Global Studies Vocab Check 1

Global Studies

A multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary field of inquiry dedicated to the exploration of the many dimensions of globalization and other transnational phenomena. Examines our interconnected world, focusing on the broad social, economic, cultural, and environmental processes of globalization.

Globalization

No country can exist entirely isolated today. Countries, economies, societies, and cultures become more connected and dependent on one another through cross-border trade, technology, investments, and communication

Four pillars of Global Studies

Globalization, Transdisciplinarity, Space and Time, Critical Thinking

Space and Time

Globalization changes not only what we do, but how distance and duration feel.

• Space: social media lets us enter other worlds

• Time: social media sustains restorative nostalgia

Grassroots globalization

Grassroots Globalization: human-rights networks, democratic movements, transnational activism, solidarity across borders, circulation of alternative narratives.

A form of cultural and political activity that comes from ordinary people rather than large corporations or world governments.

Multidisciplinarity

Several disciplines, side by side, pointed at the same subject - without directly collaborating with one another, instead showing how each discipline interprets an issue and letting the audience decide how to weigh this analysis.

Interdisciplinary

 Borrows methods, concepts, or theoretical frameworks across academic disciplines to build something new. Still aimed primarily for academic knowledge production, but no longer reducible to any one office. For instance, political psychology.

Transdisciplinary

Trans doesn’t just mean across but “through and beyond” steps outside the academy altogether and treats non-academic knowledge as indispensable evidence, not anecdote. Lots of observational studies, different sources, things past previous writings or archives. 

Ideocide

Dels with ideologies and generalizations to entire populations due to their ideologies.

A political logic where an entire people, ideology, society, or way of life is imagined as dangerous and placed outside of a legitimate moral community - entire groups victims of this.

Civicide

Deals with civilizations and the structures that make civilizations.

The political consequence of ideocide -> violence directed towards this population because they supposedly embody a threatening civilization or way of life. 

• We oppose what they do -> we oppose what they are

• Globalized societies can cause a desire to dismantle an entire ideological population.

Imagined community

Imagined communities: church groups, schools, nations. Modern nations contain millions of strangers. Narrative lets them experience themselves as part of the same “we.”

Definition of nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

Primordialism

Idea that nations are natural. It’s an ancient part of human nature, people share blood, language, land, destiny. The state simply gives political form to something that’s already there.

Constructivism

Constructivist - nations are made, not found. Constructed through institutions, education, media, and above all through stories.

National narrative

A specific historical story a country tells about its own origins, identity, and destiny. Can include a variety of major and minor narratives, can include master and minor narratives. An example of this is what the republican party may have for narratives versus the democratic party.

Master narrative

A shared story of origin, values, defining events, and threats. It tells members what the nation “really” is.

Schematic narrative template

How one story is taught or narrated depending on who tells it and how it fits into cultural DNA. Templates tell people what ending to expect.

Colonialism

Colonialism is understood as a system of domination, extraction, racial hierarchy, cultural control, and political dependency.

Imperialism

A state policy or practice of extending a nation's power and dominion over other regions, typically through direct territorial acquisition or indirect political and economic control. Used in the search of markets, investment, and profit.

Anti-imperialism

Advocates for national self-determination, autonomy, and resistance against foreign domination

Decolonization

Not just about becoming an independent state, it's also about the aftermath of anti-imperialism. Reshaping language, knowledge, universities, sexuality, and existing as a human. The deeper, transformative process of dismantling colonial structures and recovering self-determination. Pluralize histories, depoliticize human rights, depoliticize global capitalism.

Epistemic decolonization

The process of unmasking and dismantling Western hegemony over how we define knowledge, truth, and validity.

Historical rupture

The continuity between past and present breaks - the previous world appears lost and time is divided between before and after.

Sublime historical experience

The “sublime” is not simply beautiful. It is overwhelming. An event feels overwhelming and unable to be fully grasped, like standing on the shore of a giant sea and realizing how insignificant you are.

Political semiosis

the active process of creating, shaping, and communicating meaning through signs, symbols, and language within political power structures

Performative

Acts that change the social world in and through their utterance.

Demonstrative

The realization or understanding of proximity to an event

Representational

Copies of the event are generated and sent outward into the wider world of audiences and witnesses at a distance.

Appropriation of an event

Events don’t become part of your life because they happen, but instead when you appropriate them and make choices in reaction to these events. The status quo of your life must change directly because of the event.

Absolute event

An event that demands to be comprehended, but makes comprehension impossible because it cannot be put into existing categories.

Contextualization

Tries to explain the causes of something and make it seem inevitable, even if it purposely puts the event in the wrong category in an attempt to explain it. The event is inserted into a casual background.

Interpretive frame

How events are framed based on what the individual knows and what those around them say, often done through a process of normalization. Compare, detail, contextualize, and sacralize.

Simmel’s Three Horizons

How do such extraordinary events connect to the events we experience every day?

Everyday events, biography (within control and life-changing), and historical events (not usually within control and can be appropriated into one’s biography).