A rchive Date
[ 15-02-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/CrossingBorders/workgroups.html
Previous page: Implementation
Research Proposal to the Ford Foundation
Crossing Borders: Area Studies and the New Geographies
The Thematic Working Groups
As the recent workshop at UC Berkeley on "Rethinking Area Studies" underscored, the intellectual foci, strengths, and lacunae of the various area studies communities vary considerably in part in relation to the character of the country(s) being studied, and historic U.S. relationships to them. As a consequence, the concerns, character, approach, and disciplinary composition of the thematic working groups will also vary. While each theme is under the auspices of one or two "flagship" area studies programs which take responsibility for the organization of activities, each working group is has resonances with other research groups and area studies programs on the Berkeley campus and will encompass a large and diverse constituency.
1. Traveling Theory and Ethnographies of Post-Communist Transition
See the report by this working group on Theoretical Explorations of Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe.
Thanks to the Cold War, scholarship on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe benefited little from developments in sociological and anthropological theory over the past three decades. This working group, led by Professors Victoria Bonnell and Michael Burawoy, is aimed at exploring, testing, and adapting these (relatively new) theoretical developments and research strategies for understanding and linking local knowledge and ethnography to broader national, regional, and global processes operating in that part of the world. The work of Bourdieu, Foucault, Geertz, Giddens, Habermas, feminist scholars, the new institutionalists, etc., often provide unique -- and in this setting, untried -- approaches to the study of local cultural and social forms, especially as they are linked to macro institution-building projects (e.g., "the market," "democracy," "the rule of law"). Pushing these bodies of social theory to the societies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe -- past and present -- will immediately extend the theoretical tools of faculty and graduate students working on those regions. It should also illuminate understudied aspects of those societies, refine and critique the theories themselves, and help to rethink the "given" boundaries between the Soviet Union, Eastern, and Western Europe. Such questions which link trajectories of post-communism to ethographically rich social theory are of course especially relevant also to the post-socialist experiences of Vietnam, Cuba, and China -- cases for which Berkeley also has a substantial depth -- which provided important counterpoints for this working group.
2. Multiple Capitalisms: Global-Local Articulations and African Recovery
See the report on the spring 1998 workshop, Rethinking "Globalization" presented by this working group.
Growing numbers of anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists are beginning to contest notions of globalization cast primarily in terms of "deterritorialization." Place, localities, and borders are better understood, in this view, as socially created through simultaneously material and discursive practices. The focus, in other words, is on new forms of "reterritorialization." Instead of asking what is the impact of "the global" on "the local," they call for historically and culturally informed understandings and ethnographic methods (classic area studies strengths) to analyze the dynamics of interaction within and across localities.
These efforts to reconceptualize globalization now parallel current literatures on agrarian change, political ecology, and gender, which are also concerned with global - local articulations, relational histories of place, and the ways that identities, resource struggles, and gender relations are being remapped. The work of Africanist scholars has been particularly influential in these literatures, but they have not yet engaged with the emerging critique of globalization. This working group, initiated by Professors Louise Fortmann, Gillian Hart, and Donald Moore, affiliated with the Center for African Studies and drawing participants from Africa and Europe, will focus on the considerable potential for synergistic interactions between these two bodies of scholarship.
3. Challenges to Federalism: NAFTA, MERCOSUR, and the Miami Process
See information on the conference/workshop this working group held in April of 1998, and the informal workshop on parties and electoral systems held in July of 1998.
The emergence of the new regional trade agreements NAFTA, MERCOSUR, and the Miami Process raises far-reaching issues for the international division of labor, national models of development, and the accustomed federal forms of government that characterize most states in the Americas.
This working group, led by Professors Thomas Barnes of Canadian Studies and Peter Evans and Harley Shaiken of the Center for Latin American Studies (as well as U.S. specialists and scholars based in Canada and Latin America) will focus on the structural implications of these new trade agreements on the different federal structures of the participating nations.
Throughout the Americas, historic federal systems designed and justified to balance specific political pressures are now experiencing new challenges variously linked to the new transnationalized economic arrangements. The decline of one-party dominance and the growing restiveness of the estados in response to a centralizing Mexican state, Quebec separatism, and the devolution of responsibilities from the U.S. government to ill-prepared state governments all reflect in part hopes and fears generated by the currently hegemonic neoliberal free trade regimes now sweeping the world. Comparative examination of these dynamics will depend upon detailed understandings of the differing federal structures, but also provide new understanding of the validity and meaning of the boundaries among states and regions in the Americas. This working group offers the possibility of linking up with research in train by the Berkeley Roundtable on the Intrenational Economy (BRIE) and with the Centre on International Development and Economic Research (CIDER) which have long-term interests in, respectively, trade liberalization and financial integration within the region.
4. Remapping Identities: the Africa-American Diaspora and Pan-Indian Movements
See the Review of Activities on this working group.
Professors Beatriz Manz and Percy Hintzen, Chairs of the Center for Latin American Studies and African-American Studies, respectively, will jointly lead a working group on the remapping of social identities in the context of increasing global integration. In recent years, both Africa and the Americas have simultaneously become sites of powerful transnationalizing influences, but also the reassertion of distinctive local politics and cultures. Among others, the complex North - South and transatlantic dynamics of the African-American diaspora are being increasingly recognized and incorporated into social identities. Likewise, the 1992 quincentennial observances accelerated powerful Pan-Indian movements from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego that are expanding political and cultural links and reshaping identities among indigenous populations. (Mayan priests are now active in northern California.) Simultaneously, however, indigenous peoples in Chiapas, Guatemala, Bolivia, the U.S., and Canada are coming to recognize their distinctive cultural worth and attendant social, political, and economic rights. This explicitly comparative working group will focus on the tensions and mutual interactions remapping these identities, and remapping our understanding of the relationships among Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Africa. Insofar as these identity questions are typically attached to global debates over human rights, this working group will work in collaboration with the IIS's newly established Center for Human Rights, directed by Dr. Eric Stover.
5. Identities in Question: The Contradictions of European Integration
See the October 1998 symposium, Islam and the Changing Identity of Europe planned by this working group.
The classically autonomous nation-states of Western Europe are integrating institutionally and symbolically at an astonishing rate. The transnational powers of the European Union (EU), and very notion of the EURO, a common European currency, mark major transformations and challenges to historic identities. Yet simultaneously Europe is experiencing a unique revival of oppressed local cultures (Gaelic, Catalonian, Waloonian, etc.); a growing recognition that its Muslim immigrant communities are no longer guests, but residents; and more equal relations with its ex-colonial dependencies. Globalizing integration and the expansion and (however grudging) acceptance of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural identity politics are proving mutually constitutive.
A working group led by Professors Manuel Castells and Nezar Al Sayyad, the chairs of the Centers for West European and Middle East Studies, respectively, will examine the emergence of subnational regions and cross-national networks, the shifting foundations of cultural identity, language use and discourse, the rewriting of national histories, Europe's growing interdependence with and colonization by its Muslim neighbors and residents, and the growing reality of Umberto Eco's prediction of an emerging "Afro-Europe."
6. Transnational Environmentalism, Civil Society and Social Networks: Green Activism in Asia and California
See the Spring 1998 Report of Activitiesby this working group. [jpeg images total ~106k]
Led by Professors Nancy Peluso and Robert Reed of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, this working group will focus on the confluence of local and transnational environmental activism, linking scholars, activists, and policy makers in Indonesia, Vietnam, and California. In all three locales (and many others), successful environmental activism has usually begun as a collaboration between local affected populations and members of a nearby or national elite -- joined together to counter the extractive activities of national or multinational corporations, or national or international agency development projects. While rooted in specific locales and histories, success stories among them almost always point to crucial support obtained from various transnational networks and organizations.
Drawing on long-standing personal and UC Berkeley collaborative relationships with environmental researchers and activists in Indonesia, Vietnam, and California, the working group will focus on the content, evolution, and implications of these local/transnational linkages among these environmental activists and organizations. It will deal with the cross-national translation of concepts and strategies, their transformations in local settings, the comparability of the issues they are facing, and the value, limitations, and dangers of transnational linkages. It is, of course, understood that the working group's own activities in analyzing and developing more effective research strategies for understanding these interactions and processes, will at the same time be contributing to them. This working group will work closely with a newly established Berkeley Environmental Politics group (BEP) located within the Institute of International Studies, and the California Studies group headed by Dr. Richard Walker of the Geography Department.
Next page: Looking to the Future
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