Posts Tagged ‘Higher Education’

The Role of Universities in Cultural Heritage Protection

May 20, 2011

nullDr. Helaine Silverman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The global tourism industry has generated intense interest in and pressure on major archaeological and historic sites around the world. In addition, ethnic, religious, political and environmental disputes have arisen around some of these places. The field of cultural heritage management addresses these and other issues. This brief paper discusses two important cultural heritage management and research projects conducted by faculty affiliates of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP) at the University of Illinois. Their work highlights the role of universities in cultural heritage protection.

In 1992 Hindu nationalists demolished a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, Gujarat state, India, that had been built atop the site considered to be the birthplace of the Hindu god, Rama. Deadly riots between Muslims and Hindus ensued. Ten years later, 57 Hindu train passengers were killed by Indian Muslims as they returned from Ayodhya, an attack prompted by Hindu preparations to build a new shrine in Ayodhya. Hindus immediately retaliated for the train attack and soon Gujarat was engulfed by bloodshed and widespread destruction of homes, shops and religious sites. Seen alongside UNESCO’s mantra that cultural heritage belongs to all humankind and must be respected, protected, and embraced, the violence in Gujarat challenged the idealistic notion of universal cultural heritage.

This was the context in which four professors from the Department of Landscape Architecture, in association with Indian partners from the Baroda Trust, undertook a heritage conservation project at Champaner-Pavagadh, a Hindu-Muslim contested site in Gujarat. The landscape intervention plan formulated by my colleagues Amita Sinha, James Wescoat, Gary Kesler and D. Fairchild Ruggles aimed to connect the residential population of Champaner city with the sacred hill of Pavagadh and in so doing mitigate the explosive potential of this pilgrimage site. They paid equal attention to the existing medieval mosque and to the Hindu pilgrimage summit so as to conserve culturally hybrid sites. Their design enhanced historical paths, water features and human settlements (Sinha 2004; Sinha et al. 2003) and “harmonize[d] contemporary tourist and pilgrim interests; illuminate[d] the manifold historical contribution of Sultanate, Rajput, Jain and tribal groups; and thereby deepen[ed] contemporary appreciation of the pluralistic cultural legacy at Champaner-Pavagadh” (Wescoat 2007). Their plan also encompassed local community development by means of shop houses and communal spaces (Sinha et al. 2005).

Their achievement of multiple goals was demonstrated by the fact that while Gujarat burned, Champaner-Pavagadh experienced far less physical destruction. Only two years later the Illinois team helped India gain World Heritage Site status for Champaner-Pavagadh as a testament to its “perfect blend of Hindu-Moslem architecture” and its continuous Hindu pilgrimage landscape.

My colleagues are emphatic that their conservation/protection plan succeeded because it was not premised on the sacred hill summit alone. Rather, they approached Champaner-Pavagadh as a complex environment with integrated social, economic, political, religious, and natural features. Also, they were able to make a long-term commitment to stewardship of the site, eschewed a narrow focus on building preservation, and brought to the project an academically deep understanding of the Mughal Empire, Hindu sacred landscapes, Indian politics and history, and local traditions.

Luang Prabang, Laos, offers a different scenario of heritage protection. Luang Prabang was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, in part as an emergency measure taken by UNESCO against its imminent destruction by a major Chinese highway that would soon run through the middle of the beautiful ancient city en route to Vientiane. The highway was diverted to comply with UNESCO requirements and Luang Prabang is currently praised as “an outstanding example of the fusion of traditional architecture and Lao urban structures with those built by the European colonial authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its unique … townscape illustrates a key stage in the blending of these two distinct cultural traditions” (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/479).

My School of Architecture colleagues—Lynne Dearborn and John Stallmeyer—traveled to Luang Prabang to study its historic built environment and its management by the Maison du Patrimoine. In the 2010 book resulting from their fieldwork, Inconvenient Heritage, they observe that the official description (above) belies critical problems in the city, especially as generated by tourism. Once the communist government opened Laos to tourism in 1989 and legalized private enterprise, the city’s decrepit colonial villas began to be refurbished as hotels, numerous homes became guest houses, and restaurants and shops opened to service the needs of the tourism sector. Although dozens of reports have been filed with UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee since 2001 concerning threats to Luang Prabang’s built environment, Professors Dearborn and Stallmeyer found little attention being paid to the drastic changes that tourism has created in the lives of Luang Prabang’s residents. For instance, long lines of orange-robed monks on their early morning collection of alms (which reciprocally links them to the local population) now run the gauntlet past gawking, camera-toting tourists. And the internal multi-village organization of the ancient city has almost disappeared with the overflow of the tourism economy.

Dearborn and Stallmeyer’s analysis of the Maison du Patrimoine’s management plan reveals a singular representation of the city’s cultural heritage that erases “particular physical and socio-cultural pasts that are seen as unpalatable for tourists, are incongruent with contemporary development, or do not serve the political needs of the current Lao PDR government.” Luang Prabang today dutifully attends the needs of a global tourism industry but, as Dearborn and Stallmeyer observe, “the erasures necessitated by this process leave little room for the performance of locally embedded everyday activities or multiple readings of heritage.” Moreover, the World Heritage inscription and its resulting architectural preservation and urban redevelopment “have refined and redefined what heritage is in Luang Prabang, freezing the physical environment of the city as an imagined space/time.” The result is a physical environment increasingly transformed into a touristic display, rendering invisible Luang Prabang’s embedded, intangible heritage.

University scholar-practitioners are especially qualified to conduct cultural heritage projects. Our academic training makes us aware of the multiple conflicting institutions and interests that surround all cultural heritage initiatives. We argue that to undertake site protection with unquestioning adherence to adages of universal cultural heritage, or uncritical belief in the inherent value of heritage for the construction of identity, or to automatically advocate economic development through cultural heritage tourism, is to invite failure on the ground. Because we are not a profit-driven business, are reasonably unconstrained by time (at least until our grants run out), and have a university base, we do not operate in the service of influential interest groups and we are sensitive to local stakeholders whose voices typically receive inadequate attention from those in power.

Hopefully, as more universities develop programs in cultural heritage, like CHAMP’s, and their graduates move into the field of heritage management we should see greater success in the democratic management and benign sustainability of all kinds of cultural heritage sites and intangible traditions.

Helaine Silverman is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the director of CHAMP (Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices).

References Cited and Recommended

Dearborn, Lynne and John Stallmeyer
2010            Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Logan, William S.
2007            Closing Pandora’s Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 33-52. Springer, New York.

Ruggles, D. Fairchild and Helaine Silverman (editors)
2009            Intangible Heritage Embodied. Springer, New York.

Silverman, Helaine (editor)
2010            Contested Cultural Heritage. Religion, National, Erasure and Exclusion in a Global World. Springer, New York.

Silverman, Helaine and D. Fairchild Ruggles (editors)
2007            Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. Spinger, New York.

Sinha, Amita
2004            Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park: A Design Approach. International Journal of Heritage Studies 10(2):117-128.

Sinha, Amita, James L. Wescoat, Jr., Gary Kesler, and D. Fairchild Ruggles
2003            Champaner-Pavagadh Cultural Sanctuary. Gujarat, India. Design proposal and report (48 pp.) submitted to Heritage Trust, Baroda, India. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign.

Wescoat, James L., Jr.
2007            The Indo-Islamic Garden: Conflict, Conservation, and Conciliation in Gujarat, India. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 53-77. Springer, New York.

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What is Global Studies?

May 6, 2011

nullMark Juergensmeyer

What is global studies? Anxious administrators ask this question whenever a new program or degree is proposed. Is it anything different than simply international, or comparative, or area studies made over and outfitted with a bright new name?

This very question has been discussed by the Global Studies Consortium, an international organization of graduate programs in global studies. Originally proposed at a workshop in Santa Barbara in 2007, the consortium meetings draw representatives from over forty graduate programs in Asia, Europe and North America. They meet each year at such diverse locations as Leipzig, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

At one of their recent meetings, the representatives agreed upon five aspects of their programs that all of them shared in common, and which distinguish global studies from international, area, comparative, or similar fields. The five key defining characteristics of the field are as follows:

Global studies is transnational.  Global studies focus on the analysis of events, activities, ideas, trends, processes and phenomena that appear across national boundaries and cultural regions. The term “cultural regions” is meant to apply to associations of people bound together by a common language, religion, and heritage that are defined within a particular geographical area but may not be demarcated as a nation, or have occurred historically before the concept of nation was applied to states.

Strictly speaking, transnational and global studies are not the same, since an activity that appears beyond national boundaries can be largely within a particular area of the world (Europe, for instance, or the nations along the Pacific Rim), and not necessarily throughout the whole world. On the other hand all global phenomena are by definition transnational, since they occur beyond the limitations of national boundaries or control. In general, the term “international” differs from transnational phenomena since it applies to activities between and among nation-states. In common usage, however, many transnational phenomena are described as international, as in the description of some environmental issues as being international when the phenomena themselves—such as global warming—are transnational (though the responses to them may involve an international collaboration among nations).

Global studies is interdisciplinary.  Since global phenomena are economic, political, social, cultural, religious, ideological, environmental, biological, or involve new technology and means of communication, they are examined from many disciplinary points of view. Scholars involved in global studies are found in all fields of the social sciences (especially sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology) as well as the humanities, including history, literature, religious studies, and the arts. And it involves some areas of science—environmental studies and public health, for instance.

Global studies is both contemporary and historical.  Though the pace and intensity of globalization has increased enormously in the 21st century and the post-Cold War period of the 20th century, transnational activity has historical antecedents. There are moments in history—such as in the ancient Mediterranean world during the Roman and Greek Empires—when there was a great deal of transnational activity and interchange on economic, cultural, and political levels. European colonialism during the 19th and 20th centuries provides another example of a global stratum of culture, education, technology, and economic activity upon which are based many aspects of globalization in the 21st century. Thus to understand fully the contemporary patterns of globalization it is necessary to probe their historical precedents.

Global studies tend to be postcolonial and critical. Although many aspects of contemporary globalization are based on European colonial precedents, most global studies scholars do not accept uncritically the Western-privileged patterns of economic, political and cultural globalization. Some scholars avoid using the term “globalization” to describe their subject of study, since it sometimes is interpreted as implying the promotion of a Western-dominated hegemonic project aimed at spreading the acceptance of laissez-faire liberal economics throughout the world. Other scholars describe their approach as “critical globalization studies,” implying that their examination of globalization is not intended to promote or privilege Western economic models of globalization.

The postcolonial perspective of global studies is one that is viewed from many cultural perspectives. Scholars of global studies acknowledge that the perception of globalization and other global issues, activities, and trends are viewed differently from different parts of the world, and from different socioeconomic locations within it. For that reason scholars of global studies sometimes speak of “many globalizations,” or “multiple perspectives on global studies.”  This position acknowledges that there is no dominant paradigm or perspective in global studies that is valued over others.

Global studies programs aim at global citizenship. Academic programs in global studies often advance an additional criterion for programs in global studies: helping to foster a sense of global citizenship. Leaders in these academic programs aver that they are helping to create “global literacy”—the ability of students to function in an increasingly globalized world—by understanding both the specific aspects of diverse cultures and traditions as well as commonly experienced global trends and patterns. Other leaders of academic programs assert that they are providing training in “global leadership,” giving potential leaders of transnational organizations and movements the understanding and skills that will help them to solve problems and deal with issues on a global scale.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER is a professor of sociology and global studies, and director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Orfalea Center serves as the international secretariat for the Global Studies Consortium. This essay is adapted from an essay on global studies for THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL STUDIES (Helmut Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer, co-editors; Victor Faessel, managing editor) published by Sage Publications.

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Global studies abroad: toward a more integrated and meaningful study abroad experience

May 7, 2010

David Abernathy

Most undergraduate students majoring in global studies will spend some portion of their academic career studying abroad. Indeed, the “study abroad requirement” is seen as an essential component of the global studies degree at many institutions, as it provides students with an opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture and actively engage with the issues and problems they study in the classroom. But does simply including a study abroad component in a global studies major ensure that students will actually immerse and engage?  Given the subject matter of our nascent field, should we be expecting something more, or at least different, for our students when they study abroad? 

I found myself asking those questions as my institution undertook a significant overhaul of its global studies program. Considerable time was spent on the interdisciplinary curriculum, the number of credit hours, the arrangement of thematic tracks and regional concentrations, and the suite of courses that would sit at the core of the major. Study abroad, meanwhile, was barely discussed – it was simply a given. Our revised curriculum places much more emphasis on the processes and flows of globalization than before, incorporating but not privileging area studies at the level of the nation-state while addressing the increasing interconnectivity of society at all scales. We have adopted the metaphors of networks (Castells, 2000) and flows (Appadurai, 1996) as we seek to understand how globalization is changing our world. Yet our mentality toward study abroad programs seems to remain rooted in the paradigm of place. “I want to study in Ecuador,” is an example of the typical response given by a student when asked about the study abroad requirement. We may debate  the “end” or “demise” of the nation-state in our classrooms (Ohmae, 1996; Tanzi, 1998), but when it comes to study abroad the nation-state seems alive and well. Steiner asks of global studies in an earlier issue of this journal, “what is the unit of analysis?” (Steiner, 2007). We know the answer is not the nation-state (or at least not solely), yet too often that is the spatial construct we apply to our thinking on study abroad programs.

It seems appropriate and legitimate to argue that perhaps global studies students and those who teach and advise them should approach the study abroad requirement in a different manner. We should encourage students to focus on process and place together, rather than merely thinking about which international border they hope to cross. If our degree programs require students to pick a thematic track, as so often they do, then we should require our students to take the same approach to study abroad. If global studies is truly a different beast from area studies or international relations, then that difference should be reflected in the study abroad programs chosen by our students.

At my college, we are taking three steps to tailor our study abroad requirement to the specific needs of global studies students (while actively seeking input on other possible approaches). First, we are developing our own short-term study abroad courses that explicitly deal with key issues in contemporary globalization. Our first such course focuses on culture, globalization and development in Ghana, with students traveling in May 2010. Our second course examines the tensions between conservation and globalization in Panama, with study and travel planned for Spring 2011. The development of our own courses allows us to embed the learning objectives of our major directly into these study abroad opportunities.

Where internal study abroad courses are not appropriate or sufficient, we have begun working to improve our advising for external study abroad programs. We are developing a guide to study abroad programs that should be of particular interest and benefit to global studies students based on the subject matter and course of study. Study abroad institutions such as the School for International Training (SIT) and the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) have developed courses that address complex global issues, and we are working to match courses like these to the academic tracks our students choose. We advise students to think about what themes and research topics they are most interested in grappling with while abroad, then look to see which courses provide the closest fit. We do not try to suggest that place is unimportant, of course – we simply want the topics and issues to be given significant weight in the decision-making process.

Finally, we are working to be more self-reflexive about the study abroad process itself, asking students to recognize that the networks and flows that position them as participants in programs across the globe can themselves be the object of study in our field. A colleague of mine once wrote about what students don’t learn abroad (Feinberg, 2002), arguing that it is near impossible for students from the Western world to escape the “imaginary world of globalized, postmodern capitalism” that puts them at the center of the globe, and asking if study abroad programs can provide a sufficient challenge to students’ preconceived notions of how the world works. His argument seems particularly germane for those of us in global studies: how can we justify a study abroad requirement if we don’t actively seek out – or create – those programs that offer such challenges, while in turn providing students with the necessary tools of critical analysis that enable them to question the very act of studying abroad?

We are working to truly integrate the study abroad requirement into our major, rather than simply treat it as a box that students must check on their way to a degree. By teaching students the necessary skills of critical analysis and asking them to apply those skills to their own study abroad experience, by advising students to focus on the themes and content of study abroad programs rather than simply locale, by identifying external study abroad programs that are particularly good fits for our major, and by developing our own internal study abroad courses that explicitly address globalization, we are increasing the likelihood that study abroad both embraces and enhances the learning objectives of our academic major.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. New edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Feinberg, Benjamin. 2002. “What Students Don’t Learn Abroad.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 3).

Ohmae, Kenichi. 1996. The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York: Free Press.

Steiner, Niklaus. 2007. Global Migration in Global Society. Global-e (May 17).

Tanzi, Vito. 1998. The Demise of the Nation-State? IMF Working Paper. Available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/wp98120.pdf.

David Abernathy, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Global Studies at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.

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Creating the Global Studies Curriculum – A Space for the Local?

July 13, 2009

Jack Luletulips-japan

In Fall 2006, Lehigh University created an undergraduate major in Global Studies. In this essay, I examine theoretical, methodological and pedagogical approaches ultimately chosen for the new curriculum. In particular, I consider our attempt to emphasize the local in our global study.[1]

Discrete research and teaching on global topics had gone at Lehigh for more than a century. However, the attacks of 9-11-01, just 90 minutes from our university, galvanized faculty and students to more fully internationalize Lehigh’s campus. Faculty took on the role of globalizing research and teaching.

One of our first theoretical and pedagogical decisions: Out of the many ways in which a university might internationalize curriculum and research, we decided to focus on globalization.

A number of factors lay behind the choice. One was focus. In some Global Studies programs, students choose from an array of courses, sometimes hundreds, tied together only by virtue of international content and concern. Globalization gave us a subject of study for teaching and research.

Another factor was the importance of the subject: No matter how it is defined – and we have some faculty who deny its existence – globalization must be considered one of the defining terms of modern life.

A third factor was its interdisciplinary potential: We have four colleges – 18 departments in the College of Arts and Sciences alone – and yet each discipline was engaged in studies that took up globalization.

In Spring 2006, we submitted a proposal to create the Globalization and Social Change Initiative. It was immediately accepted – and funded. I had headed one of the working groups and was asked to be director of the Initiative. By Fall 2006, we were up and running.

I should explain what is meant at Lehigh by an “Initiative.” The concept, at one level, is similar to a research institute or center. Primary functions of the Initiative are to foster and promote faculty research.

Yet at Lehigh, and other campuses, research institutes do not get involved with the undergraduate curriculum, nor do they sponsor extracurricular student clubs and activities.

The concept of an Initiative allows us to support almost any activity on campus that falls under the rubric of globalization and social change. We do traditional center activities, such as hosting research symposia and conferences. But we also created the undergraduate Global Studies major and plan a graduate degree in Global Studies. Too, we sponsor international student clubs and activities. The breadth is rich and satisfying.

Why an initiative in “globalization and social change?” Again, theoretical and pedagogical considerations guided us.

Globalization, we felt strongly, is not simply an economic process. This was important for us to emphasize as we worked alongside our colleagues from the business college.

We believe that globalization, while surely an economic process, is also historical, social, religious, cultural and political. Globalization and social change, we felt, signified our scope.

With our understanding of globalization and social change in place, we set out to situate that understanding within the curriculum. Like many programs, we felt that a primary strength of Global Studies is its interdisciplinary nature. We tried to create a markedly interdisciplinary curriculum (and courses).

An introductory course presents students with competing notions of globalization and then proceeds through modules, each showcasing how the study of globalization is undertaken in different disciplines: history, political economy, culture and anthropology, political science and international relations, communication, sociology and others.

Students then work their way through a core curriculum made up of course work from more than eight different departments, courses specifically tailored for the major: globalization and history; the political economy of globalization; culture and globalization; politics and globalization, global communication, globalization and religion, and more. Advanced electives and a capstone research seminar round out the curriculum.

However, the Global Studies curriculum is only one part of the major. Following the work of Appadurai (1996), Pieterse (2004), and others, we felt that globalization is fruitfully studied at the local level – “the global production of locality” (Appadurai, 1996, 188). We debated how to give our students experience and tools for understanding the ways globalization is negotiated within local contexts.

As a start, we require intermediate language proficiency of our students, the equivalent of four semesters. We encourage – and gave serious consideration to requiring – a major in a foreign language but ultimately felt the credit requirements for a double major would be too intense. But language is a tool for understanding and we wanted our students to at least experience language instruction, to understand the connection between language and culture, and to know that the world does not speak English.

We also require two courses in one Area Studies program (and strongly encourage at least a minor), such as Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and others. Like Appadurai, we felt that Area Studies, though contested, still provide “a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world” (18).

Finally, we require Study Abroad, either a full semester or two six-week summer sessions. We believe that immersion in another culture is essential for our students’ education. We help students seek out service learning projects while abroad.

With good advising, students match language, Area Studies and Study Abroad. For example, a Global Studies student studying Spanish will take Latin American Studies classes, and study and work in Chile. We encourage students, while abroad, to pursue the intersections of the global and local, of “how global facts take local form” (Appadurai, 18).

The program – the Global Studies curriculum with the localizing experiences of language instruction, area studies, and study abroad – is in its infancy. Still to be determined: What are the educational – and life – outcomes of this particular balance of global and local in study of globalization?

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (2004). Globalization and Culture: Global Melange. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Jack Lule is the Joseph B. McFadden Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Director, Globalization and Social Change Initiative at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA

[1] Versions of this essay were presented to the Global Studies Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 2008, and the Global Studies Association North America Annual Conference, New York, New York, June 2008.

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Is Global Studies a Field? (part 2)

August 29, 2008

David L. Wank
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Studies,
Sophia University (Tokyo)

A strong case could be made for Global Studies (GS) as a distinct field in regard to curriculum and degrees. Examining the websites and other materials of GS programs around the world, reveals several general characteristics of program design and focus. First, GS programs draw heavily on the social sciences, especially the anthropology, history, political science, and sociology, with some representation of economics and business studies. Second, although less represented in GS programs, humanities appears to embody a more critical perspective on GS, as for example, the humanities-centered GS program at Hanyang University, Korea. This underscores the considerable room for fruitful co-existence between humanities and social science scholars in GS programs due to thematic coherence through the aforementioned (see part 1 of this essay) conceptual focus on “globalization” and shared explanatory frameworks.

What does a GS curriculum look like? By viewing GS programs around the world I can discern six types of courses or curriculum building blocks.

1. Thematic courses consider such broad frameworks as transnationalism, world systems, global history, global-local, world literature, and global intellectual history.

2. Topical courses focus on democratization, migration, media, nationalism, gender, NGOs, diaspora, food security, ethnic conflict and so on.

3. Issues courses emphasize problems requiring solutions such as environment, population, disease, disasters, genocide, human rights.

4. Training courses emphasize job-related skills in program evaluation in NGOs, managing multicultural organizations, conflict resolution.

5. Methodology courses present ways to study globalization, mostly focusing on qualitative approaches.

6. Area courses focus on specific countries and regions in globalization. (This constitutes a fruitful overlap with Area Studies curriculums).

A number of program curriculums contain foundational or core courses, often drawn from Block 1 and then a mix of courses from other blocks.

Discussion of curriculum is an opening to reflect on the aforementioned question (see part 1) of whether or not GS represents the ideology of U.S. political and economic interests. Theories of globalization might appear as U.S-centric, human rights as culturally specific notions of personhood, the training for NGO work as undermining state sovereignty, and the emphasis on English-taught curriculums as Anglo-American cultural hegemony. Of course all fields in the Academy are not only structures of knowledge but also of power, but my point is how an awareness and recognition of these criticisms could be institutionalized as a critical perspective in a GS curriculum. Within the aforementioned thematic curriculum block “globalization” could be analyzed as a structure of power and knowledge through such readings as Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. In topics courses, teaching about anti-globalization movements fits the bill. Courses in the issues curriculum block could also highlight alternative solutions to problems that lie in indigenous practices and ideas rather than simply through “intervention” by wealthy nations, international organizations, and NGOs. In regard to practical courses, training in non-violent anti-globalization strategies could be included. Area courses can further understanding of how globalization is variously understood and enacted in different parts of the world, through such concepts as global-local and critical regionalism.

The final issue that I would like to touch on is institutional signification of GS knowledge in the names and types of degrees offered by GS programs. For a multi-disciplinary field this signification becomes problematic at the graduate level because the various tensions surrounding a multi-disciplinary field in the disciplinary-oriented Academy. An M.A. or Ph.D is expected to signify professional expertise in specific knowledge considerably beyond the general intellectual skills signified by an undergraduate B.A.

Insight on this issue can be gained by briefly considering Area Studies, which emerged in the 1950s and has a decades-long history of a multi-disciplinary field in the Academy. It is noteworthy that most Area Studies programs offer the terminal Area Studies M.A. and very few continue up to a named Area Studies Ph.D. Although an Area Studies graduate degree signifies rich understanding of a specific country or region, its holders can be seen as lacking training in any particular curriculum or methodology, hindering acceptance in the academic job market. At this moment, the creation of M.A. and Ph.D degrees in GS shows a similar tendency. There are considerably more GS programs offering terminal Global Studies M.A. degrees then those that also offer a Global Studies Ph.D. The few doctoral programs in GS that do exist seek to combine a focus on globalization as the object of study with grounding in the research strategies of an established disciplinary field. This reflects the aforementioned observation (see part 1) that methodologies to study globalization are still best obtained through disciplinary training.

Two ways of institutionalizing this combination can be seen in extant Global Studies Ph.D degrees. One is through a named degree, such as the Ph.D in Global Studies at Sophia University. We only admit candidates already trained in a social science discipline through prior graduate and undergraduate education. Once admitted, candidates take qualifying exams in both their discipline and in GS, and the dissertation committee is composed of faculty members from the discipline. The other way is to attach a Global Studies certificate to a disciplinary degree, as at University of California-Santa Barbara. Doctoral candidates in Anthropology, English, History, Political Science, Religious Studies, or Sociology can obtain this certificate by taking designated GS courses and including one faculty member on their dissertation committee from outside their discipline. In these two distinct ways Sophia and UC Santa Barbara institutionalize the same principle of focus on globalization as an object of study with grounding in an established disciplinary field.

So is GS a field? The 1980s saw the emergence of “globalization” as an intellectual trend. In the 1990s it became a movement with the emergence of specialized journals, research associations, and undergraduate GS majors. The past ten years has resembled something of a bandwagon as universities have created GS graduate programs, which is the gold standard for representing a distinct body of knowledge in the Academy. The next few years will be crucial to deciding if GS becomes fully institutionalized as a field in the Academy. The Global Studies Consortium will have to a key role to play in this effort.

Note

This is a shortened version of a plenary presentation at the “Global Studies Graduate Education Conference”, held at Sophia University, Tokyo May 16-18 2008. Conference attendees consisted of 25 representatives of current or planned graduate programs in Global Studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

References

Klein, Naomi (2008). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Diasater Capitalism. Picador.

Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt (2001). Empire. Harvard University Press.

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Globalization and the Virtues of Openness in Higher Education

August 29, 2008

Michael A. Peters
Professor, Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Openness has emerged as an alternative mode of social production based on the growing and overlapping complexities of open source, open access and open archiving and open publishing. It has become a leading source of innovation in the world global digital economy increasingly adopted by world governments, international agencies and multinationals as well as leading educational institutions. It is clear that the Free Software and ‘open source’ movements constitute a radical non-propertarian alternative to traditional methods of text production and distribution. This alternative non-proprietary method of cultural exchange threatens traditional models and the legal and institutional means used to restrict creativity, innovation and the free exchange of ideas. In terms of a model of communication there has been a gradual shift from content to code in the openness, access, use, reuse and modification reflecting a radical personalization that has made these open characteristics and principles increasingly the basis of the cultural sphere.

So open source and open access has been developed and applied in open publishing, open archiving, and open music constituting the hallmarks of ‘open culture.’ For some theorists, such as law professors Yochai Benkler (Yale) and Larry Lessig (Stanford), this symbolizes a new mode of social production and a form of cultural formation that represents an alternative to capitalist forms of globalization. As a number of economists have remarked this marks the emergence of global science and knowledge as a global public good that rest on an ethic of participation and collaboration based on the co-production and co-design of knowledge goods and services.

As one author expresses the point:

The present decade can be called the ‘open’ decade (open source, open systems, open standards, open archives, open everything) just as the 1990s were called the ‘electronic’ decade (e-text, e-learning, e-commerce, e-governance) (Materu, 2004)

And yet it is more than just a ‘decade’ that follows the electronic innovations of the 1990s; it is a change of philosophy and ethos, a set of interrelated and complex changes that transforms markets and the mode of production, ushering in a new collection of values based on openness, the ethic of participation and peer-to-peer collaboration.

New forms of freedom are occurring in the fundamental shift from an underlying metaphysics of production-a ‘productionist’ metaphysics-to a metaphysics of consumption as use, reuse and modification.  New logics and different patterns of cultural consumption are appearing in the areas of new media where symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily activity.  It is now a truism to argue that information is the vital element in a ‘new’ politics and economy that links space, knowledge and capital in networked practices. Freedom is an essential ingredient in this equation if these network practices develop or transform themselves into knowledge cultures.

The specific politics and eco-cybernetic rationalities that accompany an informational global capitalism comprised of new multinational edutainment agglomerations are clearly capable of colonizing the emergent ecology of public info-social networks and preventing the development of knowledge cultures based on non-proprietary modes of knowledge production and exchange.

Complexity as an approach to knowledge and knowledge systems now recognizes both the development of global systems architectures in (tele)communications and information with the development of open knowledge production systems that increasingly rest not only on the establishment of new and better platforms (sometimes called Web 2.0), the semantic web, new search algorithms and processes of digitization. Social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding value as evidenced in the growth of open source, open access and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities that transcend borders of the nation-state.  Openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results.

The role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production promotes the emergence of a new information environment and networked economy that both depends upon and encourages great individual freedom, democratic participation, collaboration and interactivity. This ‘promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property – and market based production, than they ever have in modern democracies’ (Benkler, 2006: 3). Peer production of information, knowledge, and culture enabled by the emergence of free and open-source software permits the expansion of the social model production beyond software platform into every domain of information and cultural production.

Open knowledge production is based upon an incremental, decentralized (and asyncrhonous), and collaborative development process that transcends the traditional proprietary market model. Commons-based peer production is based on free cooperation, not on the selling of one’s labor in exchange of a wage, nor motivated primarily by profit or for the exchange value of the resulting product; it is managed through new modes of peer governance rather than traditional organizational hierarchies and it is an innovative application of copyright which creates an information commons and transcends the limitations attached to both the private (for-profit) and public (state-based) property forms. (See, for instance, Michel Bauwens’ P2P Foundation work at the P2P Foundation at http://p2pfoundation.net/3._P2P_in_the_Economic_Sphere).

As the Ithaka Report University Publishing in a Digital Age (2008) reveals these broad initiatives in open source, open access, open publishing and open archiving are part of emerging knowledge ecologies that will determine the future of educational resources and scholarly publishing challenging commercial publishing business models and raising broader and deeper questions about content development processes as well as questions of resourcing and sustainability.  The new digital technologies promise changes in creation, production and consumption of scholarly resources including the development of new formats allowing integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination and dynamically-updated content as well as alternative distribution models including institutional repositories, pre-print servers, open access journals, that will broaden access, reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content.

On February 14 2008 Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online. The new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications and marks the beginning of a new era that will encourage other US universities to do the same. Open access means ‘putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet, making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, and removing the barriers to serious research.’ As Lila Guterman reports in The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog

Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote in a news release that the decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated (http://chronicle.com/news/article/3943/harvard-faculty-adopts-open-access-requirement).

Open access has transformed the world of scholarship and since the early 2000s with major OA statements starting with Budapest in 2002 movement has picked up momentum and developed a clear political ethos. Harvard’s adoption of the new policy follows hard on the heels of open access mandates passed within months of each other – the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the European Research Council (ERC). As one blogger remarked: ‘open archiving of peer-reviewed journal literature [is] now on an irreversible course of expansion’ not only as US universities follow Harvard’s lead but also as open archiving makes available learning material to anyone including students and faculty from developing and transition countries.  Harvard’s adoption of the open archiving mandate is similar in scope to the step taken by MIT to adopt OpenCourseWare (OCW) in 2001. These initiatives are part of new strategies to establish knowledge cultures that will determine the future of scholarly publishing, the form and content of educational resources, and therefore also the future of innovation and research in the digital global economy.

References:

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven, Yale University Press.

Ithaka Report, the (2008) University Publishing in a Digital Age July 26, 2007 Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, Matthew Rascoff, Preface: Kevin Guthrie at http://www.ithaka.org/strategicservices/Ithaka%20University%20Publishing%20Report.pdf

Materu, P. (2004), Open Source Courseware: A Baseline Study, The World Bank, Washington.

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Interregionalism and the globalization of higher education: new Euro-Asia initiatives

May 14, 2008

Kris Olds
Professor of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison

One of the interesting aspects of change in higher education systems is how they are being denationalized; reshaped, as it were, by forces and actors that are thinking at, and operating at, scales other than the national. In social science terms (e.g., see the work of Neil Brenner) this is often deemed the “relativization of scale”; the process whereby actors operating at the global scale, the inter-regional (e.g., Europe-Asia) scale, the supranational regional (e.g., European, Asian) scale, the national scale (e.g., Germany), the subnational regional (e.g., Silicon Valley) scale, and the urban scale, all come to play increasingly important roles in shaping a “multiscalar” development process. See, for example, these two recent reports by the European University Association (EUA) and the OECD on higher education for regional development in a globalizing era:

euacover.jpg

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In this case we have a regional stakeholder organization (the EUA), and a multilateral organization (the OECD), both framing development processes simultaneously at the urban, regional, and global scales, with the national scale present, though clearly not dominant. Don’t forget, as well, that the OECD is a creation of member states, and its global thinking is therefore animated by, and mediated by, the nation-state. This is a point Saskia Sassen has insightfully driven home, most recently in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006).

On the higher education and research policy front one emerging phenomenon worth taking note of is interregional dialogue. For example there is a now a decade long series of formal Transatlantic Dialogues, anchored by the American Council on Education (ACE), the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), and the European University Association (EUA). These meetings are always framed by ‘global’ thinking, but focus on achieving interregional objectives and enhanced understandings of what is going on on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this context the EUA announced, on 21 February, that it is partnering with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Netherlands Organisation for International Cooperation in Higher Education (Nuffic), to “establish an EU-Asia Higher Education Platform for European and Asian academics and policy makers”. This initiative is being facilitated by the European Commission’s Asia Link programme. As the EUA puts it, the purpose of the two-year project is to:

  • Provide a means for enhancing information exchange, dialogue, and cooperation in higher education and research between the two regions;
  • Develop best practices for institutional development and cooperation, and foster mobility of students and academics between the two regions;
  • Draw attention to the role and situation of universities in developing countries.

Throughout the course of 2008-9, a series of workshops and round tables in Asia and Europe will be organised, targeting institutional development and cooperation issues. Amongst the themes that are expected to be covered will be higher education governance and management, decentralisation, cooperation in graduate education, and interregional and inter-institutional cooperation in quality assurance.

While this is a complement to other forms of engagement also underway, and it is only targeted at parts of Asia, it is a noteworthy one.

First, and most importantly, there is much to learn in Asia about European developments over the last ten years given that Europe is grappling with the ‘modernization’ of its higher education system at a regional scale, though in a manner that blurs scales of action and intent, and takes into account national sensitivities and differential capacities for statecraft.

Second, it differs from the nature of North America-Asia and Australasia-Asia engagement, both of which tend to be relatively more person to person (e.g., the Australian Scholarships, the Fulbright awards) or event-oriented (e.g., student recruitment fairs, the US University Presidents’ Delegation to Southeast Asia).

In contrast, the EU-Asia Higher Education Platform is a truly post-national/interregional initiative, of a programmatic nature, and with an associated development agenda that focuses on systemic change.

In addition, and tying back to the start of this entry, note the presence of the nation-state in enabling EU-Asia relations to be forged, both directly and indirectly. This initiative is one that will also inevitably be forced to grapple with huge national variations in Asian higher education systems, and the lack of institutional capacity to operate at a regional scale in Asia, with respect to higher education. Yet while nation-states in Asia have not (yet) prioritized the construction of a regional higher education imaginary, it is only a matter of time given the structural forces that are reshaping Asian societies and economies. The complexion of the changes that will eventually emerge, and the nature of the intra-Asia and Asia-Other dialogue(s) facilitating them, have really yet to be determined.

global-e volume 2 issue 1 may 2008

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