Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815629826 ISBN 13: 9780815629825

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 2003

Synopsis

These works entertain the question of how scholars may reconfigure area-based knowledge to respond to social sciences and globalization. The essays in this collection address the current crisis in area studies, a crisis that differs from its perennial struggle with the established academic disciplines. This crisis stems from the confluence of three related circumstances: the end of the Cold War; greater economic and cultural fluidity across political borders; and contradictory intellectual trends in the academy, which include on the one hand a renaissance of universalizing thinking in the social sciences and on the other hand, the rise of post-colonial studies and debates about modernity, postmodernity, and cultural hybridization. Although the essays differ markedly in their focus and strategies, the authors all demonstrate that local knowledge, including serious study of individual cultures and proficiency in foreign languages, which are vital to understanding rapidly changing global patterns and to countering universal claims by the social sciences. While the authors also agree that area studies must reject their enthnocentric heritages and adopt inventive new contours, they pr

About this title

About the Author

Ali Mirsepassi is Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology at the Gallatin School, New York University. His publications include Democracy in Modern Iran (2010) and Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (2000).

Amrita Basu is the author of Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women's Activism in India. She is the editor or co-editor of six books, including Women's Movements in a Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms and Beyond Exceptionalism: Violence, Religion and Democracy in India. She has received research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association and Vice President of the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is on the editorial boards of the International Political Science Review, American Political Science Review, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and Critical Asian Studies. She was previously the South Asia editor for The Journal of Asian Studies.

Frederick Stirton Weaver, Narragansett, Rhode Island, is professor emeritus of economics and history at Hampshire College. He is the author of "Economic Literacy: Basic Economics with an Attitude" and "Latin America in the World Economy: From Mercantile Colonialism to Global Capitalism".

Review

University professors of anthropology, international relations, political science, history, economics, and Middle Eastern, African, and gender studies present 12 contributions examining the area studies debate by placing conventional academic disciplines in their historical and cultural contexts and by elucidating the problems of traditional area studies. (Book News)

Edition details

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0815629826
• ISBN 13: 9780815629825
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Mirsepassi Ali, Basu Amrita, Weaver Frederick