Abstract
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.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Higher Education, Academia, Disciplines, Students, Critical University Studies
