Transnational Scholarship

Description

Peggy Levitt:

"In 2007, Sanjeev Khagram and I outlined a transnational optic for capturing social life across borders. A transnational lens begins with a world that is boundarless and borderless and then asks what kinds of borders arise in particular socio-historical contexts, why, and explores how these interact with unbounded spaces. It does not take the relevant space of inquiry as given but asks instead what the geography where the subject of interest is embedded actually is. It tries not to privilege the global or the local, or the sending and receiving, but to hold these sites and layers of social experience, and all else in between, in conversation with each other. In other words, it sees the global, the national, the regional, and the local as potentially transnationally constituted. It stresses how each of these layers of social experiences are constructed through continuous, interative interactions.

A transnational optic helps identify the different actors, ideas, and objects circulating within social fields or what I call cultural carriers. It calls our attention to the real and imagined, past and present geographies through which cultural products travel and the pathways and networks that constitute them. It brings into sharper focus how other ideologies and interests circulating within these fields intersect with and shape their trajectories. Finally, it produces a clearer picture of how and why assemblages are created—the impact and outcomes of these encounters. When cultural elements (be they ideas, objects, rituals, or organizing strategies) comes to ground, how and why do they cluster as they do? How do the cultural elements circulating at other levels of the social field influence the shape, strength, and durability of this convergence?

Mapping and categorizing transnational phenomena and dynamics requires new kinds of observations and new kinds of methods for collecting them. Most existing data sets, historiographies, and ethnographies make transnational analyses difficult if not impossible because they are based on national-state units and are designed to make comparisons between countries. They do not capture flows, linkages, or identities that cross or supersede other spatial units or the phenomena and dynamics within them.

Transnational scholarship requires that data be collected on multiple units, scales and scopes of analysis. In the ideal world, that would mean actually following a particular cultural product and seeing how it lands against different meta-cultural backdrops. But when this is not possible, transnational dynamics can also be investigated by asking respondents to map the cross-border aspects of their identities, beliefs, and activities and the people they are connected to." (http://governancexborders.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/transnational-studies-and-governance-4-transnational-studies-and-culture-in-motion/)

More Information

• Article: “Constructing Transnational Studies” by Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt.

URL = http://www.peggylevitt.org/pdfs/Levitt.Khagram-cnstrcttransstdies.pdf