GLOBALIZATION AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Globalization has become a widely used concept in the social sciences to refer to the contemporary conditions of the world, and Geography is an especially significant disciplinary site for understanding and critiquing how specific places and regions are integrated yet unevenly positioned within global processes and events. The emphasis on both integrated and uneven geographies provides an opportunity to reflect on the diversity of ways in which economic, political, and cultural practices are being (re)shaped by corporate and state power, and the social and environmental consequences of such transformations. It also usefully prevents an uncritical celebration of globalization as economic and cultural progress.
The companion concept of International Development is an especially prominent instance of how solutions to poverty are being devised within a global framework. Yet, international development, particularly in its neo-liberal version, has proved to be quite amenable to the imperatives of capital accumulation and resource exploitation and has become the subject of sharp criticism and militant protests by global and local social movements. Globally-oriented critical analyses, by addressing the multiple intersections of state spaces, corporate agendas, and people’s everyday struggles, can illuminate both current alliances and contradictions between states, corporations, and social movements.
Within our department, the critical focus on Globalization and International Development includes a wide range of topical and regional interests. Our faculty is actively conducting research on urban and regional transformations (viz., global cities); environmental politics (viz., the privatization of water, anti-dam movements); economic restructuring (viz., information technologies, labor migrations); and gender issues (viz., women, environment, and agriculture).
These topics are being studied in the context of Central and South Florida, particularly focused on the rapidly expanding Tampa Bay region (by Kevin Archer, M. Martin Bosman, Elizabeth Strom, and Jayajit Chakraborty), as well as through international examples from Latin America (the Dominican Republic, Belize, and Ecuador by M. Martin Bosman, Philip Reeder, and Graham Tobin respectively), Africa (Sierra Leone, by Fenda Akiwumi), and Asia (India, by Pratyusha Basu).
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