Welcome & Opening Comments

Global studies emerged in the 1980s as scholars, policymakers, and the general public began to take note of the increasingly transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods that have come to be identified under the rubric of globalization. Interest in global phenomena has since spread to every discipline in the social sciences and humanities, to become an intellectual touchstone in the academy and beyond. Despite increasing popular and scholarly attention to global issues, no clear consensus has emerged regarding the most fundamental definitions of terms or appropriate empirical methods for studying the global.

This conference will explore emerging directions and methodologies for global research. The scholars in the Mellon Foundation-funded Framing the Global project have been addressing this question collaboratively and through their own work, which is characterized by interdisciplinarity, empirical grounding, and a concern with tracing the links between the transnational and the local in a variety of lived, political, discursive, cultural, and social domains. The conference will extend that conversation to include other scholars and practitioners with similar concerns.

Framing the Global is a five-year collaboration between the Center for the Study of Global Change at Indiana University and Indiana University Press funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.