Globalizing the research imagination : transdisciplinarity in global studies

In a book presenting a series of interviews with some of the world’s leading global studies scholars, Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey conclude that globalization has deeply challenged many prevailing ideas and practices in the social sciences and humanities. The resulting imperative to globalize the research imagination has put pressure on conventional academic landscapes and architectures shaped by Western disciplinary logics developed in the previous two centuries. As Kenway and Fahey (2009: 4) put it, mobilizing this global imagination “becomes a form of ‘disciplinary urging’ encouraging those in the field to move beyond its impasses and absences, even beyond inherited ways of thinking.” But such an intellectual enterprise of globalizing our inherited ways of thinking stands in stark contrast to established forms of academic tribalism that discourage relationships and exchanges between different disciplines.