Volume 14, Issue 3 - Editors’ Forum: Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global; Guest-editors: Hilary E. Kahn, Zsuzsa Gille, and Jonathan L. Larson

While Global Studies has been pursued for research and teaching purposes for a few decades, there is little agreement on what substantiates the field. The Framing the Global project tackles this question by arguing for a renewed engagement with the empirical. It asks global scholars to step back from the analytic, to return to a space where pre-conceived methods, theories, and disciplines do not guide our findings. In this way, scholars must engage in a pre-analytic un-framing before they can define the particularities of their global. Each author in this forum enters into the global through an entry point, a point of specific empirical significance – whether a diaspora, a classroom, a biennale circuit, the AIDS regime, or plastic buckets and masks – that guides the way they trace what is global. In addition to exploring the need for un-framing Global Studies, Kahn and Gille also explain how un-framing and re-framing might help us understand global pedagogies and pandemics, by demonstrating how critical an engagement with the empirical is for contemporary global challenges that require us to excavate our understandings and shatter concepts that predominate rather than engage.

Since the term globalization erupted in public and academic discourses in the late-1980s, the hyperglobal perspective has been a prominent framing offered to understand global phenomena. Despite important challenges, it has remained extremely popular with its rhetoric exerting a powerful influence across the political spectrum, and in business and policy circles. This article argues that one reason for this durability is its inadvertent reproduction by the traditional understandings of “local” and “global” utilized in frameworks critiquing the hyperglobal perspective. More specifically, as scholars have noted, the global-local tends to be marked by dichotomous binaries and placed in a scalar hierarchy where the global overpowers the local. To side-step the issues emerging from the global-local approach, a conceptual rubric focusing on the “global-particular” relationship is offered as an alternative. This orientation helps prevent the importation of the dichotomous binaries and scalar hierarchies that reproduce hyperglobal imaginaries. As a result, it is easier to retain the complexity and contingency of global dynamics, and by extension, challenge hyperglobal framings. A case study of the global foreign exchange market is used to elaborate on the framework and to show why it provides a stronger point of departure for researching and theorizing globalization.

Framing the global in U.S. undergraduate education has significantly entailed “field” experiences. How have such activities prepared students to understand the interaction of daily life with larger institutions, structures, and processes? How to incorporate attention to the contradictions and untenable translations of a locale and its global entanglements into pedagogical responses to a pandemic that has significantly halted physical mobility and personal contact? This article takes up questions of how a certain conceptualization of ethnography could inform efforts to design new pedagogies for global studies. Building off a recent discussion in anthropology, I argue that the concept of ethnographic “sensibility” provides a productive entry point to discovering and articulating insights into the forms and dynamics of a population and place as shaped by interactions with other populations and places in time and space. I draw from my own experiences with the pre-pandemic piloting of an online course in media ethnography. I highlight examples of student work that point in one direction for how to engage students of global studies in profound field experiences, perhaps even when accessed digitally. This article employs the articulation of entry points for global research for the crafting of entry points for pedagogy.

This essay elaborates “Oriental sensitivity” as a methodology for studying Chinese cultural flows in locations outside of that nation-state as an index of globalization. The article specifically draws on research that investigates the practice of tai chi on Martinique in dialogue with a larger discourse of Chinese currents in the Atlantic. Oriental sensitivity expands but also specifies Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism in relation to several of his commentators and in relation to the case study by emphasizing the ways in which individual bodies might knowingly and unknowingly structure an Orientalist encounter. The methodology facilitates an analysis of the convergence of ecology, kinship, migrant labor and phenomenology in thinking about how transnational Chinese movements might matter.

As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the “stuff” of potential global prosperity, plastics are substances that people inscribe with varied cultural meanings. Deploying four conceptual “entry points” for global research, we explore how global plastics have become not only a site of an emergent socioecological crisis but themselves a point of leverage for a more humanized globalization. We approach the problem first as an exercise in reframing, shifting our viewpoint away from debates on waste to re-examine ideas of culture and symbolism. Then, working through the entry points of the particular, materiality and affect, we ground our argument in examples from the contemporary pandemic response, earlier ethnographic work, and our own ethnographic projects. We show how plastics have failed people’s desires for a durable modernity, but nonetheless come to shape the ways they feel and think about themselves and each other as sharing responsibility for a global world.

This article employs artifacts from the KMB’s “material culture” as a lens into this institution’s branding process and, within it, its interaction with the Venice Biennale. It analyzes larger questions about the career of the biennale cultural form as it re-territorializes in a new location that is added to the art world map “in progress.” Historically, geographical location has been crucial for many biennales in the Global South to articulate their origin, identity, and claims vis-à-vis the global art world. Moreover, biennale proliferation especially in the South has produced cartographic re-imaginings aiming to destabilize the “center-periphery” configuration of the art world map. The article shows that the KMB does not reiterate ideological standings put forward by Southern biennales but crafts its positionality on different grounds. These entail simultaneously anchoring the KMB to histories of circulation in and out of South India tracing back at least two millennia and strategically weaving a relation with the archetypical Venice Biennale in the present.

Drawing on the framework of transnational materiality (Gille 2014), a conceptual contribution from the Framing the Global project, this article examines how HIV testing and counselling services became a site of political contestation in Taiwan since expanding service delivery was proposed as a response to the HIV epidemic by global health institutions in the 2000s. This global scheme, the study argues, not only reshaped the organization and practices of HIV service delivery, but also generated vulnerability as these practices connected to HIV-positive people’s lives were largely governed by global models and national programs that may not fully reflect local concerns. In response, local NGO workers politicize service delivery in part by transnationally adopting and promoting practices that attend more carefully to localized forms of vulnerability. Using qualitative data collected in Taiwan, the analysis reveals a grounded politics of HIV service delivery that highlights the materialization of vulnerability and its management.