Revitalizing Area Studies: Building Thematic Resonance Through Reconciliation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies
American Anthropologist, 2004
Understanding globalization is probably the most crucial task facing social scientists today and many scholars are confronting the challenge. One can battle over which perspective is the most fruitful, but Arjun Appadurai's claim in his edited volume, Globalization, is to use all possible methods and tools to comprehend the changes that are on us. This ingenious collection, many chapters republished from Public Culture, ranges from analyses of art and textiles to political economy. Appadurai cites the urgency of the situation, as well as the historical patterns of inequality, to incorporate a wide variety of perspectives and methods. Although most of the articles explore new areas from unusual angles, perhaps the one kind of article missing from this collection is the "on the ground" ethnography of the banking practices of the elite or grassroots resistance from below. I am concerned about the scholarly and social implications of the postmodern emphasis on images, imagineries, tropes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and mediascapesapproaches that skim the exotic, colorful, and glittering surfaces of globalization. Appadurai has previously avoided locating power or defining empire or the corporate forces of privatization and investment, which characterize globalization in the second millennium. Nevertheless, recently Appadurai appears to have landed lightly on earth, both in his recognition of capitalist predation in his introduction and in his research on Mumbai (to be found in later issues of Public Culture). His introductory remarks in Globalization read with an appropriate sense of urgency. There is concern for the gravity of the subject and the wrongs being perpetrated through a continuing process of capital accumulation by dispossession. But you will still not find in these pages any systematic analysis of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Trade Organization. Nor will you find any explicit recognition of the ongoing demonstrations against globalization or, apart from Saskia Sassen's analysis of the state, any detailed examination of the increasing gap between rich and poor. You will not read much about the persistent injuries of uneven development or the ongoing destruction of working-class communities. Although the chapters collected by Appadurai fall short of grappling with the institutional structures and inequities that make globalization perhaps the primary problem now confronting anthropology, the collection nonetheless pro
International Studies Review, 2024
In this contribution, we discuss the South–South traveling of concepts as an ignored dimension in the Area Studies (AS) debate and one that we think should be seen as an essential part of a comparative AS research agenda. Focusing on social movement studies (SMS), we argue that this research field has seen lively debates on whether and how northern-centered theories should be applied to different regions of the Global South but has yet to tap into the potential offered by the deliberate appropriation of concepts developed with a view to one region of the Global South by scholars working on another region. The contribution is part of the forum "Contextualizing the Contextualizers: How the Area Studies Controversy is Different in Different Places", by Jan Busse, Morten Valbjørn, Asel Doolotkeldieva, Stefanie Ortmann, Karen Smith, Sérgio Costa, Irene Weipert-Fenner, Jonas Wolff, Saskia Schäfer, and Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann.
Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Studia territorialia, 2022
In this collaborative article, we-Anwar Mhajne and Crystal Whetstone-investigate our positionalities in diverse area studies through a critical reflection on our experiences as political science graduate students conducting fieldwork for our dissertations. We work across different area studies-the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and South Asia and Latin America-mainly as an insider (Mhajne) or simply as an outsider (Whetstone). Taking an interpretive approach and using the method of autoethnography, we critically reflect on our different fieldwork experiences undertaken as political science graduate students, relying on postcolonialism to guide us. We ask: how can our fieldwork experiences complicate the structures of insider and outsider in relation to our situatedness in different regions of area studies? We engage with a decolonial feminist framework to help unpack these experiences and to imagine how our varied experiences disrupt the colonization processes embedded within area studies. We conclude by identifying eight ways to further decolonize area studies based on our fieldwork and other scholars' work.
The entanglements of transnational feminism and area studies
Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, 2016
In this essay, I consider the relationship between transnational feminism and area studies. I suggest that transnational feminism's long engagement with the difference offers a way in which to address the critiques of area studies which has tended to identify places with particular ''traits''. I examine how particular strands of western feminism intertwined with the project of area studies by seeking to define, reform, and consolidate places and people within their ambit of power. If we consider area studies to be organized in a horizontal scale focused on large regional spaces defined by ''traits'', then transnational feminism adds a vertical dimension to the study of area studies with its focus on the intimate spaces of power.