Research
Isaac
Kamola
Dissertation:
Title: Producing the Global Imaginary: Academic Knowledge, Globalization and the Making of the World
Defense Date: December 18, 2009
Abstract:
My dissertation starts by identifying how the concept of globalization has—in a relatively brief period of time—transformed the way scholars, activists, policymakers and citizens think about the world. On the one hand, there is widespread agreement that a complex process called globalization exists, and academics should analyze it. On the other hand, there is substantial disagreement about just what globalization. I argue, by contrast, that the supposedly universal concept of “the global” is a product of asymmetrical relations of academic knowledge production. To develop this argument I diagnose a set of contradictions and tensions concerning how academic literature on globalization typically represent Africa. Asymmetries in knowledge production mean that globalization has become an assumed universal fact to which Africa, and African universities, are presented as occupying a subordinate place. For example, scholars based in the US and Europe typically claim that globalization is an empirical and universal trend—even while treating Africa and African states as anomalous to this trend. I argue that scholars represent Africa as “not globalized” because the US and European academy has become the primary site of the mass-production of knowledge about globalization—as exemplified by changes in research funding, the flourishing of Global Studies departments, and the proliferation of study abroad programs. In contrast, African universities—including the relatively resource-rich South African universities—have been remade into development institutions that primarily produce knowledge about how to respond to conditions already imagined as “global.” I argue that these asymmetrical relations of knowledge production reproduce colonial tropes of civilized/non-civilized in which the lived material practices of African societies come to stand for that which is particular, exceptional and “local.” Rethinking “the global” through an analysis of the asymmetrical relations of knowledge production within a political economy of higher education makes it possible to investigate the power at work and the political stakes in the academic production of concepts like “global governance,” “global economy,” and “global development.”
Committee:
Bud Duvall
(Advisor), Professor & Department Chair, Department of Political Science, University
of Minnesota
Michael Barnett, Professor
& Stassen Chair of International Affairs, Humphrey School, University of
Minnesota
Lisa Disch,
Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Premesh
Lalu, Associate Professor of History & Director of the Programme on
the Study of the Humanities in Africa, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Antonio Vasquez-Arroyo, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota
Complete dissertation draft.
Publications:
“Reading ‘the Global’ in the Absence of Africa” in Claiming International Relations: Worlding Beyond the West, Arlene Tickner, David L. Blaney & Ole Waever (eds), Routledge, forthcoming, expected: 2010.
“Creating Commons: Divided Governance, Participatory Management, and Struggles Against the Enclosure of the University” (with Eli Meyerhoff) in Polygraph, 21 (2009), 15-37. (peer reviewed)
"Coffee and Genocide: A Political Economy of Violence in Rwanda" in Transition: An International Review, 99 (2008), 54-70. (invited)
“The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda”
in Third World Quarterly,
April 2007 28(3), pp571-592. (peer reviewed)
Review of: Atilio A. Boron, Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri (Zed Books, 2005). In Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, September 2007 35(3), 767- 769.
Review of: Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Clausewitz and African War: Politics and Strategy
in Liberia and Somalia (Frank Cass, 2005). In Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, August 2006 34(3), 987-989.
Current Projects:
“Somali Piracy and the Crisis of Peacebuilding” (invited to present at Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding Workshop: University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, October 29-31, 2009)
“Critical Tensions: Situating ‘Critical IR Theory’ Within a Political Economy of Higher Education,” with Raymond Duvall (paper for the 2010 International Studies Association conference, New Orleans)
Research
Interests:
Globalization; IR theory; international political economy; African politics; political economy of conflict in Africa; political economy of higher education; African postcolonial theory.
Research Statement (PDF)