In the 1990s academic marketplace, transnational history emerged in the wake of the sprouting of international history, global history, and postcolonial history as historical subject fields. Christ...

Although some historians have been researching and writing history from a transnational perspective for more than a century, it is only recently that this approach has gained momentum. But what is transnational history? How can a transnational approach be applied to historical study? Pierre Yves Saunier's dynamic introductory volume conveys the diversity of the developing field of transnational history, and the excitement of doing research in that direction. Saunier surveys the key concepts, methods (...) and theories used by historians, helping students to find their own way in this vibrant area. (shrink)

In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment” as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press._ In _Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History_, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across (...) eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies. "This is a compelling collection on an important subject. Its transnational and biographical approach helps one to see eighteenth-century Catholicism and the Enlightenment itself in fresh and interesting ways." — Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University_. (shrink)

The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History, 1910–1945 by Hwansoo Ilmee Kim. Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 358pp. HB. $45.00, ISBN-13: 9780674987197.

The history of education in the modern world is a history of transnational and cross-cultural influence. This collection explores those influences in (post) colonial and indigenous education across different geographical contexts. The authors emphasize how local actors constructed their own adaptation of colonialism, identity, and autonomy, creating a multi-centric and entangled history of modern education. In both formal as well as informal aspects, they demonstrate that transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in education have been characterized by (...) appropriation, re-contextualization, and hybridization, thereby rejecting traditional notions of colonial education as an export of pre-existing metropolitan educational systems. (shrink)

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The (...) Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups. (shrink)

Two prominent approaches to the history of empires and nation-states are comparative imperial history [CIH] and transnational history [TNH]. Each group of historians has actively promoted their perspective, but the two have had little interaction. Furthermore, in the history of East Asia, nationalist perspectives have dominated over transnational approaches until very recent times. This article points to new studies that examine Chinese imperial and national history from transnational and comparative perspectives, and encourages (...) further work, including an ecological and environmental viewpoint, that will foster this trend. (shrink)

This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.

The article studies the Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish truth commissions dealing withstate-Sámi (an indigenous population living in northern Scandinavia, Finland and north-western Russia) relations through the concept of transnational historical justice. The fact that three separate commissions are studying the history of the Sámi has been criticized by earlier researchers, but never from the perspective of intergenerational, and more specifically historical justice. Our study of the mandate documents and the report of the Norwegian commission (the only one published (...) in the time of writing of this article) points to constructive ways forward that could acknowledge and better embrace the transnational character of Sámi history, especially in terms of historical justice. We also study in what way the Norwegian commission worked within and stretched the framework set by the mandate document. Our conclusion is that the lack of transna-tionalism in the mandate and work of the commissions leads to historical Sámi individuals and groups being forgotten. These are historical groups and individuals whose existence does not fit in neatly in the presentist perspective of the commissions, projecting the current nation state borders back in time. For this reason, historical justice toward these groups is also a forgotten issue in the mandate and work of the commissions. (shrink)

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that (...) shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Inés Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform our (...) theorization and normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant's canonical approach and enlists overlooked resources to radicalize, democratize, and transnationalize cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In a series of reports the United Nations Special Representative on the issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations has emphasized a tripartite framework regarding business and human rights that includes the state “duty to protect,” the TNC “responsibility to respect,” and “appropriate remedies” for human rights violations. This article examines the recent history of UN initiatives regarding business and human rights and places the tripartite framework in historical context. Three approaches to human rights are distinguished: moral, political, (...) and legal. It is argued that the tripartite framework’s grounding of the responsibility of TNCs to respect human rights is properly understood as moral and not merely as a political or legal duty. A moral account of the duty of TNCs to respect basic human rights is defended and contrasted with a merely strategic approach. The main conclusion of the article is that only a moral account of the basic human rights duties of TNCs provides a sufficiently deep justification of “the corporate responsibility to respect human rights” feature of the tripartite framework. (shrink)

In this essay I review four recent monographs on Chinese American history: Xiao-huang Yin's Chinese American Literature since the 1850s, Madeline Hsu's Dreaming of Gold, Dream of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, Young Chen's Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, and Xiaojian Zhao's Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965. Based on both English- and Chinese-language sources, the authors of these four books explore migration processes and the social origins of Chinese (...) immigrants from an international perspective and they reinterpret the cultural values of immigrants as fundamentally open, engaged, and cosmopolitan. Moreover, they characterize the Chinese American community as a dynamic, fluid, and flexible global network and place Chinese America in a larger historical context beyond that of a single nation. They have seriously challenged the American-centered and nation-based research paradigm and promoted a more transnational, transcultural, and multilingual approach to the history of Asian American experience. (shrink)

Until recently the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ was a forgotten concept in the intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries. The last two decades have seen a remarkable revival of interest in cosmopolitanism across a wide variety of fields. This article contends that legal developments since the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights and the rise of an ‘international human rights regime’ are at the forefront of a new cosmopolitanism. Yet there is a great deal of skepticism toward such claims on (...) the part of those who maintain that democracy and human rights are best furthered by the nation-state framework. Still others confuse legal cosmopolitanism with the spread of a uniform system of rights across different national jurisdictions. In several writings in the past, I developed the concept of ‘democratic iterations’ to argue against such skepticism as well as misunderstandings of legal cosmopolitanism. In this article, I show how democratic iterations unfold across transnational legal sites, which encompass various national jurisdictions and through which contentious dialogues on the application and interpretation of such fundamental rights as ‘freedom of religion’ in different jurisdictions can emerge. To document such processes I focus on the Leyla Sahin v. Turkey case which was adjudicated by the European Court of Human Rights in 2005. (shrink)

The term ‘nurse’ (hushi—’caring scholar’) did not enter the Chinese language until the early 20th century. Modern nursing—a fundamentally Western notion popularized by Nightingale and introduced to China in 1884—profoundly changed the way care of the sick was practiced. For 65 years, until 1949, nursing developed in China as a transnational project, with Western and Chinese influences shaping the profession of nursing in ways that linger today. Co‐authored by Chinese, Canadian, and American nurses, this paper examines the early stages (...) of nursing in one province of China as an exemplar of the transnational nature of nursing development. By identifying sociopolitical influences on the early development of nursing in Shandong, the authors aimed not only to contribute to the nascent body of knowledge on China nursing history, but also to heighten readers’ sensitivity to the existence of historical echoes, residue, and resonances in their own nursing practices. Tracing current issues, values, or practices back to their roots provides context and helps us to better understand the present. Whether we are aware of the details or not, the gestalt of nursing practice in a particular place has been shaped by its history—including in Shandong province in China. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues (...) that the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

Given that the practices and institutions of knowledge production commonly referred to as ‘science’ are believed to have ‘Western’ origins, their apparent proliferation entails negotiations and power dynamics that shape both science and diplomacy in specific locales. This paper investigates a facet of this co-production of science and diplomacy in the emergence of knowledge infrastructure in Japan during the Allied Occupation. It focuses on the 1947 delegation from the United States National Academy of Sciences to Japan and its role in (...) creating the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). While historians view this mission as having been dispatched to provide advice on the foundation of the SCJ, it was in fact an unintentional outcome. The original plan was to recruit long-term scientific advisers on science policy to Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. The creation of the SCJ was not the brainchild of any individual but the result of an unforeseen alteration of the original idea through negotiations among various actors. By examining the transnational aspects of this process and the complex social process underlying it, and drawing on Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory, this paper proposes the concept of ‘techno-diplomatic assemblage’ for understanding the transnational construction of knowledge infrastructure such as the emergence of the SCJ. (shrink)

In social scientific studies of Europe’s new democracies, there has emerged an analytical approach which transcends the teleology of ‘transitology’ and, focusing on the impact of culture and history, is sensitive to the contingencies and ‘eventfulness’ of social transformations. The main thrust of this article is that such a culturo-historical approach may prove useful not only in assessing the different results to which the processes of democratization lead at the national level, but also to assess the general direction of (...) political change after 1989 towards democracy. Building on Eisenstadt’s notion of modernity as a cultural and political program, this article therefore attempts to understand the revolutions of 1989 not only as the mere sum of particular national events, but also as part of an ‘entangled history’, that is, as a common, transnational phenomenon which was based on and articulated a shared cultural understanding. (shrink)

The paper briefly summarises the historical evolution of transnational corporations and their activities. It then introduces the major theories developed to explain the TNC. There is an attempt to place the theories historically, within the context of the socio-economic … More ›.

This essay analyses discussions of national versus international or transnational science, with an emphasis on the journal Osiris from 1986 to 2009, including the concepts of national science, national styles and characters in science, scientific internationalism, transfer of science and scientists from one nation to another, and comparison of different national examples. The author argues that perceiving science as a ‘national’ activity has not only been persistent, it is also perhaps inevitable. This special issue on transnational histories of (...) science raises the question of what is gained and lost by such an approach. First of all, what is the distinction between ‘transnational’ and ‘international’? The dictionary defines the latter as something existing, occurring, or carried on between two nations, while the former extends or operates across national boundaries. Thus ‘international’ implies some sort of commerce. In contrast, transnational is a loosely defined term. (shrink)

This is the first book to address the social organisation of modern yoga practice as a primary focus of investigation and to undertake a comparative analysis to explore why certain styles of yoga have successfully transcended geographical boundaries and endured over time, whilst others have dwindled and failed. Using fresh empirical data of the different ways in which posture practice was disseminated transnationally by Krishnamacharya, Sivananda and their leading disciples, the book provides an original perspective. The author draws upon extensive (...) archival research and numerous fieldwork interviews in India and the UK to consider how the field of yoga we experience today was shaped by historic decisions about how it was transmitted. The book examines the specific ways in which a small group of yogis organised their practices and practitioners to popularise their styles of yoga to mainstream audiences outside of India. It suggests that one of the most overlooked contributions has been that of Sivananda Saraswati (1887-1963) for whom this study finds his early example acted as a cornerstone for the growth of posture practice. Outlining how yoga practice is organised today on the world stage, how leading brands fit into the wider field of modern yoga practice and how historical developments led to a mainstream globalised practice, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Yoga Studies, Religious Studies, Hindu Studies, South Asian History, Sociology and Organisational Studies. (shrink)

This essay departs from conventional American Studies treatments to resituate Bellamy's utopia of 1888 within transnational debates over industrialism, socialism, and the state in European nations and their settler societies between 1890 and 1940. Building upon critical studies and information about the reception of Bellamy's utopia abroad, it offers three approaches: a genre-based analysis of the utopian hybrid that suggests textual bases for multiple readings; a transnational history of evolutionary socialism that helps explain Bellamy's global relevance in (...) the 1890s and again in the 1930s; and a comparative approach that contrasts the reception of Looking Backward in different national contexts. In the face of traditionally exceptionalist scholarship and the narrower, nationalistic frame of Bellamy's sequel, Equality, to understand Bellamy's global appeal we must recover the international context of Looking Backward and the internationalist views expressed in its pages. (shrink)

By focusing on Chinese cultural formations and critical discourses of the last decade of the century, the author dissects the intellectual, economic, and political contradictions of a turbulent era. This wide-ranging, deeply interdisciplinary work demarcates the cultural terrain by examining diverse media: film, television, avant-garde art, and literature, as well as critical theory and intellectual history.

This article is a response to the 1999 article `On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason' by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, in which US intellectuals such as myself were accused of engaging in `imperialist reason' through scholarly and institutional efforts to impose a US paradigm of racial relations upon Brazilian society and scholarship. This article makes three principal points in relation to Bourdieu and Wacquant's charges. First, their critique relies on presumptions and critical analytical methods which privilege the nation-state and (...) culture as the sole object for comparative analysis, and, second, as a consequence ignore how Afro-Brazilian politics and the US civil rights movement intersect within the political contexts and histories of transnational black politics. The intersecting affiliations of transnational black politics across territorial and nation-state boundaries problematize any characterization of international and inter-state relations as the inevitable interaction of politically discrete, territorially sovereign entities. Bourdieu and Wacquant's self-entrapment within the analytic category of the territorial nation leads them to imprison and caricature US African-American politics and thought within the geographic boundaries of the USA. Their assertions, however, provide an opportunity to consider the so-called US civil rights movement within the larger context of black struggles for racial equality in various parts of the world. Third, Bourdieu and Wacquant's attack is in some ways consistent with Wacquant's demonstrated habit of decontextualizing black cultural production and presenting such decontextualization as a virtue or strength, as evidenced in some of his writings on boxing in the United States. This final linkage is crucial, I believe, in understanding how the indiscriminate use of sociological categories and the refusal to engage the specific peculiarities of the tensions between politics and culture in Brazil are symptomatic of a wider misrecognition of black agency more generally in Wacquant's writings. (shrink)

This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. (...) In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in post-war Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication and exchange. At heart of the Lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy, no longer simply Western, yet to come. The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which have long since moved away from earlier 'Area Studies'; at the same time, they participate in the new scholarship about Foucault's own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault's work for philosophy in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper analyses the logistics of knowledge in eighteenth-century Anglo-Swedish scholarly collaborative relationships. More specifically, it analyses the making of Thomas Mangey’s Philonis Judaei Opera as a long-distance collaborative project between Mangey and the Swedish scholars Jacob Serenius and Erik Benzelius. The early modern Republic of Letters has commonly been characterised as a collaborative communication system upheld by communitarian norms. This description has however been challenged by several recent studies, which have underlined the commercial aspects of early modern scholarly exchange. (...) Building on such studies, this article highlights how negotiations about the logistics of knowledge circulation – of, e.g. shipping and long-distance financing – were an integral part of early modern transnational scholarly relationships. In the correspondence between the three scholars of 1728–42, we find ample practical details of how they struggled with slow and unreliable regional mercantile infrastructures. The strains of these logistical challenges thoroughly shaped the relationships between the three scholars, and would eventually lead to the collapse of their collaboration. (shrink)

Memorializing Violence brings together feminist and queer reflections on the transnational lives of memorialization practices, asking what it meanas to grapple with loss, mourning, grief, and desires to collectively remember and commemorate-as well as urges to forget-in the face of disparate yet entangled experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. The volume uses a transnational feminist approach to ask: How do such efforts in seemingly unconnected remembrance landscapes speak to, with, and through each other (...) in world order inflected by colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics, structures, and strictures? How do these memorializing initiatives not only formulate within but move through complex transnational flows and circuits, and what transpires as they do? What does it mean to inhabit loss, mourning, resistance, and refusal through memorialization at this moment, and what's at stake in doing so? What might transnational feminist analyses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation have to offer in this regard? (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with seasonal agricultural workers employed in Canada from Jamaica and Mexico, this paper focuses in on the experiences of a Jamaican farmworker who remits funds to pay a neighbour to farm his land (or the land he leases) while in Canada, and who participates in regular long-distance discussions with family members and neighbours back home about the upkeep of the farm. The concept of a “transnational agricultural care chain” is proposed here to capture a series of (...) personal links between people, located, at least temporarily, in different countries, who tend to the crops and farmland as a practice that entails asymmetrical relations of obligation to care for others. Agricultural care chains form part of a strategy to get by and possibly even advance the economic and social standing of one’s family under difficult economic conditions. Land access, as a co-constitutive sphere of production and reproduction, is another important factor in the livelihood strategies of rurally-rooted migrants, but the significance placed on land must be understood in connection to the uneven processes of global capitalism, histories of colonialism and, in the case of Jamaica, plantation slavery. The paper concludes with a reflection on how transnational agricultural care chains as paradigmatic of the contemporary food system are relevant to political and conceptual discussions around food sovereignty. (shrink)

This article examines the making of Romanian diplomatic practices during the first two decades of the Cold War by analyzing the activity of the Romanian Institute for Cultural Relations with the Foreign Countries in the field of architecture. I investigate how transnational cultural exchanges conducted jointly by party members and architects adjusted the professional careers of the latter. Questions related to what was good or bad, which images were still valid iconic representations of the country, what values the architects (...) should share, or how to depict architecturally modernisation and the nation dominated the IRRCS debates. Using archival information consisting of reports of cultural activities abroad, foreign travelers’ statements, itineraries, exhibitions’ materials and photographic records etc., I address Romania’s self-representation practices at home and abroad constructed in relation to the Other – the Easterner and Westerner, in close connection to the shift in the country’s economic interests. (shrink)

The ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of knowledge circulation is explored in a study of the encounter between American and British nuclear scientists and engineers who together developed a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium in the 1960s. A fine-grained analysis of the transnational encounter reveals that the ‘how’ engages a wide variety of sometimes mundane modes of exchange in a series of face-to-face interactions over several years. The ‘why’ is driven by the reciprocal wish to improve the performance of the (...) centrifuge, though this motive is embedded in the asymmetric field of the ‘special relationship’ in nuclear matters between the United Kingdom and the United States. The result of the encounter is co-produced, hybrid knowledge in which the national provenance of the contributions from each side of the Atlantic is at once diluted and a contested site for the affirmation of national power. (shrink)

After World War II, infant mortality rates started dropping steeply. We show how this was accomplished in socialist countries in East-Central Europe. Focusing on the two postwar decades, we explore comparatively how medical experts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany saved fragile newborns. Based on an analysis of medical journals, we argue that the Soviet Union and its medical practices had only a marginal influence; the four countries followed the recommendations of the World Health Organization instead, despite not being (...) members. Importantly, we analyze the expert clashes over definitions of livebirth, which impact infant mortality statistics. We analyze the divergent practices and negotiations between countries: since the infant mortality rate came to represent the level of socioeconomic advancement, its political significance was paramount. Analyzing the struggle to reduce infant mortality thus helps us understand how socialist countries positioned themselves within the transnational framework while being members of the “socialist bloc.”. (shrink)

Thinking History Globally means thinking about the past and the present beyond national borders, language barriers, and enclosed regions. There are four thinking strategies to gain global perspectives: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing. Comparing is about contrasting between several cases and drawing new conclusions. Connecting is tracking the interdependences between cases and assessing their importance. Conceptualizing is recognizing that developments in one or several cases belong within a larger recurring pattern. Contextualizing is making sense of one case amidst developments (...) world-wide. This book offers a practical guide into these strategies of thinking by applying them to multiple historical cases, ranging from the first civilizations and up to the First World War. While doing that, Olstein also presents the twelve branches of history that outstand in the application of these four strategies and in thinking history globally: comparative, relational, international, transnational, oceanic, global, world, and big histories, historical sociology, civilizational analysis, world-system approach, and history of globalization. (shrink)

The prospect of a transnational feminist coalition is one of the most challenging questions that feminism faces today. The author analyzes Beauvoir’s involvement with the Algerian decolonization movement and her own self-critique as instructive tools for forming better ways for feminists to engage transnationally. Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, political writings, and activism continue to offer models for developing an anticolonial and anti-imperialist transnational feminist ethics and are an underexplored resource in transnational feminist scholarship.

The historiography of sexology is young. It is also expanding at a remarkable pace, both in terms of the volume of publications and, more notably, in terms of its geographical, disciplinary, and intersectional reach. This special issue takes stock of these new directions, while offering new research contributions that expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary and transnational formation of this field from the late 19th through to the mid 20th century. The five articles that make up this special issue (...) stage historiographical interventions by challenging the tendency within sexological history to focus on the medical, the homosexual, the human, and the Western European at the expense of other disciplines, diagnoses, non-human subjects, and geographical locations. A particular strength of these contributions is their focus on mapping conversations among and between sexologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid 20th century – particularly in Germany, Britain, and the US – and between East and West in the early Cold War era. (shrink)

In this study, we propose an ecological model of teacher agency and emotional vulnerability that draws on epistemological roots of these two constructs to capture historico-personal, socio-organizational, and prospective levels of teacher professionalism. We then ontologically apply the model to exploring transnational language teachers’ agency and emotional vulnerability in the context of Turkey. Framing the study within a narrative inquiry methodology, we collected data from open-ended questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews. Data analyses revealed that the teachers’ personal emotions, (...) embodied agencies, and vulnerabilities were profoundly shaped by individual histories, contextual discourses, and sociocultural particularities. The findings unpack novel dimensions of teachers’ agency and emotional vulnerability, attesting to their interconnection, especially within the context of transnationalism. We conclude the study with implications for teacher educators to reduce the pressure on transnational teachers and render their agencies as rooted in effective professional growth, rather than being defined by excessive vulnerabilities that in turn restrict teacher agencies. (shrink)

Demands calling for reparations for historical injustices—injustices whose original victims and perpetrators are now dead—constitute an important component of contemporary struggles for social and transnational justice. Reparations are only one way in which the unjust past is salient in contemporary politics. In my book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, I put forward a framework to conceptualise the normative significance of the unjust past. In this article, I will engage with the insightful comments (...) and try to address the concerns of the contributors to the symposium on my book. I will discuss whether and in what sense my framework incorporates past-regarding duties, how it is different from causal interpretations of the relationship between past and present injustice, whether it can carve out a greater place for blame in our thinking about responsibility for structural injustice, whether such a responsibility needs to hinge upon an account of solidarity, and how de-temporalising injustice can cast new light on immigration politics. In particular, I will stress and further clarify the importance that the notion of ‘structural debt’, which my book develops to reflect on historical responsibility, can play in thinking about what is owed to an unjust history. (shrink)