The One-Sided World of "Global Studies"
is ultimately marred by the author's utopian politics. Like his Marxist forebears who saw no difference between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover (both were supporters of capitalism), Goldman seems unwilling to recognize any grey area in the field of development economics. Even worse than Goldman's utopianism is his tendency to deploy impenetrable academic jargon in support of it. He writes, for example, that the World Bank is"deeply embedded in multi-tentacled structures of power, culture, and capital." In another passage, Goldman seeks to"demonstrate not only how the world of sustainable development is constituted in situ ... but also the regimes of power, truths, and rights on which these new institutional practices are based.” Quotations of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist Michel Foucault abound.
Goldman’s work provides a glimpse of the growing field of “global studies,” about which I’ve written previously. Most high schools have a “global studies” component of their social studies curricula (in New York, students take the course in 9th and 10th grades), so it would seem to make sense for universities to expand their offerings in the subject. Moreover, how could anyone object to a providing students with a greater understanding of the international environment in which we live?
Yet, much like Goldman’s book, the institute with which he’s affiliated—and the global studies movement in general—seems to focus on providing a one-sided critique of contemporary globalization, not on providing students with an academic understanding of global affairs.
At the U of M, the Institute for Global Studies “informs, educates and organizes professional development opportunities for K-16 teachers on global and international topics . . . dedicated to the teaching of international studies and increasing global awareness in students.” I generally don’t think of college as grades 13 through 16, but such an approach is common among “cutting-edge” educational theorists.
The Institute’s programs include Teacher Summer Institutes, designed to train teachers (at solely the K-12 level) on how to incorporate “global themes” into their classes. This summer’s session includes an offering called “Islam in Global Context,” which is intended to study “how Muslims see themselves in the world they live in, and how the world views them.” Specific topics are “historical development of Islam, including the basic and fundamental doctrines of the faith,” and the relationship between Islam and “the other Abrahamic faiths: Judaism and Christianity.”
Sounds like a timely and useful offering. So what are the sole recommended texts for the course? Confronting Islamophobia in Educational Practice (which examines"how schools, teachers, and students are coping with the stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination that are building up against Islam and its followers") and The Miseducation of the West: How Schools and the Media Distort Our Understanding of the Islamic World (which reflects the Said approach that"a Western perspective on the 'other'" meant that"Westerners found easy justification for the colonial conquest of many Islamic lands," the" contemporary expression" of which comes in"the Bush administration's and its conservative allies' efforts to teach the nation about the true meaning of 9/11 and Islamic terrorism," which"represent a return to a 1954 view of America as the bearer of the democratic torch to the anti-democratic forces of the world.")
What else is the Institute offering? For K-12 teachers and community college (13 and 14?) professors, Teaching Genocide and Human Rights. Again, this topic sounds very much appropriate for a GS program or for high school teachers. But what does this course hope to accomplish? To relate instances of genocide, such as the Holocaust, “to contemporary problems in American society, and most important, how study of this material can affect attitudes toward representing history.” Again, it’s not hard to see the direction from which this offering proceeds.
Who’s on the GS faculty at the U of M? Four professors of sociology; three each of history and anthropology; two each of geography and women’s studies; and one of human rights.
First of all, it seems strange that there are no political scientists in a topic that substantially overlaps with poli sci. Second, it quickly becomes clear that all of the professors occupy one end of the pedagogical spectrum.
The geography professors focus on “Labor geographies; theories of agrarian and ecological change; spatiality of class and identity politics; subalternity; political economies of"development" &"globalization"; Marxism and post-Marxism; social theory;” and (2) “feminist science studies, postcolonial theories, and bioethics.” In addition to Goldman, the Sociology contingent includes experts in: (1) “social resistance to agricultural biotechnology”; (2) cross-national environmental movements; (3) “Gender Differences in Motivations for Seeking Citizenship.” The History contingent includes no experts in US or European foreign relations—seemingly a prerequisite for any “global studies” program--but it does feature specialists in Indian environmental history and a professor whose work tries"to understand how people are governed not only official institutions, but through the diverse range of modern powers that work on subjectivities and that have identified the self as a governable object," thereby producing scholarship that"borders on anthropology, social history, and cultural history."
All of these topics are worthy of impartial academic study. Yet the U of M’s mission statement claims that the global studies program will “interrogate sets of interrelated processes forming today's increasingly interdependent world. This means examining political, economic, cultural, and social structures which impact many different actors, from local communities to nation-states to transnational and global businesses and social movements. It also entails examining how these entities have unfolded historically and geographically and how they continue to shape societies, politics and individual livelihoods in the twenty-first century.” Instead, the program has produced a contingent of faculty and initiatives that, much like Goldman’s book, are only interested in exploring “globalization” through a one-sided lens tilted to an extreme pole of the current ideological spectrum.
If colleges (or the academy as a whole) wish to establish academic programs designed to provide a far-left critique of “globalization" or to train anti-globalization activits, they are, of course, free to do so. But they should term such programs"anti-globalization studies" or"social reform," rather than claiming that the initiatives provide an understanding of “today's increasingly interdependent world,” or can serve to guide the “global studies” curricula offered at the high school level.
That the “global studies” movement has chosen a moniker already in common use (in a very different form) at the high school level, but then used its title to generate a far different agenda than that associated with HS “global studies” courses suggests a level of duplicity that has no place in higher education.