Portals of Globalization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Synopsis

Portals of globalization is an analytical category introduced in globalization research to investigate how global flows are anchored and articulated in particular places. It has been used to analyse the way flows and controls come together on multiple scales, and how actors in these places actively manage global entanglements. Consequently, the changing positionality of these places in global networks can reveal the scope, function, and transformation of global connections and shifting spatial orders. Stemming from research debates on the historicity, regional difference, and spatial complexity of globalization processes, this issue seeks to strengthen empirical insights from different disciplinary and regional perspectives. It brings together research on past and present portals of globalization to facilitate the dialogue across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. A special focus on a variety of local and regional contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America allows us to re-evaluate assumptions about the centres and peripheries of globalization processes, the mechanisms and directionality of circulations, and the asymmetries in global connectedness.

Biographical Notes

Claudia Baumann (Global and European Studies Institute, Leipzig University, Germany)
Claudia Baumann is a research associate and coordinator of the MA and PhD Programme Global Studies: Peace and Security in Africa at Leipzig University. In her PhD project she approaches universities as „Portals of Globalization“, places where the „global“ is particularly dense and where processes of globalization can emerge, accelerate and be controlled. The study is based on the examination of three universities: Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) and Hanyang University (Korea). Her research interests include international higher education, globalization and higher education, and higher education management with a regional focus on Ethiopia, India, and South Korea.

Dr. Antje Dietze (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Antje Dietze studied cultural studies in Leipzig and Paris, earning her PhD in 2012 from Leipzig University for her work on the role of cultural organizations and artistic practice during the post-socialist transition in Germany. As part of her current research she spent 2015/16 as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) P.R.I.M.E. research fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Montreal (Canada). Her research interests include entertainment and the arts, cultural industries, and cultural change within the study of culture and transnational history, focusing particularly on Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dr. Megan Maruschke (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Originally from the US, Megan Maruschke came to Leipzig in 2010 to join the Erasmus Mundus MA Programme “Global Studies – A European Perspective”. She also studied in Italy and Poland. In 2012, she started her PhD research at Leipzig within the Research Training Group (GK 1261): “Critical Junctures of Globalization”. She wrote her dissertation on the history of free port and free trade zone practices since the mid-nineteenth century in Mumbai, India. Her current research deals with the way in which the French Revolution challenged concepts of space in the Americas.