7 - Examining the Promise of Global Studies

Summary

Global studies emerged as a transdisciplinary field exploring the many dimensions of globalization. This chapter assesses how well the field of global studies has fared in its development. Criticisms of the field can be organized under four major headings. First, global studies is accused of failing to generate a scholarly consensus on what constitutes its central features and essential components. As a result, the field is said to have remained a diffuse project-in-the-making, still relying heavily on murky generalizations and cobbled-together methodologies. Second, there has been significant disagreement among global scholars on the relationship between globalization studies and global studies. Third, a number of detractors claim to have identified a profound theory–practice gap involving the programmatic content of global studies. Fourth, postcolonial thinkers have offered incisive critiques of what they see as the field’s troubling geographic, ethnic, and epistemic attachments to understandings anchored in the dominance of the Global North. Responding to each of these critiques, this chapter examines the promise of global studies and the current state of the field.