might adopt a particular structure, in practice it is much more difficult to identify its boundaries (Hilhorst 2003).
• Sovereignty: Sovereignty is the power to make decisions over who lives and who dies.  This power, or legitimate authority, is most often associated with nation states.  However, increasingly non-governmental organizations are making decisions over who lives and who dies, and therefore making sovereign decisions that are not necessarily tied to national boundaries.
• Biopolitics: According to Michel Foucault biopolitics involves “a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on” to address a “whole series of related economic and political problems associated with human development” (1997, 243).  The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics, Foucault argued, included forecasts, statistical estimates, censuses, demographic surveys, and overall measures that provided extensive knowledge about the population that was deemed essential by the state to provide for the well-being of its population.
• Post-colonialism: Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an interdisciplinary discipline concerned with understanding the different ways in which representations about the so-called developing countries and their people are constructed and maintained, largely for the benefit of those in the West.

Discussion Questions

1. In what ways might the notion of sovereignty be changing?
2. How do non-governmental organizations engage in sovereign-like practices?
3. How do you explain the rapid rise of NGOs in the 1990s?

Supplemental Readings

1. Barnett, M. (2011). Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2. Fassin, D. (2011). Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
3. Moyo, D. (2010). Dead Aid. Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Can be taught with these chapters

• Rights by Alex Perullo
• Rules by Tim Bartley