Global Studies Literature Review - No. 7, May 2016

Framing the Global

This year, the Global Studies Literature Review (GSLR) offers a new issue (No. 7) focused on the theme, “Framing the Global.” Inspired by Hilary E. Kahn’s edited volume Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research (Indiana University Press, 2014), which offers a set of academic research perspectives on disentangling global phenomena from local and transnational lived worlds, the GSLR editors sought to extend this challenge of global analysis to scholar-practitioners within international education. As professionals in a field that assumes global mobilities, how do we articulate the meaning of “global” for our own professional work? And, how does this impact our shared knowledge of the world that our students and colleagues in higher education seek to understand?

Included in this issue are a set of featured essays with innovative and intellectually demanding considerations of the entry points to our work in international education. Kahn urged the scholars involved in the original Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change project to challenge and disrupt their own disciplinary assumptions through experimentation with new methodologies grounded in ethnographic and empirical data of the lived world. This juncture served to open “entry points” to describe the partial, relational, symbolic, negotiated, and enacted characteristics of “globals” that shape specific research topics (Kahn 2014, pp. 6-7). The essays presented here extend this work in ways that disrupt our own assumptions about international education as a field, and offer new thinking about both methodology and grounded experience.

We hope the essays and synopses included in this issue deepen and expand our conversations in the field and lead us to even newer entry points and frameworks for appreciating the complexity of this world we share.

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