Transdisciplinarity in globalization research : the global studies framework

Contemporary globalization research increasingly occurs within the loose academic framework of “global studies,” which, in the late 1990s, emerged as a transdisciplinary endeavor exploring the many dimensions of globalization. After an initial comparative discussion of the academic use of the concept “transdisciplinarity,” this chapter argues that attempts to understand the social complexities related to today’s globalization processes raise a plethora of empirical, normative, and epistemic concerns that cannot be sorted out by specialists operating within the narrow and often rather arbitrary confines of single disciplines and their associated idioms. To illustrate these dynamics, this chapter presents concrete examples of how globalization researchers working within the global studies framework employ transdisciplinarity strategies to understand global complexity. As will be shown, they are critical of the tendency to compartmentalize social existence into discreet spheres of activity, and thus have been increasingly committed to the engagement and integration of multiple knowledge systems and research methodologies. The chapter closes with a call to extend these transdisciplinary modes of engaging in globalization research. Indeed, this transdisciplinary imperative of “globalizing the research imagination” has the potential to reenergize and reconfigure research projects across the social sciences and humanities.