(2010) “Area Studies and Academic Disciplines across Universities: A Relational Analysis with Organizational and Public Implications” (original) (raw)
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The common thread running through these books is their interest in how location functions as an organizing trope for contemporary work in the humanities and social sciences. Taken together, they explore the concept of location as places we study (such as literature in America, culture in Africa), places we study in (English departments, American studies programs, centers for East Asian studies, and others), and circumstances that define and structure our subjectivity as scholars and critics (such as the fact that I write this article as a white, upper-middle-class professor of English at a Midwestern, urban university). This shared preoccupation with locations, and the act of locating, is connected both to significant developments in theory and methodology in the humanities and social sciences and to profound political, economic, and cultural changes in the areas and regions we study. David Simpson's Situatedness: Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (2002) and the essays collected in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (2002), edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle , edited by Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, for example, would be unthinkable without the theoretical critique of essentialism inaugurated by Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucault's work on subjectivity and the relationship between power, ideology, and institutions. However, these books also respond to profound dislocations and realignments connected to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization, and the current crisis surrounding US policy toward Islam and the so-called "war on terror." Together, these changes have begun to significantly influence the areas and regions we mark off for study, the structures within which we do our work, and our self-consciousness about our situatedness as critics.
Area Studies and Disciplines: What Disciplines and What Areas?
2020
Area Studies (AS) debates often centre on the relationship between AS and disciplines, with a particular focus on so-called systematic disciplines including social sciences and economics. To my mind, this is a bit shortsighted and narrows the issue of what disciplines and AS mean. In the following paragraphs, I offer some thoughts about disciplines in a broader sense, about methods and about areas as a structuring element of the institutional academic landscape in Germany. I end with a recommendation for liberating the AS debate from the quest for the relationship between AS and disciplines and for a strong integration of transimperial, transregional, transnational and translocal dimensions into the segmentation of institutions and study programmes. Disciplines Natural sciences, life sciences, mathematics, economics, social sciences and the like demand to be characterised first and foremost by particular methods and methodologies. This feature also qualifies the subjects of study subsumed under such headings (e.g. physics, biology, sociology, political science) to be called disciplines. In the German language, disciplines are also called Einzelwissenschaften or Fachwissenschaften, signalling a kind of singularity and systematicity. They are seen as "systematic disciplines", which is a term that is meant to distinguish them from allegedly non-systematic methods of scholarly inquiry. While systematic / non-systematic is a delicate binary in itself, the designation "discipline" merits attention for several reasons. I would like to start out by reflecting on the temporality of disciplines and then move on to the methodological plurality of some disciplines. Concerning
The Contingencies of Area Studies in the United States
Philippine Studies Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2003
This essay ofers a set of reflections on the "crisis" of area studies in the post-Cold War era in the United States. Setting aside for the moment the institutional aspects of this crisis, it delves instead into the contingent and accidental ways by which practitioners of area studies in the U.S. encounter that which is foreign and distant, then subsequently seek to consolidate this encounter as an integral part of an intellectual and politico-ethical trajectory of their lives.
Area Studies and Academic Disciplines across Universities
Size 444 b. Type Documents Source Documents upload Documents CHALLENGES Demonstrate to skeptics that the field of Area Studies is not dead. Respond to allegations by critics that Title VI/FH has under-performed in equipping our graduates with foreign language proficiency, in-depth knowledge of non-U.S. societies, familiarity with critical global issues, and in placing our graduates in national security positions Carve out its own niche as other governmental and non-governmental programs establish competitive programs (e.g., ROTC Language and Culture Project of NSEP)
International Studies Review, 2024
As part of recent years’ efforts at reaching a more context- and diversity-sensitive study of international relations, the nexus between fields of IR and Area Studies (AS) has received a renewed attention. While AS is usually presented as the “contextualizer” of the disciplines, this forum reverses the perspective by suggesting that an awareness of both diversity and context is also relevant when it comes to understanding the evolution of the field of AS and its relations to IR. In this forum, a selection of scholars with diverse backgrounds (US, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Central Asia), different (inter)disciplinary trainings and regional orientations examines how various fields of AS and its relations to the disciplines vary, and what follows from a stronger attention to such kind of diversity. By contextualizing the contextualizers, the forum brings attention to how a context-sensitive field can also suffer from its own provincialism. While the US-centric narrative about AS might have been almost “hegemonic,” at closer inspection, it turns out that AS in different (sub)disciplinary and geographical settings have evolved differently, and in some places the so-called Area Studies controversy (ASC) has been almost absent. A broadening of the perspective also reveals how the challenges to a successful cross-fertilization are not limited to those outlined in the “classic” ASC, but the forum does simultaneously offer encouraging lessons on how dialogues between area specialists and discipline-oriented scholars can help to overcome epistemological, theoretical, or methodological blind spots. Rather than presenting the IR/AS nexus as a panacea per se, the aim of the forum is therefore to invite to a broader and more self-reflective discussion on some of the opportunities as well as challenges associated with this strategy for making the study of international relations more context-sensitive and attentive to different forms of diversity.
The Survival and Adaptation of Area Studies
SAGE Handbook of Political Science, 2020
In the post-Cold War era, there have been significant changes in resource streams, disciplinary trends, and the wider academic environment, and these have undoubtedly produced new kinds of challenges and pressures for area specialists housed in political science. However, viewed from a global perspective, it is clear that reports of the "death" of area studies have been greatly exaggerated. Rather area studies scholarship has continued to adapt to new environments, with cross-area research also expanding in directions that supplement area-based scholarship and highlight the latter's resilience and ongoing utility.