Finding Balance (Asynchronous Session)
No Brighter Future: Right Realized, Rights Safeguarded View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tim Weldon
The global pandemic highlights the layered reality of global interdependency, the need for worldwide collaboration and the challenge of an international commitment to a unifying cause: eradication of the present threat to life and our way of living. Amidst government efforts to meet the challenge, and using ever more sophisticated technology, from reporting and testing, tracing and treating, the pandemic also underscored the reality of the need for greater safety of the human person, and the security of the safer person realized in the safeguarding—and even expanding—of human rights, especially those befitting a global biopolitical future. This paper examines why the active, collaborative protection of human rights, specifically the freedom of speech, mobility and travel, work and worship, along with education and healthcare access, the ethics of privacy (physical and data) and the protection of the vulnerable are of paramount importance for the flourishing global society. Subsequently, the focus turns, in outline, to how we may begin to accomplish this.
International Police Economy: The New Leviathan and the Politics of Dissent View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Howard
Responding to Jacques Rancière’s reassignment of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘police,’ this paper ponders the implications for justice were we to reassess international political economy as international ‘police’ economy. I argue that contemporary capitalism is a totalitarian system that negates the meaning of justice and outside in relation to totality. There are four parts. First, I deal with the circumscription of politics through state sovereignty and the contours of policing. Using spatial metaphors to denote sovereign boundaries, I demonstrate the contingency of political authority. Second, I argue that markets have their own self-justificatory sovereignty and are today able to overdetermine political state sovereignty with their own policing. Markets, under the mimetic logic of the price mechanism, produce sovereignty legitimated through rationality. Third, I characterize international police economy as a totalitarian system, arguing that totalitarianism is a thin-centered ideology akin to a mobilization strategy and takes form only in conjunction with other ideologies. Finally, I assess issues relating to historical theory and practice, showing the latter always exceeds the former, and that if capitalism were based on universally acceptable values policing would be unnecessary. I therefore consider whether an ‘outside’ is visible or available to us: is international political economy possible, or are we condemned to international police economy? My argument is that historical reality as a ‘coming to be’ always exceeds ideas as ‘being,’ and any form of totalitarianism based on fixed ideas will be rendered obsolete unless it can recalibrate itself, as the mimetic market appears capable of doing.
The Biopolitics of Life-work Balance: Building a New Global Studies Department during a Global Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Long Bui
This study discusses the challenges of building of a brand new Global Studies department at the University of California and recruiting its first cohort of PhD students during the pandemic. While biopolitics is often seen broadly in terms of producing disciplinary subjects, we can apply that framework to ascent of the Global studies (anti)discipline, a academic-industrial complex dealing with dispersed students, and a planetary epidemiological crisis requiring state interventions. I argue we cannot think of the institutional growth of global studies outside the management of life and biopower in a post-Covid world. In fact, the pandemic gave evidence of what (the future of) global studies can and should look like, one that reconfigures the assumed relationship between students and schools, pedagogy and classrooms, life demands, and workplace pressures. The increasing push for life-work balance coincides with a need to decolonial, de-corporatize, and de-materialize the university in ways that make it more equitable, open, and transparent. This research documents one newly established department's remote learning at the same as it sought to globalize the curriculum to foster greater connections than previously imagined. Amid a time of lockdowns and quarantines, global studies is shown to create emergent network opportunities to build a new academic community and life outside the strictures of time and space. At stake is the success of a robust field of study that responds to future problems (and pandemics) with flexibility. The global subjectivization of new practitioners is related to new technologies and forms of global knowledge/power.
The Bazaar on the Border: The Story of the Largest Port of U.S. View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mehnaaz Momen
This paper examines the growth of Laredo, from a dusty little border town to the largest port of the nation. The story of Laredo as a marketplace can be told by means of three interlinked threads: its transition from a trade route to a solvent community, its shifts back and forth between corridor and destination, and its local affluence and self-sufficiency morphing into a global constellation. The way Laredo evolved from a minor node of transaction to a full-fledged city and then became a major thoroughfare after NAFTA is interconnected with trends of globalization. Laredo started as a small but prosperous community where local merchants were the arbiters of their economic plans rather than being part of global forces. The identity of the city is tied to these transitions—how the local powerhouses dissolved into the amorphous international network and how after establishing itself as a vibrant community, becoming one of the ten major cities in the state, Laredo again became relegated to a trade corridor, funneling billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise through its well-developed transportation grid. The analysis of Laredo’s evolution highlights the local/global conflicts that continues to shape the policies and politics of this town.
Global Governance Institutions: Structural Readjustment for Indigenous Peoples View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hari Har Jnawali
This paper examines whether the present global governance structure is suitable to accommodate indigenous peoples’ aspirations. For long, these institutions have focused on states, but not on indigenous peoples. Even when the focus has been given on indigenous peoples, the approach is State-focused. Its recent example is the passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), keeping states’ interests intact. It took a long time for this Declaration to get approved. The norm entrepreneurs spent most effort on finding an acceptable ground for states rather than indigenous peoples. When provisions on the Declaration did not seem to pose a threat to sovereignty norms, states agreed to pass the Declaration. States’ interest was served, and indigenous nationalities compromised. In particular, indigenous peoples got the right to self-determination, the central thrust of their demand, with qualification, when States got the same right as wished. In this background, this paper investigates- What prevents global governance institutions to take indigenous perspectives when it comes to dealing with the structural injustice and systemic violence? It argues that the basic structure of global governance institutions that considers states as constituencies prevents the UN from giving a proper response to indigenous issues. It thus becomes important to restructure institutions. Else, failure is likely to continue. This paper takes ‘document analysis’ as its methodological approach, and studies major UN documents, archival reports and published interviews to investigate its research question.
Thematic Dynamics of Internet of Things : Impact on Digital Personalized Healthcare
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bongs Lainjo
Information technology has continued to shape contemporary thematic trends. Advances in communication have impacted almost all themes ranging from education, engineering, healthcare, and many other aspects of our daily lives. This paper reviews the different dynamics of the thematic IoT platforms. A select number of themes are extensively analyzed with emphasis on data mining (DM), personalized healthcare (PHC), and thematic trends of a subjectively identified IoT-related publications over three years. In this paper, the number of IoT-related-publications is used as a proxy representing the number of apps. DM remains the trailblazer, serving as a theme with crosscutting qualities that drive artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data transformation. A case study in PHC illustrates the importance, complexity, productivity optimization, and nuances contributing to a successful IoT platform. Among the initial 99 IoT themes, 18 are extensively analyzed using the number of IoT publications to demonstrate a combination of different thematic dynamics, including subtleties that influence escalating IoT publication themes. Based on findings amongst the 99 themes, the annual median IoT-related publications for all the themes over the four years were increasingly 5510, 8930, 11700, and 14800 for 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 respectively; indicating an upbeat prognosis of IoT dynamics. And finally, the vulnerabilities that come with the successful implementation of IoT systems are highlighted as part of the research. Security continues to be an issue of significant importance.
