Global-Political Scholarship
The Collaborative for Global-Political Scholarship (GPS) is a group that is open to graduate students and faculty at the University of Minnesota who are interested in global-political scholarship and intent on creating an interdisciplinary body of scholars for regular engagement in organized dialogue. GPS will create the opportunity for scholars to tackle important questions about global politics and global scholarship, such as: What is this object called “the global”? How is it to be studied and understood, especially within the context of academic scholarship? What are the theoretical tools and concepts needed to study global politics? What is the relationship of the scholar to the global, and what are the costs and consequences of academically reproducing the global? What are the sites of contestation and political engagement in a globalizing world?
In particular, this collaborative focuses on the problematic of time in a moment when our very understandings of time and temporality are being challenged. Indeed, with the presumed waning of modernist notions of history and complex shifts in production the concept of time is becoming both more complex and more pressing. In addition to, and expanding on, the questions above, this collaborative will pursue the following routes of inquiry: How are changing notions of time practiced in the workplace, in the global economy, and in communications? In turn, how are these practices represented in film, art, literature, critical thought, and other texts?
GPS will enrich the culture of scholarship on questions of global politics in three focused ways. First, we plan to invite leading national and international scholars from a range of disciplines to visit the Twin Cities and meet with collaborative members for a series of multi-day seminars. In addition to these seminars, there will be a lecture open to the public. Second, the working group will facilitate opportunities for focused reading groups. These groups will meet regularly to discuss texts by prominent scholars of global politics as well as read and discuss the ongoing scholarship of GPS members. Third, the collaborative will create possibilities for colloquia and conferences held across disciplinary lines. The collaborative is planning on holding an academic conference in spring 2008 in which a select number of faculty and graduate students from around the world will meet with the intent of compiling an edited volume around questions of global scholarship. We also hope to harness the many language skills of the GPS membership to seek out and translate work on global politics that has not yet made its way into an Anglophone academic setting.
GPS is organized by John Barner (Social Work), Matthew Hadley (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature), Isaac Kamola (Political Science), Garnet Kindervater (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature), and Matthew Stoddard (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature). Contact: globalworkinggroup@gmail.com.