Research Topics
Community and identity
The search for autonomy in a globalizing world leads some persons to reconsider and reconstruct identities, their understandings of who they are. These changes come in the search for new communities or in the refurbishing of old communities in order to take advantage of globalization or to act to change it. So we find that the ways in which a variety of communities exercise, enhance, find, or lose their autonomy are changing in response to different globalizing pressures.
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Culture
Some of the first discussions of globalization, expressed fears about cultures around the world converging on a Western, consumerist model. In the process, communities would lose cultural autonomy and their most cherished ways of life. Research shows that human beings and their communities are more adaptive and innovative than this simplistic view suggests. Struggles over cultural autonomy create innovative, unchartered borderlands in which the global, cultural, political, and artistic meet, creating and recreating both our understandings of globality and of the worlds in which we live.
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Democracy
Democracy refers to political practices where communities as large as nation-states and as small as local organizations rule themselves. Such practices have become more global as the nation-state has become the dominant way of organizing the earth's territory. Globalization on the one side and the search for autonomy on the other have challenged this linkage between democracy and the state. New social movements, identity-based organizations, fundamentalist communities, and even states themselves have sought new forms of rule above or below the state. These searches raise basic questions about what democracy means and how it is achieved.
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Global Governance
Governance is a broad term. While it suggests governments create rules and make decisions, the term implies that rule-making and decision-making might take other forms such as private authority, community-based direct democracy, or partnerships between non-governmental organizations, states, and global centers of authority. Globalization and its pressures for integration and interdependence on the one side and autonomy and its pressures for self-rule and self-determination on the other raise questions about governance on a global scale. Global governance is concerned with studying these questions.
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Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous Peoples have faced globalization and its pressures on autonomy for millennia. These pressures intensified greatly during the European age of imperialism when Indigenous Peoples' lands were taken from them and their ways of life were disparaged as primitive or savage. They see globalization as a long-standing cruel process that destroys autonomy. More recently, they have also sought to use the linkages possible under globalization and the institutions created with it like the United Nations to reclaim autonomy.
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Property rights
Political, economic, and cultural structures of varying form, often grouped under the headings of empires and imperialism, have reflected global ambitions. Struggles for autonomy have occurred at the frontiers of these empires, at their dissolution, and in many other sites both within and outside imperial structures. Central to many of these struggles are those over the introduction of Western notions of property rights. Property rights often involve the establishment of private control over land, goods, living organisms, and technologies. As such, they give rise to some of the most intensive struggles at the heart of the tension between globalization and autonomy.
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Technology
The growing interdependence — the drawing together of the world — associated with globalization has often involved individuals and communities taking advantage of technologies. These technologies permit new constructions of social space less bound by physical location and new understandings of time. These technologies are remarkably diverse: written alphabets, the printing press, the steamship, railways, airplanes, cargo ships, the telegraph, radio, television, and more recently the Internet and digital media. Studying globalization and autonomy requires a good understanding of the role of technology in reshaping conceptions of space and time.
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Trade and finance
Trade refers to the exchange of goods, services, ideas, and people (slaves, sex workers) between persons or organizations. Finance involves the payment of debts, investment, borrowing money at interest, and managing money. Although both of these economic acts are often linked, finance can also involve speculation about the value of money alone. Both of these activities tend to create interdependence and to draw the world together. Both are often dominated by powerful corporations or states. And finally both have been at the center of globalization for many centuries, particularly at the end of the 19th century and in the past thirty years.
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World History
World history involves the study of historical phenomena on a world or global scale. As such, it focuses on the following kinds of phenomena: the diffusion of technologies like the printing press and the telegraph; the spread of Western property rights; the growth of large religious communities; the transmission of plants, animals, bacteria, and germs across continents; and empires and imperialism. This kind of study leads naturally to global history, the study of the history of globalization itself. Understanding well globalization and autonomy requires familiarity with world and global history.
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