Contemporary Reflections
The Place of Doomsday: Geographical Engagement with the World During the Apocalypse
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ron Davidson
Both secular and religious warnings of a potential doomsday ring in the climatically-altered, post-millennial air of the United States. In the discipline of geography, the idea of doomsday has been examined mainly within critical geopolitics, where the spatio-political implications of evangelical millennialism have raised concern. In this paper, I approach doomsday from the humanistic framework of place. My theme is that both religious and secular thinking about doomsday offers a powerful vehicle for the geographical imagination to create, contemplate and explore both real and fictional places. At a time when geographers bemoan the numbing psychological effects of placeless, globalized landscapes, the prospect of doomsday heightens concern for and interest in places on a global scale. Doomsday scenarios heighten sensitivity to “real” places – i.e. to emotive, morally charged, and experiential qualities of places, from rafts of arctic ice to contemporary Israeli urbanscapes. Doomsday scenarios also stimulate efforts to invent fictive places. The landscapes of post-apocalyptic stories are cousin to the wildernesses once imagined to occupy the “terrae incognitae” of ancient maps. They are bizarre and dangerous places that nonetheless stoke exploratory curiosity in audiences.
Orphans at the End of History?: Fukuyama's and Neoliberal Globalization's Omission of Liberal Norms of Deliberation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Katz
Thirty years on, Fukuyama's claim regarding the end of history almost seems quaint. What has been lost during the intervening years between his writing and contemporary challenges to liberal democracy is Fukuyama's argument against materialism. In characterizing the political developments of the late 1980s, Fukuyama focused on the role of ideas, emphasizing "consciousness and culture." To what degree has the process of neoliberal globalization during these thirty years been prescriptive and materialist in both orientation and effect, disregarding the need to attend to consciousness and culture? What Fukuyama ignored and proponents of neoliberal globalization dismissed were key principles of liberal democracy, central norms which I consider “orphans at the end of history.” Fukuyama characterized an ongoing elite debate over how best to organize society. Missing from his treatment and absent in neoliberal models of globalization is cognizance of the bottom-up construction of societal identity through deliberation and practice. I propose a paper for the 2019 Global Studies Conference that explores the sources of discontent with neoliberal globalization, focusing on the erosion of key liberal democratic norms within the neoliberal globalization enterprise. I locate dissatisfaction with neoliberal globalization in the penetration of materialist incentives into the construction of identity, the process of higher education, and in the role of societal elites. I address the degree to which the promotion of liberal deliberative norms in the debate over ideas and culture, was replaced by a materialist ethos that alienates and divides, to such an extent that despite Fukuyama’s optimism, history has returned.
Rethinking of Globalization: Hybridity and Cross-fertilization in World Music
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Li Wei
One of the central arguments in anthropological theory of globalization is that the discourse of cultural imperialism assumes the increased global traffic in culture principally as a process of cultural imposition and dominance of western culture over the rest of the world (Inda & Rasaldo 2002). While western culture and values are increasingly embraced around the world, in the last several decades, we have witnessed the emerging market economies along with growing cultural influence of the periphery to the core as well as within the periphery itself. In this paper, I will examine the dynamics of the local and global in world music, a genre that mediates nonwestern musical elements in otherwise predominantly western pop music. In particular, I will look into two examples of cultural phenomena: A China based ethnic folk rock band, Hanggai, and K-Pop. Hanggai is a Beijing-based Inner Mongolian folk music group that blends Mongolian folk tradition with ethnic Han and modern western styles such as punk rock. K-Pop is a popular music genre originated from South Korea and developed as a transnational pop sensation. I argue in the mass-mediated global popular culture, world music has become a new testing ground that challenges the old notion of one-way flow of culture in globalization. World music practice, such as carried by Hanggai and K-Pop, seems to provide a new paradigm in that musical hybridity is much celebrated as a positive outcome of cross-fertilization as well as a means to negotiate cultural identity and challenge the global order.
Big Data Analytics and Social Science : The Beginning of the End?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Moir
Social scientific research on Big Data situates people’s data generation and usage practices within the new science of search but is bounded by conventional conceptual and theoretical canons. However, it has been argued that this if search is the new science then Big Data is the beginning of the end of history, narrative and theory. In an ever increasing data-rich environment, the retrieval of what people are doing in their social media communications with one another will likely yield a multitude of search parameters. Perhaps no one story will be there to be told, or even could be told, but instead a limitless number of computations that combine data sources. Although this would at first sight appear to usher in the much debated abandonment of grand narratives in favour of little stories it is worth remembering that, at least at present, Big Data analytics works through aggregation and the subjugation of people’s practices to second-order theorising. However, there is another approach waiting in the wings that draws upon Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as a way of considering social media usage as embedded within the language games and practices of everyday life. This paper considers this alternative approach and draws upon recent ontological and epistemological work on social media analytics to offer a counterpoint to second-order social scientific concerns. In particular, it is argued that instead of applying social scientific insights, it is best to begin where there concerns seem to end; within the practices of the people themselves.
