COMM590 McCarthy MW 2-3:50 Globalization Communications and Culture

The events of 9/11 and their repercussions have provoked a particular urgency within the field of communication studies to better understand how modern human actors are connected across the particularities of ethnicity, nation, region, culture, language, and identity. Indeed, in the broad theater of the human sciences, across disciplines and fields of affiliation, there is now a collective intellectual desire, perhaps not always fully articulated, to explore the matter of global interconnections---inequalities, uneven development, movement and migration of people, ideologies, images and economic and cultural capital--- in a far more rigorous way than we have considered these issues in the past. Recent scholarship has tended to subsume these issues under the general concept of “Globalization” (Castells, 2001; Hoogvelt, 2001). In this sense, globalization refers to elaborated processes that have affected the relations among human groups across local, regional, and national borders from the very earliest beginnings of modernity. However, these large-scale processes have in the last few decades achieved a level of unparalleled acceleration and diffusion, owing in no small measure to the amplification and multiplication of the networking and interactional practices made possible by computerization and electronic mediation generally. In a very practical sense, globalization defines that configuration of everyday processes by which events, decisions, and activities conducted in one area of the world can now have immediate effect in an entirely different and distant part of our globe. Sometimes, these effects can be positive---as in the growing ecology awareness movement. At other times, the dynamics of globalization can be completely devastating—as in the immediate and prolonged recessionary ripple effects on national economies around the world as a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York City.

But the matter goes beyond spectacular events. Globalization is expressed in the everyday movement of goods, services, finance, people, information, images, communication, crime, pollutants, drugs, fashion, culture, ideologies, and beliefs across modern territories--- large and small (McGrew,1996, p. 470). Scholars and commentators have tended to take one of two approaches to these developments. On the one hand, there are those, like Christopher Jencks (1996) who regard globalization as the effect of a generalized liberating, postmodernist trend towards a diminution of the authority of centralizing powers and institutions such as the state. They associate this pattern toward decentralization with a corresponding augmentation of personal freedom, movement, migration and the cultural and the political heterogeneity of the expression of the broad masses of the people. On the other, there are those such as Masao Miyoshi (1998), Ankie Hoogvelt (2001), Andy Green(1997), and others who are more cautionary, who point instead to persistent patterns of global domination by the leading capitalist powers of the West. Theorists of this more pessimistic school of thought call attention to such matters as the accelerating homogenization and commodification of global culture (the world dressed in blue jeans) and the persistence, indeed the intensification, of the political and economic asymmetry of the North- South divide.

This Fall’s Emphasis

This fall, the emphasis in the “Pro-seminar in Globalization, Communications and Culture” will be on the relevance of Foucauldian analysis to the examination of modern forms of power and state rule. A central question that we will be asking is how do Foucauldian theories of power--particularly as related to the consideration of such topics as “discipline,” “surveillance,” “government,” and “biopower”– contribute to our understanding of contemporary forms of governance in the area of globalization? The course will continue to take the form of a public forum as part of a standing student/faculty reading/writing/research collaborative the principal objective of which is to make a pragmatic scholarly intervention into current debates on globalization with a strong disposition toward mentoring students’ prospective scholarly publication. Student participants registered for the course can choose either (a) to work on a manuscript for a journal or other publication or (b) to work on a term paper. The course should appeal to a wide range of students from a variety of disciplinary interests and backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, communications and educational policy, and the fine arts. Readings for each weekly session will be determined as we go along and as suggested by participants. But special attention will be paid to a set of core readings from the texts listed below. Each seminar session is regarded as a public forum. So, all and sundry are invited to participate.