Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper explores our considerations in working towards an ongoing humanities fieldwork collective. At a time when many versions of globalization theory focus on the shrinking world, hybridity, and digital resources, our project in contrast focuses on the need for extended place-based work as an integral part of understanding the dynamics of globalization, particularly in the global south. While place-based work is the norm in disciplines like Anthropology, in the humanities it remains quite marginal. Drawing on examples from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, we provide a forum to practice, theorize, and develop place-based research from several different disciplines of the humanities. The paper instantiates the dilemmas of such work, its value (including its role in redressing imbalances of the global production of power/knowledge), its relationship to and differences from anthropological fieldwork, and the ways in which it can transform and expand the work of the humanities – and perhaps also the social sciences.