Our researchers make sense of our interconnected world and develop new approaches to better understand and respond to global, national, and local issues in culture, society, politics, history, identity, sustainability, and gender. We focus on six areas (Brazil, China, European, Japan, India and South Asia, and Russia) and also International Studies – allowing us to address shared global issues from firmly rooted knowledges. However, much of our research is comparative or boundary-crossing in both disciplinary and geographical senses
Research in Global Studies is characterized by a multi-disciplinary – indeed, increasingly post-disciplinary, concern with the challenges of our times. We combine perspectives from our areas of expertise to understand such challenges. Thus, we contribute to a variety of research fields beyond our original, language-based focus. This approach allows us to critically and creatively engage with theoretical discussions on globalization and globality as well as decolonization and decoloniality, indigeneity and emicness, diffusion and domestication, and the ‘glocal’.
A further trademark of our department is our commitment to pushing forward such theoretical debates: we are not only experts in different areas of the world who are all committed to developing research beyond Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism, but also experts in different disciplines and research methods. As anthropologists, historians, political economists, political scientists and sociologists we are able to open a varied research toolbox as we embrace our pluriverse approach.
Thematically, our research is varied, too. We are concerned with gender, migration, race, the environment, natural resource extraction and use, climate change, social and cultural practices and discourses as much as with transnational networks, intellectual history, populism, authoritarianism and the very construction and contestation of normative orders. These broad themes are expressed in specific projects, such as on ‘best practice’ in disposal of plastic waste, what constitutes a ‘refugee’, whether Special Economic Zones help or hinder labour activism, or even in exploring something seemingly universal like ‘youth’ or ‘the night’.
