Volume 19, Issue 3

Mexico City hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 1968. Scholarship has focused on intended economic outcomes that the Mexican government pursued; nevertheless, few scholars have looked at how organizers depicted the nation in terms of race during this period of global attention. This article uses archival documents, official publications, the press, and static and moving images to analyze how Mexican organizers planned the Olympic Games and used racialized representations while trying to position Mexico as a modern global leader. Organizers followed Olympic protocols and the expectations of being an Olympic host; they signposted proximity to Europe and the North Atlantic, and used miscegenation ( mestizaje ) as part of their strategies. The messages reached millions of people around the world, coinciding chronologically with anti-imperial and anti-racist struggles. The article suggests that IOC protocols such as the torch relay, and the opening and closing ceremonies have shaped representations of host cities and nations, particularly those not often associated with European countries.

Understanding microorganisms and the havoc they cause requires exceptional creativity. Today, disease outbreaks and infections are largely understood through media narratives and their accompanying imagery. This article focuses on the World Health Organization (WHO) and its complex infrastructure via decentralization as depicted in two Hollywood films, Contagion (2011) and World War Z (2013). Reframing these contemporary blockbuster films as pandemic films, one can detect different representational propositions about the WHO and how it contrasts systems of global health vs. local health. The WHO’s cultural significance appears in one situation as defective and score-settling but in another as multilateral, there to serve humanity.

This essay answers the research question: What are the main topic tendencies in Global Studies journals within 30 years of publication from 1989 to 2019? As Global Studies is an interdisciplinary field, the methodology being applied addresses the problem of analyzing fields of knowledge whose content shares research interests, objects of study and methods with others. I map the field, being aware of the crossroads between fields as an opportunity to show how, from the diversity of topics, fields nourish themselves from this intellectual richness and, at the same time, delineate their “own” space within the complex system of sciences. For this purpose, I use bibliometric tools for visualizing data such as VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The conclusions show (1) how an important percentage of content from Area Studies (Co-field of Global Studies) become “global” over time; (2) how disciplines merge through relationships among topics in global research; and (3) how topics about crisis, war, and health issues had already high occurrence degrees in the Global Studies field before the crisis of pandemics and war after 2019.

In the twenty-first century, the democracy bequeathed by the past confronts major, diverse challenges. In thinking about how it might be reimagined, it is important to look beyond conceptions of democracy that are associated with a distinctive Western tradition, indicated at an early point by Athens two and a half millennia ago. Recent scholarship has questioned some clear connection of that specific ancient experience with the democracy that has developed since the late eighteenth century, challenging in several ways what might be called “epistemic exclusion.” One challenge concerns a long debate about Athenian uniqueness. A second concerns how the founding generation of modern democracy thought about, or did not think about, Athenian practices. A third concerns whether a broader geography of influence has infused the entire modern history of democracy in which much innovation has happened in peripheral places in hierarchies of wealth and power. These reflections have implications for where to look for good ideas to construct a better democratic future.