In July 2024, I traveled to the beautiful and historic city of Kraków, Poland, to attend the Global Studies Research Network’s Global Studies Conference on migration. Situated on the scenic Vistula River, with its medieval roots and significant historical and cultural sites that include Gothic and Renaissance architecture and a well-preserved Jewish Quarter, Kraków was a fitting location in which to explore the topic of migration and its impact on the global.
The Global Studies Research Network “is devoted to mapping and interpreting past and emerging trends and patterns in globalization”, employing technical, theoretical, and practical approaches to analysis while also pursuing strategies for action. They aim “to build an epistemic community where we can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries” (https://cgscholar.com/cg_event/events/E24en/about). The Global Studies Research Network’s 17th Global Studies Conference, titled “The World on the Move: Understanding Migration in a New Global Age”, explored themes such as “Networks of Economy and Trade”, the “Power of Institutions”, “Vectors of Society” and “Culture and Ecological Foundations” to study the economic, political, socio-cultural, and eco-systemic dimensions of globalization.
In the opening plenary, Professor Jan Brzozowski of Jagiellonian University in Poland presented a comparative analysis of the migration of Venezuelans in Peru and Ukrainians in Poland, exploring the differences between forced and voluntary migration, as well as how adaptation and integration processes vary. He stressed that Global Studies as a field offers advantages in exploring the topic of migration as one can take a global perspective comparing migratory trends across the world. Global Studies welcomes cross-regional viewpoints and invites scholars from a multitude of fields such as Economics, Education Policy, and Human Rights to engage in dialogue. Global Studies also offers a unique entrée into policy development and its implications, such as comparing the education policy for migrant children across different host countries. Global Studies’ multidisciplinary approach also encourages exploring how history and context influence policy. Such insights reinforce Rizvi and Lingard’s observations that public policies, once the purview of sovereign nation states, are now also located within the global system (2009).
The plenary was followed by a host of thought-provoking lectures, such as one by Daniel Benson, an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at St. Francis College in New York, who presented a talk titled: “What Happened to Internationalism? : Doing Global Studies in the Post-Post-Cold War World,” and one by Dawn Bolger, Lecturer of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations at Swansea University in the UK, who presented a talk on “the Rwanda Directive: Moral Panics and UK Asylum Policy.” Benson critically analyzed the term globalization, researching the use of the term in current literature, adding to Steger and Wahlrab’s (2016) historicized account of the advent of the term in their foundational textbook on Global Studies. Bolger explored how governments construct anti-immigrant narratives through propaganda strategies such as “exaggerated distortion” to frame a group or activity as a symbol of social anxieties, thereby creating a “moral panic” on which to base policy. Kolodziej (2016) reminds us that “for the global society, or any human society, to survive, thrive, and replicate itself, three competing imperatives of governance — Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL) — have to be addressed and an inevitably problematic solution devised to keep them in precarious balance” (p. 1). The role of governments and political parties using political exploitation and fearmongering to frame immigrants as threats to create a moral panic jeopardizes that “precarious balance” as “the religious and moral values of a human community” situated within the OWL imperatives are challenged (p. 2).
The Global Studies Research Network’s 3-day Global Studies Conference on broadening our understanding of the global aspects of migration featured presenters and participants from 49 countries, pursuing a multitude of disciplinary and regional angles. The conference demonstrated how Global Studies is an important field that allows scholars to explore global problems and evaluate the effects of globally minded solutions on local and national policy.
References
Kolodziej, E. (2016). Whither Globalization? From book launch talk on Governing Globalization.
Rizvi, F. and Lingard, B. (2009). Globalizing Education Policy. Routledge, N.Y.
Steger, M. B., and Wahlrab, A. (2016). What is Global Studies? Theory and Practice. Routledge.
