Extensions of Globalizing Knowledge Michael D. Kennedy

November 23, 2019

Thanks to the interest of colleagues, I enjoy the opportunity to discuss Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation and to develop its extensions in a number of circumstances. In this posting, I provide some of the references and resources that develop in anticipation of, and following, those engagements. This posting is updated as encounters multiply.

Although of course I enjoy the attention my book wins in these conversations, it is far more important to me that it helps to stimulate a more reflexive and consequential approach to globalizing knowledge than what individual intellectuals, universities, or even knowledge networks now practice.

In what follows are

1) links to my subsequent publications extending themes of Globalizing Knowledge (Some of their penultimate drafts can be found beginning on p. 10)

2) links to other publications discussing Globalizing Knowledge (p. 3)3) events associated with Globalizing Knowledge (p. 4)

My publications and interviews extending themes from the book:

1. (forthcoming) “Normative Frames and Systemic Imperatives: Gouldner, Szelényi and New Class Fracture” in pp 25-51 in Tamás Demeter and Katalin Füzér (eds.), Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Themes from Iván Szelényi, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2019.

2. (forthcoming) Kennedy, Michael D. and Merone Tadesse, “Towards a Theory and Practice of Diversity and Inclusiveness in Globalizing US Universities: The Transformational Solidarity of Knowledge Activism” Youth and Globalization 1: 254-281 https://brill.com/view/journals/yogo/1/1/article-p1_1.xml?lang=en (see below, p 10, for a preliminary version)

3. (2019) Kehal, Prabhdeep Singh; Laura Garbes and Michael D. Kennedy. “Critical Sociology of Knowledge.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. Ed. Lynette Spillman. New York: Oxford University Press (https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0221.xml?)

4. (2018) “Political Imaginaries and University Possibilities: Responsibility, Conflict and the Transformations of Brown University and European Humanities University” Crossroads (Perekrestki) 1:25-40. http://journals.ehu.lt/index.php/perekrestki/article/view/164/147 

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5. (2018) “Knowledge Mobilization, Non-Western World, and the ‘Selfie’”, interviewed by Labinot Kunushevci, pp. 57-75 in Contemporary Sociological Conversations Prishtina/Tirana: LogosA (also in Albanian).

6. (2017) “Sexual Violence as a Strategy of War” – an interview with Linda Gusia and Michael D. Kennedy by Sarah Baldwin in the Podcast “Trending Globally”

7. (March 22, 2017) Story in the Public Square on the Sociological Imagination, Globalizing Knowledge, and the Time of Trump,

8. (2016) “Communication as Perspective: An Interview with Michael Kennedy” excerpt from an interview with Michael Kennedy conducted by Labinot Kunushevci University of Prishtina (1/13/2016) Policy Trajectories Parts 1 and 2 Conducted as part of a series of conversations  for a volume entitled Communication as Perspective: Interviews with Contemporary Sociologists, in prep, ed. Labinot Kunushevci. Other interviewees include Anthony Giddens, George Ritzer, Patricia Hill Collins, Liah Greenfeld, Hayriye Erbaş, Jasminka Lažnjak, Raewyn Connell, Chua Beng Huat, Barry Wellman, Margaret Abraham, and John Holloway.

9. (2016) “Policy and Sociology in Context” Parts 1 and 2 -- Linda Gusia and Michael D. Kennedy, Policy Trajectories,

10. (August 15, 2016) “The Interdisciplinarity of Globalizing Knowledge” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, Social Science Research Council http://items.ssrc.org/the-interdisciplinarity-of-globalizing-knowledge /

11. (December 11, 2015) “We Are Seeing You: Protesting Violent Democracies in Kosova”, Michael D. Kennedy and Linda Gusia. Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements https://opendemocracy.net/michael-d-kennedy-linda-gusia/we-are-seeing-you-protesting-violent-democracies-in-kosova forthcoming and translated into Spanish for this volume: in Breno Bringel y Geoffrey Pleyers (Editores) Sociología pública y global de los movimientos sociales

12. (July 29, 2015) “A Comparative and Historical Sociology of Alternative Futures” The Futures We Want http://futureswewant.net/michael-kennedy-comparing-alternative-futures/

13. (2015) “A Transformational Sociology of Socialism and China’s Cultural Revolution: Reflections on Yiching Wu’s The Cultural Revolution at the Margins” Trajectories 27:1:14-19 http://asa-comparative historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Fall_2015.pdf

14. (July 25, 2015) Interview with Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies blog: http://www.aseees.org/membership/michael-d-kennedy

15. (December 5, 2014) “Engaging Intellectuals and Politicians” University World News http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20141203123125417

16. (December 3, 2014) “Rethinking the Social Question: Where is Class in Trade and Where Does Latin America Belong?” Stanford University Press Blog http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2014/12/rethinking-the-social-question.html

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Select publications by others addressing Globalizing Knowledge:

1. Andreas Glaeser, Book Review, Contemporary Sociology 45:6(2016):757-59. http://csx.sagepub.com/content/45/6/757.extract

2. Padraic Kenney, Book Review, Perspectives on Politics 14:4(2016): 1250-513. Janet Donald, Book Review, Canadian Journal of Higher Education Revue

canadienne d’enseignement supérieur Volume 46, No. 1, 2016, pages 176 – 1784. Mark J. Oromaner, Book Review, Education Review 23(2016):

http://edrev.asu.edu/index.php/ER/article/view/2056 5. Dwuglos wokol Michaela Kennedy’ego Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals,

Universities and Publics in Transformation by Marta Bucholc, “Design Etosu Globalnego Inteligenta” (pp. 295-300) and Tomasz Zarycki, “Globalizacja Wiedzy I Dylematy Intelktualistow Centrow I Peryferii” (pp. 301-10) in Tomasz Zarycki (ed.), Polska Jako Peryferie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Scholar) 2016. http://scholar.com.pl/sklep.php?md=products&id_p=2599Table of Contents: http://scholar.com.pl/upload/product_files/2599/448_Polska_peryferie_rozbieg_.pdf

6. Jonathan Larson, “Toward the Intellectual–Administrator? The Utility of Frames in the Craft of International Education” NAFSA http://www.nafsa.org/uploadedFiles/Chez_NAFSA/Resource_Library_Assets/Networks/RS/Book_Reviews/gsl_larson_toward_the_intellectual.pdf

7. Fredrico Brandmayr, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Doing Consequential Sociology” European Journal of Sociology 56:3(2015):498-508.

8. David Perry, “Where Are We Going? Why Are We in This Handbasket” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2015) 6, 500–513. doi:10.1057/pmed.2015.43

9. Dan Little, “Globalization and the Planetary Knowledge Business” March 3, 2015 http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2015/03/globalization-and-planetary-knowledge.html

10. Hillary Angelo, Book Review, Culture Section of the American Sociological Association Newsletter, Fall 2015, pp 20, 33.

11. Hiro Saito, “The Possibility of Global Public Sociology” ISA eSymposium for Sociology http://www.sagepub.net/isa/admin/viewEBPDF.aspx?&art=EBul-HiroSaito-Dec2015.pdf&type=2 references my book, but is both more sober in his account of constraints on global public sociology and also more visionary in his invocation of the performative dimension of sociology's relationship to transnational social problems.

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EVENTS

11/23-25/19 Contributions to Two Roundtables at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies,

1) Legacies of Communism? Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989/91: A Reassessment

2) Global Imagination after Versailles: Alternative Histories of Social Science in Eastern Europe (notes anticipating my talk on p. 52 below)

10/24/18 "Facts, Objects, and Visions in the Design of Globalizing Knowledge" Center for Advanced Study MillerComm2019, Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:00pm Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum https://publish.illinois.edu/globalcurrents/2018/12/04/millercomm2019-facts-objects-and-visions-in-the-design-of-globalizing-knowledge/

10/19-20/18 “Knowledge and Learning in the Transition to and in the Defense of Democracy: Commonalities and Contradictions in the Transformations of Knowledge Activism” for The Graduate School for Social Research, Institute of Philosophy and SociologyPolish Academy of Sciences, A conference inaugurating the new academic year“Pivotal Ideas of the Last 30 Years: Democracy, Society and Markets at the Turn of the Century, October 19th-20th, 2018, with Organizers, Michał Federowicz, Jan Kubik, and Andrzej Leder https://www.academia.edu/37612292/Knowledge_and_Learning_in_the_Transition_to_and_in_the_Defense_of_Democracy_Commonalities_and_Contradictions_in_the_Transformations_of_Knowledge_Activism

7/9/17 (notes below for) 11 Theses Beyond Globalizing Knowledge European Humanities University, Vilnius.

7/8/17 (notes below for my) European Humanities University Graduation Addresshttps://www.facebook.com/pg/EHUOfficial/videos/?ref=page_internal

3/19/17 Notes in preparation for Story in the Public Square Television Interview about the power of narrative around various themes, including intellectuals and universities in the time of Trump, and in Central and Eastern Europe, and the sociological imagination. Broadcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5P88I4YuD0

3/13/17 Reflections on Liberalism and Illiberalism in the Academy (prompted by so much conversation among peers and others following Frank Bruni’s piece: (notes below)

3/1/17 The Urban Readers Series presents Kimberly Hoang in Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. She will be joined in conversation by Michael D. Kennedy. https://www.semcoop.com/event/urban-readers-series-kimberly-hoang-dealing-desire-

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michael-d-kennedy (notes below -- to listen to the discussion, go to https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TJdS19iv9CdExoaXZ5c1Nobjg/view?usp=sharing

12/15/16 Solidarity and Social Change: A 2016 Synthesis, notes accompanying the final discussion in my undergraduate seminar on Solidarity and Social Change. (notes below)

12/8/16 Knowledge Cultural Sociology beyond its Globalization:Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Empire, notes accompanying the final discussion in my graduate seminar on the Sociology of Culture and Knowledge (notes below)

11/3/16 “Globalizing Knowledge for the Future, Then and Now”Michael D. Kennedy For http://instrat.pl/future-insights-inauguracja-cyklu/ and http://instrat.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Globalizing-Knowledge.pdf

10/31/16 PANEL: The Politics of Culture and the Political Role of Cultural Institutions4:00pm to 6:00pm William James Hall, Room 1550 (33 Kirkland Street), Harvard University (notes below) The nexus between politics and culture is fertile ground. Cultural institutions profoundly shape how we imagine the world; the structures, institutions, and inequalities that organize it; and the ways in which we mobilize for social change. At the same time, cultural institutions are shaped by politics—countries occupy different positions in a cultural hierarchy of value, political factors shape cultural diffusion, and culture is used as a diplomatic tool. Our panelists will engage broadly with these questions, exploring the ways in which the encounter between culture and politics influences theory and practice.Peggy Levitt, (Moderator) Professor and Chair of Sociology, Wellesley College & Co-Director of TSI, Harvard UniversityMartha Tedeschi, Director of Harvard Art Museums Frederick Wherry, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Yale UniversityMichael D. Kennedy, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs, Brown University Co-sponsored by: Harvard Culture and Social Analysis Workshop http://seminars.wcfia.harvard.edu/tsi/event/politics-culture-and-political-role-cultural-institutions

8/19/16, “Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World?” University of Washington, Seattle https://chsminicon2016.squarespace.com/Linda Gusia, University of Prishtina and Michael Kennedy, Brown University“Kosova’s Place in the Transnational Imaginary: A Comparative and Historical Account of Becoming Policy Significant”.

6/14/16: at the University of Warsaw, “Political Imaginaries and University Possibilities in the World System and among Proximate Publics” (notes below, p.7) a Keynote Address for a conference entitled “Uniwersytet - a rozwój społeczny w świecie globalnych wyzwań”, Uniwersytet otwarty na otoczenie: Przykłady partnerstw z

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instytucjami publicznymi i biznesem Doświadczenia UW i instytucji partnerskich 25-lecie Instytutu Studiów Społecznych im. Roberta M. Zajonca Konferencja międzynarodowa, 14 czerwca 2016, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Nowy Gmach

4/21/16: Patrick Ball, “Digital Echoes: Understanding Patterns of Mass Violence with Data and Statistics” a lecture at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Part of a larger project on the articulation of human rights advocacy and quantitative methods, Patrick Ball exemplifies the blending of intellectual and political responsibility I elaborate in Globalizing Knowledge, and illustrates why statistical expertise can be central to critical social science. Watch his lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4jzroaDTY4&feature=youtu.be

2/29-3/3/16: in Oxford and London to talk Critical Social Science, Area Studies, Interdisciplinarity, and Globalization (see text below, p. 59)

2/11/16: in Chicago at Northwestern University: “What’s Critical about Globalizing Knowledge? Power, Networks, and Norms in Transforming Universities”. 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM  Harris Hall, 108 1881 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208 (text below, p. 67)

1/6/16: in Singapore, Notes in anticipation of and following an introductory lesson to Sociology through the prism of “Mind, Selfie and Society in Extensions of Globalizing Knowledge”, (text below, p. 76)

11/30/15: in Prishtina, Kosova A Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge 11:00-12:30 in the Main Library. Discussants include Linda Gusia, Nita Luci, Shemsi Krasniqi, and Vjollca Krasniqi (notes below, p. 56)Departamenti I Sociologjise dhe Programi Universitar per Studime dhe Hulumtime Gjinore (Universiteti I Prishtines), ju ftojne ne promovimin dhe diskutimin e librit te Globalizing Knowledge Promovimi behet te henen, me 30 nentor 2015, nga ora 11:00h-1230h, ne Bibloteken Kombetare.A News Report about the event EXPRESS PËRUROHET VEPRA E SOCIOLOGUT AMERIKAN MICHAEL D KENNEDY 01 12 2015 Kohavision (in Albanian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMVKH6EmnEk)

11/27-28/15: A Keynote Address, “What Was 20th Century Transition Culture and What Has Come Next?” at a conference entitled “Transition in Retrospect: 25 Years after the Fall of Communism”, University of New York Tirana, Tirana, Albania. Text below, p. 60.

11/20-21/15, American Association for the Advancement of East European and Eurasian Studies, as Chair of a Panel, “Poland Goes Global” 8:00 AM 11/21 with Piotr Kosicki, Małgorzata Mazurek, Malgorzata Fidelis, Philipp Ther, and Brian Porter-Szucs (text below, p. 85)

11/20-21/15, American Association for the Advancement of East European and Eurasian Studies, My contributions to a Roundtable on “Portable Practices of Critical Social Inquiry: Taking East Central Europe Global” 10:00 AM 11/20 (text below, p. 90)

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11/11/15: Ann Pendleton-Jullian, “Design, Agency, and the Pragmatic Imagination” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairshttp://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/ann-pendleton-jullian-design-agency-and-pragmatic-imagination

The book is now available: http://www.pragmaticimagination.com/

Ann Pendleton-Jullian and her co-author John Seely Brown exemplify for me in Globalizing Knowledge an intellectuality that might most be suitable for addressing the crises and opportunities of the 21st century in their forthcoming work, Design Unbound. Ann illustrates how that might be the case in her presentation, available on the internet here: https://mediacapture.brown.edu:8443/ess/echo/presentation/370c3723-133f-4385-b69d-c7ca3c57365e

This talk will be two short talks - a diptych of conversations intended to set the stage for an emergent discussion around how design can couple the imagination to action for agency and impact. The first half of the diptych - Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a Rapidly Changing and Radically Contingent World - will introduce the concepts and themes of the framing chapter of Ann Pendleton-Jullian’s recently completed manuscript with co-author John Seely Brown. It will talk about new frames, new tools and a new kind of agency. At a moment when every action seems to dislodge stones in precarious terrain — ecologically, politically, culturally — we need to find ways to affect change from inside. The tools and meta-tools of Design Unbound begin in architecture, landscape, and urban, design, but, unbound from thingness and disciplinary boundaries, they serve to shift from designing content to designing contexts in an increasingly complex, connected and contingent world. The second short talk - The University 2033: Designing the Future of Higher Education - will present ongoing work undertaken by Ann Pendleton-Jullian with students and innovative leaders in this domain to redesign the future of the university – not the master plan, but the model and mechanisms that form a university level learning and research ecosystem for the 21st century. Originating in her own work on several projects, then transferred to a set of humanities studios at Georgetown University, and on to a set of multi-disciplinary studios at Ohio State, this project proposes more than incremental change. More than focusing on the fixing or repairing of problems, or the opportunities and challenges of disruptive technologies, these studios begin by asking: “What are we aiming at?” “How do we create a true paradigm shift for the context of 2033 (not merely remodel the university of the industrial era)?” This work has led to Georgetown President Jack DeGioia’s initiative “Designing the Future(s) of Georgetown” and is the genetic material for a new university being planned and designed for Eastern Africa in Kajiado, Kenya.

10/15-17/15: My paper entitled "Ivan Szelenyi, Solidarity and the Intellectualities of the 21st Century", in a conference “Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Themes from Ivan Szelenyi” University of Pécs (notes below, p. 94)

http://szociologia.btk.pte.hu/ivan-szelenyi-intellectuals-inequalities-and-transitions

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10/1/15: “Between Criticism and Co-action: Meeting the Need for a New Kind of Relationship between Policy Makers and Academia”Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, Brown University

Aleksandra Goldys, Maria Szymborska, and Maria Rogaczewska, founders of a unit of Warsaw University dedicated to supporting “bottom-up” change in public policies (especially in sport-for-all and public health policies), discuss the similarities and differences of academia’s engagement of social problems in Poland and the EU with the US. Following a discussion of their relative successes, these sociologists will focus on the challenges remaining in developing their distinctive approach to “solidary knowledge” – active “co-action” with local actors and policy makers in making change.The team visited Brown to work with Michael Kennedy (Sociology and International and Public Affairs) and Alan Harlam (Swearer Centrer for Public Service) to explore the travel and translation of social entrepreneurship between Poland and Providence. http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/between-criticism-and-co-action-meeting-need-new-kind-relationship-between-policy-makers

9/29/15: I moderated “Globalizing Solidarity Step by Step” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

In 1980-81, Polish men and women organized a social movement called Solidarity that shook the foundations of communist rule in their country, and laid the groundwork for the emancipation of their nation in 1989. The meaning of that solidarity, however, is not so clear in retrospect for a new generation of Poles, nor is it so obvious in translation as the world yearns for a new way to recognize, and then bear, the burden of others.In that light, Michał Łuczewski together with Mikołaj Achremczyk, Piotr Czekierda, Małgorzata Fałkowska-Warska, Michał Gawriłow, Paweł Łączkowski and Maria Szymborska assembled to research and then write Solidarity – Step by Step, a book available in both English and in Polish. (Should you wish to read this book in advance, write to Michael_Kennedy@brown.edu to receive an electronic copy). Łuczewski and Karol Wasilewski have also turned their sixth step, “to forgive in truth” into a film entitled “The Father, the Son, and the Friend”.  Six of the book’s authors and filmmakers will discuss their book and show their 30 minute film. The event can be viewed here:http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/globalizing-solidarity-step-step

Following this event, see also Michal’s interview here: http://wyborcza.pl/1,91446,19433057,dr-michal-luczewski-polsce-brakuje-spojnej-polityki-historycznej.html; for those who don’t speak Polish this is the gist of the article entitled "Poland Lacks Politics of History" (the translation is literally Poland Lacks a Coherent Historical Policy, but I think this is a better translation as it refers, among other things, to the German Historikerstreit). In this essay, he explores these politics in Germany and Russia in order to illuminate the ways in which history is and might be engaged in Poland. He argues that history cannot be overlooked with a focus only on the future, and rather that the past ought be engaged more thoughtfully.  In particular, he proposes that Poland address much more substantially in its public culture the victims of communism, the heroes of that time, notably John Paul II, and finally the Solidarity

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movement itself. Indeed, this non-violent movement ought to be part of a global history of liberation movements alongside Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. He concludes, "as Michael Kennedy, the superb American sociologist, says, 'Solidarity' is something too precious to leave to just the Poles." I like his adjective for me, but I especially appreciate the quote.

5/4-5/15: Comments on “The Treasure of Solidarity: Lessons for Europe” Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to the European Union in Brussels http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/konferencja/?lang=en (notes below, p. 113)

4/24/15: A Book Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge with Hillary Angelo, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Craig Calhoun organized by the Urban Democracy Lab at the Gallatin School, at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, (20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, Room 503) 6-8pm. Video: https://vimeo.com/129003932 (notes below, p. 126)

4/23/15: Comments in a Session Entitled, “Ways of Knowing” at Thinking the Earth, http://www.brown.edu/academics/institute-environment-society/sites/brown.edu.academics.institute-environment-society/files/uploads/Thinking%20the%20Earth%20Brochure.pdf comments below (p. 136)

4/9/15: American University and George Washington University, “Globalizing Knowledge and the Articulation of Intellectual Responsibility, with special regard to Ukraine” held at American University 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW MGC 203/205 Washington DC 20016 – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/globalizing-knowledge-and-the-articulation-of-intellectual-responsibility-tickets-16056699019 (discussion notes below, p. 140)

3/24/15: A Book Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge hosted by the Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw with Marta Bucholc, Michal Sutowski, Tomasz Zarycki and Adam Leszczynski in the Brudzinski Hall, Kazimierz Palace, University of Warsaw (5:30 pm http://www.uw.edu.pl/events/event/spotkanie-z-prof-michaelem-kennedym/) (discussion notes below – p. 150)

2/27/15: Eastern Sociological Society meeting discussion of “Boundary Making and Border Crossing in Global Higher Education” (discussion notes below – p. 160)

2/25/15: Center for Russian and East European Studies University of Michigan https://events.umich.edu/event/20261 (discussion notes below - p. 169)Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0BtG3RIhhM&feature=youtu.be

1/30/15: A Book Panel Discussion at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University with Lina Fruzzetti, Leela Gandhi, and Keith Brown (video: https://mediacapture.brown.edu:8443/ess/echo/presentation/3d1efedf-7844-4ad4-ac1b-e34b527fa1fb) (Discussion notes available below, p. 176)

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1/16/15: Singapore Management University (paper available below and on its website: https://socsc.smu.edu.sg/events/2015/01/16/globalizing-knowledge-meets-singapore) (p. 200)

PRELIMINARY VERSIONS OF PAPERS PUBLISHED

(forthcoming) Kennedy, Michael D. and Merone Tadesse, “Towards a Theory and Practice of Diversity and Inclusiveness in Globalizing US Universities: The Transformational Solidarity of Knowledge Activism” Youth and Globalization 1: 254-281 https://brill.com/view/journals/yogo/1/1/article-p1_1.xml?lang=en (see below for a preliminary version)

Towards A Theory and Practice of Diversity and Inclusion in Globalizing US Universities:

Transformational Solidarities of Knowledge Activism 1

Michael D. Kennedy and Merone Tadesse Brown University

June 26, 2019

Abstract: Concerns for social justice in and commitments to globalizing universities are

rarely part of the same portfolio among academic managers, or even among students, but

these articulations of transformation in higher education increasingly intersect in both

decolonizing theory and practice. Following an elaboration of various meanings of

solidarity, diversity, and globalizing knowledge, we consider various connotations of the

decolonizing mobilization in universities. We then consider in more detail the challenge

of linking struggles over diversity to the practices of globalizing knowledge in the USA,

especially at Brown University. We conclude by considering particular forms of

1 Thanks to Hiro Saito, Aisalkyn Boeeteva, Georgina Manok, Prabhdeep Singh Kehal, Laura Garbes, Ricarda Hammer, David Kyuman Kim, Soyoon Kim, Emily Wanderer, Yasemin Bavbek, Juho Korhonen, Tina Park, Amy Chin, Syeda Masood, Maria Ortega, Ani Adhikari, Jonathan Acosta, Renetta Walcott, Nabila Islam, Svenja Kopyciok, Jose Itzigsohn and many others less formally for discussions that have informed much of this contribution. We are of course responsible for the final presentation of these arguments.

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transformational solidarity in direct and categorical associations, in contests defining

equivalent oppressions, and in efforts to deepen awareness of racisms beyond more

familiar contests in the societies and global extensions of US power.

Towards A Theory and Practice of Diversity and Inclusion in Globalizing US Universities:

Transformational Solidarities of Knowledge Activism

The ambition of universities to extend and deepen learning is sufficiently general

to allow all sorts of scholarship, and to accommodate all kinds of complements -- from

globalizing knowledge to diversifying learners. But just as imagination and innovation

have become keywords enabling far greater focus in moving university investments, we

might also consider how the address of power, solidarity, and justice could move a far

more consequential articulation of university purpose in a world defined increasingly by

polarized conflict and attacks by the alienated and their manipulators on learnedness and

knowledgeability.

In what follows, we propose a set of questions with examples that could draw

different fields of knowledge theory and practice into richer dialogue. In particular, we

wish to bring questions of social justice more into globalizing knowledge, and

transnational questions to concerns over diversity and inclusiveness. This kind of

knowledge activism -- a scholarly pursuit which takes its questions from what justice

activists offer, on the one hand, and on the other, moves the activist’s disposition into

cultures of critical discourse – is not just academic. It can address some of the greater

challenges facing universities in the execution of their global public responsibilities, at

least those in the USA we know best.

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This paper extends conversations and engagements begun during Tadesse’s

residence at Brown University, but now grows past our observations and discussions

then. We propose to move well beyond existing sensibilities about globalizing knowledge

and diversity to consider the possibilities of mobilizing transformational solidarity around

the value, and challenge, of difference across the world.

Solidarity is not an obvious value within the institutions of higher education.

More typically universities articulate values around truth and beauty in their missions;

excellence is often defined in their rankings. However, struggles for justice beyond, and

within, universities have moved at least some, notably those win the decolonizing

movement, to rethink excellence, beauty, and truth in those struggles’ terms. Clarifying

solidarities can illuminate those academic, and social, transformations, especially when

they move beyond more familiar articulations of injustice. We begin by considering

different approaches to solidarity.

Solidarity can be conceived in both functional and transformative terms.

Durkheim’s conceptions of mechanical and organic solidarity address how societies hang

together, while Marx’s vision of proletarian class consciousness exemplifies solidarity’s

transformative power. Subsequent scholarship elaborates forms of social association

moving solidarities that reproduce or alter status quos.

Calhoun (2003) and Zhou (2015) mark three types of solidarity based on a) direct

social relations, as workers on a factory floor, b) categorical identities that don’t require

direct ties but are based on imagined communities, like the nation, and c) public

deliberations where identifications are made through various modes of communication

around particular issues. We can see the latter most readily when people come together to

protest for peace, or even agitate for war. Following Jodi Dean’s (1997) account of

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reflective solidarity, we might imagine a more relational solidarity too. Out of struggles

and deliberations, agents can articulate new family resemblances moving solidarity

beyond direct ties, existing public spheres, or pre-existing categories of identification to

construct with innovative cultural frames meaningful ties.

Within and across universities we can see direct solidarity among students

mobilizing for changes in fees or among university leaders tied by social networks

seeking greater financial appropriations. Solidarity in higher education also can be

categorical, for instance when it is based on a common articulation of existing interests,

as in an allied effort to defend academic freedom. That categorical solidarity can also be

more transformative, notably when commonly identified actors work to make universities

more diverse and inclusive.

People of Color has become the euphemism in the USA marking both a base for

exclusion, and the principal agents of transformative struggle. But categories are not

simply derived from locations in systems of power and privilege. Here is where we move

beyond heuristic distinctions.

Solidarities around public issues are not the only forms communicatively

constructed. Categorical solidarities are too. They are products of public discourse.

Much as the category “Hispanic” was “made” through social relations and institutional

powers (Mora 2014), so too are any of these categorical solidarities constructed. Some,

however, are more easily articulated than others because of how power and identification

are themselves conceived, experienced and contested. Some global solidarities in the

transformation of higher education might be read as extensions of more familiar national

contests while other transnational expressions struggle to be even recognized. In these

last conditions we can especially appreciate the importance of knowledge activism.

13

The language we use matters in the articulation of transformational solidarities; it

brings some struggles to the fore, and might make others more visible. In what follows,

we clarify not only some of the conditions for transformational solidarity’s effect in

global articulations of justice, but also the possibilities for those efforts’ very appearance.

To recognize solidarity’s potentials in knowledge activism requires that we recognize the

hegemonic discourses within which globalizing knowledge and diversity have been

produced. We start with diversity.

Articulations of Diversity and Globalizing Knowledge

Diversity is a code word with many connotations (Berry 2011, 2015; Posselt,

2016; Warikoo 2016). It travels across the world with, occasionally, similar affect: as a

tool of management substituting for “more challenging” subjects like power and racism

(Ahmed 2012).

For just that reason, diversity became markedly useful in the 1990s USA when

affirmative action and other manifest commitments to racial justice came under assault by

political actors who preferred more “color blind” policies. Many in the administrative

leadership of universities and other complex organizations typically preferred to advocate

“diversity”, even if they were advocates of racial justice. It was “safer”. It could justify

an approach to extending justice in ways that were manifestly consistent with

organizational purpose: in universities, to improve the quality of education for all (Gurin,

Lehman and Lewis, 2004; Gurin et al 2002). When diversity’s positive vision of the

future substitutes for racism’s grisly present and past, it could not only be about race,

however.

14

If diversifying admissions to university were designed to assure the best

environment for learning by everyone. race would only be one axis of difference. Any

kind of diversity might matter. Not only US conservatives, but even liberal college

presidents could then embrace “intellectual diversity”, asserting that more conservative

voices need be appointed in the academy’s liberal left enclaves (Roth, 2017).

Others have taken diversity well beyond national domains to argue that its

advocates should welcome those with life experiences from other parts of the world too.

Diversity of citizenship and consequent experience could be a powerful complement to

assuring that diversity leads to excellence (Kennedy 2011). That connects diversity to

globalizing knowledge.

Globalization is another code word with many connotations; it also came to be

embraced by leading universities and administrators in the 1990s, and not only within the

USA. Across the world, globalizing universities, and globalizing knowledge more

generally, rarely had as their leading, or necessary, edge a quest for social, much less

racial, justice, however.

In fact, learning about the world as such in universities has been historically tied

to the needs of all sorts of authorities, whether for the extension or maintenance of

empire, assurance of national security, or developing commercial powers, among other

ambitions. But in the 1990s globalizing knowledge also could draw on images of a world

society, one increasingly integrated into globalization’s culture, reinforced by a new kind

of connectivity enabled by the revolution in information and communication technology.

Universities could make world citizens who could address world risks with their

cosmopolitan imaginations (e.g. Beck 1999).

15

That unifying image, or illusion, was shocked with the terrorist assault on New

York City and the Pentagon on 9/11/01. The previous globalizing quest among US

universities found then complement in a new kind of security mission: actors had to find

new grounds for understanding those who did not see globalization as benign, and its

hegemonic culture as respectful or just. Actually existing cosmopolitanism, associated

with neoliberalism and US military, could be part of the problem rather than a vehicle of

emancipation.

With this, a new articulation of globalizing diversity became not only possible but

necessary in US university cultures. Globalizing knowledge was not just about

complementing and supplementing one’s own nationally limited horizons. It was about

understanding actual or potential enemies. The purpose of globalizing knowledge could

then return to an original mission: to understand the “other” to assure the security and

prosperity of a university’s nation. But with this, the utopian vision, the useful illusion, of

globalizing knowledge crashed, inviting new articulations.

The preceding restates some of the arguments in Kennedy (2015) and Kennedy

(2011), but we live in new times.

For universities whose environs are not in war,i the only place where there is an

obvious “us” and “them” ii is on the athletic field, or perhaps in the more dangerous

contest with those who would deny the value of truth and academic freedom. One might

imagine US universities could find new purpose in struggles to advocate the value of

knowledge. This might be a struggle within the USA (Calhoun 2017) or with expressions

of academic solidarity with those who suffer such assaults on the integrity of knowledge

elsewhere.

16

Here, consider those in Hungary with Orban’s expulsion of Central European

University ((Ignatieff, 2017; Ignatieff and Roch 2018) and attack on gender studies as a

legitimate scholarship (Peto 2018); Erdogan’s attack on Turkish intellectuals and

journalists (Bahar et al 2017); and Modi’s attack on students at Jawaharlal Nehru

University (JNUTA 2017). Indeed, the expulsion of European Humanities University

from Belarus in 2004 could be seen as anticipation of these times when universities and

intellectuals find themselves at risk even in places claiming to be democracies (Kennedy

2018).

Such assaults on academic freedom and their institutions create relatively obvious

means for linking students, faculty, staff, and universities in solidarity across the world.

They unite to defend what has been. But that can be part of the problem when it comes to

globalizing knowledge, especially with racial justice in mind. Decolonizing universities

offers an alternative.

Decolonizing Universities

The call to decolonize universities across the global North has gained particular

traction in recent years, from Rhodes Must Fall Oxford’s (RMFOP) campaign for

a public reckoning with its colonial legacies to recent attempts by Georgetown

University, Washington DC, to atone for its past ties with slavery. The UK’s

National Union of Students (NUS) has been running ‘Why Is My Curriculum

White?’ and #LiberateMyDegree as two of their flagship campaigns since

2015…. These movements, collectively, sought to transform the terms upon

which the university (and education more broadly) exists, the purpose of the

knowledge it imparts and produces, and its pedagogical operations (Bhambra,

Gebrial and Nisancioglu, 2018:2)

17

The decolonizing mobilization is not a single movement. The variety of its critical

expressions can’t enjoy the simple categorical solidarity of academic freedom’s defense.

In this latter, we assume that academic freedom is devoted to the defense of truth,

excellence and beauty, and that particular institutions of higher education similarly

deliver a public good well beyond facilitating careers and livelihoods of their graduates

and employees. The decolonizing movement, by contrast, must knit together different

kinds of resistance into complementary

counter-hegemonic university purpose. Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu (2018) offers

one critical step with its articulation. All of the essays in that volume deserve

engagement, but several in particular clarify how globalizing university missions and

knowledge variously resonate with racial justice.

Gebrial (2018:20) uses the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford (RMFO) case to “1)

explicate the role of formalized education in the process of knowledge production and its

importance; 2) confront how the British Empire and its legacy is both normalized and

trivialized in education; 3) call for a reorientation in the anti-racist framework from

diversity to decolonization, and explore what this looks like” (p. 20). Decolonization is

about “recognizing the roots of contemporary racism in the multiple material, political,

social and cultural processes of colonialism and proceeding from this point” (p. 29). That

means that nationally framed categorical identities in which racism is often approached

miss their colonial formations. Decolonizing universities also points beyond the academy.

Aparna and Kramsch (2018) offer one method to so move. Their asylum

university movement works less in a place than with a “space of solidarity” (p. 94), a set

of relations in which knowledge production is extended in embodied and relational

fashion with mobilities in mind. They engage relations between “town” and “gown”,

18

“scholars” and “activists”, and above all, work with refugees in such a way that

boundaries are not taken for granted. Solidarities are not given, but emerge in relations

that are deliberately beyond conventional, and familiar, institutional articulations.

This offers a critical improvement to how Kennedy (2015:118-55) considered the

variety of publics; they not only vary in proximity, but in legal rights and obligations.

Donors can demand a lot; migrants, refugees and undocumented members of

communities can’t expect much. Politically engaged students, staff and faculty can

mobilize university resources on behalf of those marginalized by dominant structures of

power. Even here, however, one can’t assume that obligations are obvious.

Kennedy (2018) has previously considered the challenge of recognizing

obligations to the proximate, whose rights, resources and conditions of life were

expropriated by states that now define what is and is not legitimate (Kennedy 2018). By

focusing on the fates of the indigenous in a world defined by colonizing powers, we can

supplement, even replace, university metanarratives. Instead of progress, modernization,

or innovation, we might also consider loss, expropriation, resilience and their new modes

of expression. With that narrative, we can expect more indigenous voices in university

work (e.g. Pete 2018).

Decolonizing the university might just work as a counter-hegemonic vision of

globalizing universities, especially in those universities animated and founded with

imperial or colonial practices at their heart. It is a profound example of how articulations

of injustice and mobilizations of solidarity can be conceived in relational terms – follow

the colonizing mission, and decolonize those in its wake (Kehal n.d.). We might also ask

how decolonizing metaphors could address struggles less proximate, and forms of

19

domination more distant and less connected. We also find within their volume such

examples.

Maldonado-Torres, Vizcaino, Wallace and Annable, (2018) “propose

philosophy’s decolonization in positive terms, asking how their discipline might be a

form of liberating and decolonizing reason beyond the liberal and Enlightened

emancipation of rationality, even beyond the more radical Euro-critiques that have failed

to consistently challenge the legacies of Eurocentrism and white male heteronormativity”

(p. 65). They bring Asian, Latin American and race and gender lenses into the philosophy

project they propose to reconstruct. Their work invites us to decode methods by which

colonizing silences are efficacious.

Each discipline can move in this direction. It is also important to move in

dialogue with one another. Mutual engagement across disciplines helped colonizing

knowledge maintain its balance and consequence; it depended, for example, on an

institutional agreement between anthropology and philosophy, where knowledge cultures

of the ruled could be studied in one discipline, and the colonizers’ knowledge culture

refined in the other.

Decolonizing the university thus takes different forms, in different spaces. It

invites a different kind of solidarity among knowledge activists concerned for

articulations of power and knowledge. Decolonizing might just work as an emancipatory

narrative, especially if all forms of colonialism and imperialism could come under its

rubric. But it is not always straightforward to link various colonialisms given the ways in

which inter-imperial contest portrayed some imperialisms as better than others (Korhonen

2019).

20

To illustrate, we turn to various kinds of knowledge activism and transformational

solidarity animating struggles within Brown University over diversity, inclusion, and

globalizing knowledge.

Diversity and Inclusion at Brown University, within America

The USA has been engulfed in a series of contests over white privilege in

universities for decades, but they have developed in especially intense ways over the last

few years (Wong and Green 2016). We know the story best at Brown University, but

Brown has also been celebrated as an example for how to make diversity and inclusion

more central to university function and more accountable to those who moved it (Watson

2016). Brown’s President, Christina Paxson (2016), even said that student movements

transformed university priorities -- “constructive irreverence” was her term. That

negotiation – between student activism and institutional responsibility – is not simple.

In response to that mid 2010s wave of protest around racial injustice, Brown

developed a Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP) to address a number of issues.

Among its most central was to “focus on strategies to identify, recruit, and retain faculty,

students, and staff who have been historically underrepresented in higher education”

(Paxson 2016a). This category, known as historically underrepresented groups (HUGs)

defines much of DIAP. Demographic inequality is critical, but the problem is deeper.

Karida Brown (2018:121) for example recalled how her department had no space to

discuss “race, racialization and racism”. Things can change.

Although that department’s faculty was then (is still, but improving) remarkably

white, it was clear that DIAP had to address issues beyond the lack of HUGS. DIAP itself

called for curricular changes and for improved community within and beyond campus.

Inclusion was the term of reference here, and was designed to complement the emphasis

21

on changing percentages of HUGs. With inclusion, other axes of difference -- around

gender, sexuality, religion and citizenship, for example – could also find their place in the

commitment to making a better and more inclusive university. But inclusion is a

notoriously slippery term when so many axes of difference might be invoked in

challenging others. One is especially thorny.

When white supremacy in the questions and methods of knowledge cultures is

hard to figure, diversity might only be about bodies. For example, when theoretical

physicist Jim Gates speaks of his training and his current work in forensic science,

diversity most readily appears in body counts (Patillo, 2017). Gates does not advocate

some alternative physics.

Within other disciplines, where knowledge cultures can be charged with reflecting

white supremacy in their practice and not only in their personnel, epistemic struggles

develop about the meaning of diversity itself. Critical theorists, exemplified by

Hammer’s (2017) account of Hall and Fanon, argue that demographic diversity should be

accompanied by epistemic diversity. For those who find their knowledge culture color-

blind, having people of color conduct the same research as white folks can be used to

falsify charges of racism in their work. It would then be hard to hear Ahmed’s (2012:

151) observation: “adding color to the white face of the organization confirms the

whiteness of that face”. It might also be difficult to appreciate the more general story

lying behind the tale of denying W. E. B. Du Bois as scholar (Morris 2015). In short, in

some knowledge cultures, body counts are unlikely to resolve the challenges of

difference and exclusion animated by the whiteness of a knowledge culture itself.

Knowing a single response to such complexities inadequate, Brown’s leadership

assured regular data collection and monitoring of progress to help to keep the university

22

accountable. Student protest may have been an important source of progress around

diversity and inclusion, but the university sought to normalize this change by building it

into institutional self-understanding. It decentered responsibility for deepening diversity

and inclusion to departments, institutes and other layers of the organization.

Not surprisingly, given the challenge of transforming such a deeply engrained

white supremacy, protest returned shortly after DIAP’s development. In the fall of 2018,

despite the university’s commitment and its embrace of accountability, protest was

organized around a number of demands concerning transparency and representation.

Those demands are illuminating for many reasons, but it is also very clear that for these

transformative students, diversity and inclusion had a very specific accent.

Other than seeking the release of data on admission and rejection statistics that

would include country of origin, there was no acknowledgment of any global implication

of this action. Their focus on People of Color from the USA reflects a more general shift

around diversity.

During the time of Kennedy’s graduate training and initial faculty appointment at

the University of Michigan, struggles for diversity were tied to solidarity against

apartheid in South Africa. Shanties on the Diag in Ann Arbor, and similar symbols across

the USA, signaled a student movement simultaneously concerned for justice in South

Africa and justice in the USA. (Shantytowns, nd).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-racist protests generally involved an

expression of solidarity with the “Third World”. Third World Centers developed across

the USA, at Princeton, Brown and other places, and most dramatically within the

University of California system. Begun at San Francisco State, the movement at

Berkeley had this educational motive:

23

“The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at UC Berkeley coalesced in 1969 to

demand self-determination in education through the establishment of a Third

World College, whose curriculum would be designed for, and taught by, people of

color… tied to and energized by communities historically excluded from college

settings, it threw down a larger challenge to oppressive structures of power at the

University, in the United States, and across the world. (The Berkeley Revolution

2018).

With this language, anti-racism enjoyed a definite affinity with internationalism,

and anti-imperialism. At Brown University, founding the Third World Center in 1976

was not only made to respond to prior student protests – especially in 1968 and 1975 –

but was formed in articulation with Fanon’s critique of racism and empire (TWC 2018).

Work to extend internationalism’s sense with racial justice at its heart continues.

Internationalism and Racial Justice

Clerge (2018:221) proposes a Black Sociology that is deliberately international.

“By exploring the sociology of black communities in the Mississippi Delta, Southside

Chicago, and Sacramento, it’s important so see the linkages across a global black map

which spans from Kingston, Jamaica; Accra, Ghana; Lagos, Nigeria; Paris and

Marseilles, France, Bahi, Brazil and San Juan, Puerto Rico.” Her work to elaborate

Black Geographies exemplifies work to make global linkages around race, racialization

and racism apparent. In particular, she invites us to think about how migrations from the

American South and the Global South to US cities ought to be considered together, not

separately. There is of course ample precedent.

As a US-born daughter of immigrants from Grenada, Lorde (1983) engaged the

American invasion of her parents’ homeland in 1983 to mark the challenge of an

24

idealized Black solidarity, where Black soldiers for a US empire kill Black Grenadians

seeking self-determination. The complex relationship among race, citizenship, empire

and solidarity is manifest. As Gumbs (2014: 251) writes, it requires “recognizing and

strategically accounting for our privileges and proximity of power as self-interested acts

not to garner more privilege but to enable the becoming of the world we want to share”.

Engaging theories and practices of international Black solidarity is also central to

recognizing practices of Blackness within universities. In fact, universities should engage

that fusion if only to recognize their student communities.

Smith’s (2014) theorizes “diasporic consciousness” more generally, but her

interviews with Black students from different US universities, who are both African

American and Black students with first or second generation immigrant experience,

illuminate the meanings of Blackness in the academy. Those with African-American

identifications might just as readily use Black, depending on the situation, to describe

themselves, but the same will not be said for those with immigrant backgrounds.

Although a few Black immigrants embraced the African American label, others would

rather assign that descriptor to those whose family has been in the USA for generations;

as one of her interlocutors said, “it implies not just a reference but an identification with a

past history of subjugation” (p. 88).

Smith is concerned to understand under what conditions, and around which

issues, a more inclusive racial consciousness emerges, and, alternatively, when divisions

among Blacks take precedence. That difference is present in many US universities.

At the turn of this century, first or second generation immigrants associated with

Asian and Latinx identities were relatively well represented among those enrolled in

leading US universities, but Black students in those statuses were more than twice as

25

likely to be so enrolled; the largest fraction were from the English-speaking Caribbean.

This representation is even starker in the Ivy League at century’s beginning: “students of

immigrant origin made up 41 percent of entering black freshman” (Massey et al, 2007:

267). How to consider this has long been a matter of public debate, with a signal start at

Harvard in 2004 (Rimer and Arensen 2004).

In that gathering of Harvard alumni, Black scholars debated the significance of

immigrant origin in the definition of diversity. Some, like West Indian born Orlando

Patterson, would rather let this issue alone, while others, including Henry Louis Gates,

Jr., himself the son of a West Virginia paper mill worker, argued that it ought to be

discussed. That debate has been conducted with varying intensity over time and across

space. In the last year, for example, one of the demands of protesters at Cornell

University was to refocus attention on Black students who have been in America for

generations. They said:

“We demand that Cornell admissions come up with a plan to actively increase the

presence of underrepresented black students on this campus. We define

underrepresented black students as black Americans who have several generations

(more than two) in this country. The black student population at Cornell

disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or

Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there

is a lack of investment in black students whose families were affected directly by

the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students

whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and

American fascism.” (Jaschik, 2017).

26

Smith (2014) anticipates these politics. On the one hand, there are searches for

racial solidarity in contests, but differences in class position and historical experience can

preempt. They can be so challenging that there are few ethnographies or deep reflections

available on the matter. Indeed, even name changes suggest the difficulty.

In 2014, the name of Brown’s Third World Center was changed to “The Brown

Center for Students of Color”; similar shifts have happened elsewhere in this 21st century.

The manifest reason for such changes was student demand. After all, the major crisis

apparent in the university concerned its white supremacy, which was, in turn, considered

mostly in American terms. But it’s not so simple to keep it as a national affair just as

Black solidarity is not simple to assure.

After less than two weeks, the protesters at Cornell University declared that they

rethought the issue that divided them.

"However, upon further reflection and contemplation, we understand both the

complexity and contentious nature of our statement, as well as the frustration and

anger that was felt by our community as a consequence of our demand. We

apologize for the delay in response and any conflicting feelings this demand may

have garnered from the communities we represent. Our mission aims to support

all members of the African diaspora both nationally and internationally, as we are

a board comprised of Africans, Caribbeans and black Americans. We have and

continue to reach out to African and Caribbean groups on campus in the spirit of

dialogue and discussion surrounding this topic. Finally, we hope to rebuild any

trust we may have lost from our community members and we will continue to

fight for the expansion of opportunities for all of our communities." (Jaschik

2017).

27

Struggles for racial justice on university campuses clearly needs to be better informed by

global awareness. In those places enabled by the global slave trade, this should be easier,

even if it does not always travel so far across campus.

The establishment of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) at

Brown University is one such effort. It works to recognize “that racial and chattel slavery

were central to the historical formation of the Americas and the modern world”; CSSJ

“creates a space for the interdisciplinary study of the historical forms of slavery while

also examining how these legacies shape our contemporary world” (Center for Slavery

and Social Justice nd).

It is an unusual, if not exceptional, university, where that kind of critical

engagement we see in CSSJ would define the dominant theme of globalizing university

mission, however. When it comes to institutional missions, globalizing universities are

more often extensions of imperial practices, even if within them they offer opportunities

for a variety of globally critical and public intellectualities to flourish (Kennedy 2015:

58-63). The whiteness and imperial qualities of globalizing universities are readily

evident, much as the decolonizing movement marks.

Most US university international missions are led by white men, and occasionally

by white women. At Brown University, while collaborations between the leading unit on

campus articulating a global vision – the Watson Institute for International and Public

Affairs – and its more race-aware institutional partners occur, more general missions

cannot offend potential donors who do not share a Du Boisian kind of concern for racism

and empire (Du Bois 2007). Those ideals can, however, seek a “just and peaceful world”

https://watson.brown.edu/about. Who could object to such general values?

28

There are many good and not so good justifications for such evasion, of course,

but instead of searching for them and the defenses then mobilized to explain, one might

flip the question. Much as Kennedy, Kehal and Garbes (2018) ask what anti-racist

excellence looks like instead of asking how excellence and diversity are combined, we

could ask what would it take to define an alternative vision of globalizing knowledge so

that the whiteness of most such university ambitions is apparent.

Of course white supremacy has many different expressions. Andrea Smith (2006)

identifies three pillars -- the logics of slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism and

Orientalism/War -- in order to mark how racism not only expropriates, exploits, and

destroys different communities, but also mobilizes them to harm others. That kind of

linkage has been made explicit, too, in Brown’s student critiques of university practices

(e.g. Malik 2019).

It is of course productive to mark the limitations of any university’s scholarly

range, but it’s even more powerful to identify the forms of knowledge activism and

transformational solidarity that extend academic practice. In conclusion we consider, with

the different types of solidarity discussed above, how they variously figure in

decolonizing the university.

Direct and Categorical Solidarities

First and most obviously, universities do not move toward racial justice without

mobilizations by students, faculty, and communities so concerned. Direct solidarity

moved by proximate publics, in this case, almost always matters; it shapes who counts as

excluded and exploited. When Students of Color mobilize with their “constructive

irreverence”, they realize effect because they are the university’s most proximate public.

They also can extend recognition to those beyond campus.

29

For example, Brown University’s student protesters were among the most

powerful in noting that Brown’s DIAP ought to recognize local communities suffering

exclusion and oppression from Brown and other educational opportunities. They marked

Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Cape Verdean and Narragansett peoples in particular.

Being not only a global university, but one acknowledging its proximate environs, these

students argued Brown should develop more respectful and inclusive address beyond

broad statistical categories in registering diversity’s progress (Jerzyk 2015)

That kind of direct and proximate solidarity can translate into a more categorical

solidarity. If we can mark ways in which the authorities’ ancestors at Brown University

and its political environs expropriated land and wealth from its indigenous inhabitants,

we might also recognize the fates of other indigenous peoples too.

Native Americans at Brown, the student group associated with indigeneity, has

organized substantially around this. For instance, they sought to replace “Columbus

Day”; they argued that celebrating the Italian/Spanish explorer/conqueror’s “discovery”

of the “New World” should be replaced with a day recognizing indigenous peoples. A

student said that such an event is a way of “celebrating who we are as indigenous people

and making ourselves known and present on this campus… and to recognize that we as

Native Americans at Brown are part of a larger native community in this area and

globally” (Brown University 2017). The categorical solidarity of global indigeneity is one

of the ways in which questions of justice and internationalism combine.

Within universities, this articulation of indigenous voices seems to occur most

readily in units with commitments to environmental studies; at least it’s evident at Brown

with work by Lynch and Veland (2018) and Demuth (forthcoming). One of the three

30

Native American faculty at Brown, Elizabeth Hoover,

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/emhoover is also associated with environmental studies.

It also develops out of anthropology departments, especially those working to

figure the place of indigenous languages and their political articulations. Paja Faudree

and Kevin Escudero have moved this issue in collaborative, transnational, practice in

considering global legal and linguistic activism

https://watson.brown.edu/clacs/files/clacs/imce/people/visiting-faculty/2018-2019/

Sawyer%20Seminar%20program%20for%20public.pdf.

Individuals and units within universities associated with “internationalism” or

globalizing knowledge can engage indigenous students and scholars, and not only leave it

to them and their programs to articulate an alternative vision of the world and of the

university’s sense of indigenous place in it. But that can move into even more complex

cultural politics when peoples variously register as indigenous and colonizer.

Contesting Relational Solidarities

The far right US political website Breitbart noted with particularly hostile affect

how Palestinians might also claim that indigenous standpoint vis-à-vis Israel (Gellar

2018). Of course academic responsibility vis-à-vis Palestinian struggles and Israeli

politics is one of the most complex international questions facing US universities.

Relational solidarities emerge, and contest one another in sometimes exceptionally heated

fashion. What are the terms of family resemblances for solidarity beyond direct ties,

existing public spheres, or pre-existing categories of identification in this contest?

Perhaps the most elaborate discussion on this issue can be found in the American

Anthropological Association’s debate.

31

That association had a particularly challenging contest about its professional

responsibility here, and narrowly defeated a proposed boycott of Israeli academics and

their institutions. Analyzing the dynamics of this project is critical for any globalizing

knowledge with racial justice at its heart; the boycott’s advocates have offered an account

that goes beyond principles of academic freedom to analyze the sociological conditions

of its operation (Deeb and Winegar 2017). While Israel is not geographically close, the

implication of US power in Israeli politics, and vice versa, means that it demands

attention even by those focused only on American power. And this, then, illustrates

another principle at play: how to recognize responsibility and transform solidarities in

that wake.

Rather than consider only US citizens, one might propose that whenever US

power and privilege shapes the conditions of life for those beyond (and even within) the

USA itself, globalizing US universities ought to encourage their communities to address

the conditions and consequences of that association. That’s decolonizing. For those

concerned for diversity and inclusion within the USA, the Palestinian question becomes

especially obvious in these terms; for those elevating Blackness in the theory and practice

of diversity and inclusion, it is hard to ignore.

Gumbs (2014) has taught us, for example, about how June Jordan (1989) moved

from teaching Black English in the face of police brutality to render verse and affinity

with those facing evil elsewhere. Her poem:

I was born a Black woman

And now

I am become a Palestinian

Against the relentless laughter of evil

32

There is less and less living room

And where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home.iii

This expression of solidarity, composed originally in 1984, had prior roots and

additional extensions among Black intellectuals, creators, and activists (Kelley 2015). It

has even more contemporary expressions. The controversy over Marc Lamont Hill’s

recent pronouncement of solidarity with Palestinians (Erakat 2018) recently illustrates the

challenge. The end of the 2018-19 academic year at Brown University makes it clear.

A university coalition organized a referendum in which students were asked

whether Brown should “divest all stocks, funds, endowment and other monetary

instruments from companies complicit in human rights abuses in Palestine” and also

“establish a means of implementing financial transparency and student oversight of the

University’s investments.” With one of the highest turnouts in recent years (44% of the

student body), more than 2/3 of those voting supported divestment. Brown Students for

Israel, the student coalition opposing this call, argued that there were better ways to

pursue peace in the region (Guo 2019a). The university’s president agreed with the latter,

declaring that the university must avoid polarizations like what happened through this

referendum (Guo 2019b). A number of faculty in turn responded to support student

activism, arguing that polarization should not itself deter freedom of expression and

debate (Brown University Faculty Members, 2019).

We can see the difference in social justice struggles, where in some cases racism’s

injustice is manifest and student mobilization is welcome. In other cases, authorities and

others can declare peaceful struggle dangerous to the university’s culture of critical

discourse. Addressing relational solidarity helps us consider the conditions under which

33

university administrators welcome student activism, and not. That kind of relational

thinking can also help us see the challenge of recognition itself.

Relational Sociology’s Powers of Recognition

As we move across the world to consider those whose simultaneous difference

and implication in American power is at hand, we can see quite readily that US

conceptions of race hardly suffice when it comes to articulating diversity and recognizing

responsibility. US intervention in the Wars of Yugoslav Succession hardly compares to

the implication of the US in Israeli wars and politics, but US power has been critical to

saving Kosovar Albanians and defending Kosova’s sovereignty. That does not make

them familiar to most US students, much less citizens deserving of inclusion in

diversity’s talk, however.

Following a discussion of Du Boisian method at Brown University’s Center for

the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA 2017), Gusia and Kennedy engaged

his introductory class in sociology on how these principles might travel globally.

Building on their recently published essays (Gusia and Kennedy 2016), they invited the

class to consider whether the relations between Serbs and Albanians in Kosova,

culminating in the attempted ethnic cleansing of Albanians from the territory by Serbs,

could be considered an instance of the structural racism Du Bois and his followers

engage. Gusia discussed the fully subordinate and increasingly precarious position

Albanians suffered under Milosevic’s rule (see too Kennedy 2015:176-83).

Few in the class knew about the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, much less the

dynamics of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession. But even without that knowledge many

objected to any identification of Albanians with People of Color, and therefore worthy of

34

association with a struggle against racism. They are, several students said, white after all.

And when they leave their terrains, they can acquire all the privileges of whiteness.

While Gusia might explain how frequently she is asked “what are you?” in the

USA, the larger point is not about whether the Serb/Albanian relationship is racialized.

It’s just that the Du Boisian imaginary defies simple translation across all global spaces

evenly, even when racism and colonialism may define the terms of a global modernity

itself. But that very challenge offers an opportunity to globalize knowledge with racial

justice in mind.

This is also important in east Asia where it is also difficult to translate those

relations into US university diversity cultures. Kennedy has engaged this quite directly.

One student, herself of Chinese origins, approached him lamenting the treatment of other

east Asians by her Chinese citizen classmates. This led to extensive informal discussions

across campus about how to frame these issues. Indeed, Kennedy brought Dikotter (2015)

to many meetings, evoking considerable, albeit private, debate for Dikotter’s possible

relevance to extending the terms of diversity’s address in a university where engaging

East Asia is increasingly important.

While conventionally racist expressions by some Chinese folks against Black

people could be readily acknowledged as systematic, and problematic, whether Chinese

treatments of other peoples in its national and imperial imagination, from Korea to Tibet,

deserved a racialist if not racist label moved very different opinions among experts and

those from the region itself.

We should not be surprised by this disagreement, but we can be distressed by how

few were prepared to receive, much less recognize, this challenge. For many of those

without such ties, it was a non-issue; for even those with a conventional post-colonial

35

imagination, one that recognizes West European and US empires, Asian imperialisms and

associated racisms do not travel readily. In short, to recognize racism’s global realities,

one needs to go well beyond familiar oppressions and exclusions with some kind of

globalizing framework at hand. Decolonizing efforts might be the vehicle, but they also

need to go explicitly beyond West European and US empires, as Göcek (2013) reminds.

She exemplifies this effort not only in theory but practice too with her work on the

genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.

Systematic murders and ethnic cleansing are obvious in the memory of the

families of its victims, and in the documents of the time, and even in the memoirs of

Turkish officials (Göcek, 2015). But denial around this genocide motivates many, even

within US universities. In this century’s start, emissaries of the Turkish state, including

faculty, demanded the University of Michigan, and Kennedy, in his role of vice provost

for international affairs, assure that the university present a balanced view on 1915. They

denounced Göcek for failing, as a Turkish citizen, to perform her role to represent her

nation. It is hard to assume that the Turkish state, which denies genocide, and its victims,

simply has an alternative truth worthy of academic affirmation. Balance cannot be the

goal of globalizing knowledge with racial justice at heart. That’s easier to see when the

national and imperial histories can inform a university culture, but for globalizing

knowledge, familiarities cannot dictate the terms of justice. We can learn from the

Ottoman Empire, and Göcek.

When Göcek (2015:477) reflects on why she wrote her book about the denial of

collective violence against Armenians (and others) by Turks, she concludes,

collective violence infused into Turkish republic corrupted and undermined public

ethics. While Turks still abide by moral standards in their personal lives, all

36

complain about the lack of trust and respect in public life. Unless Turkish state

and society come to terms with the collective violence embedded in their past,

they will not be able to recover such trust and respect in their own state and

society… Only when we understand and come to terms with such collective

violence embedded in all of our pasts can we create a better future for our

descendants” (p. 477).

Not only should universities assure the academic freedom to enable scholars to undertake

such inquiry, but the international missions of universities could put engagement of

injustices at the heart of their academic charge. And in so doing, we might treat injustices

not only in their context, but relationally. After all, just as racial sensibilities don’t always

travel simply, notions of injustice can be challenging to appreciate without globalizing

knowledge.

Göcek’s scholarship is both impeccable and courageous, but it is not the kind of

work that inspires ready solidarities and vision for an alternative knowledge activism

from within the USA. It’s hard to recognize how the practices of the Ottoman empire,

and coming to terms with them, map onto the colonial legacies of the transatlantic given

conventional historical sensibilities. It’s even more challenging for a globalizing

university that too often sees little to decolonize in its own practices, and little whiteness

in their universalizing mission. It was very clear to Kennedy in his administrative role

that Turkish authorities sought to censor Göcek’s work. It took a steadfast commitment to

academic freedom by University of Michigan’s leading authorities to protect it. They

managed, but then Turkish pressure pales before other state and imperial expectations in

these times.

37

Debates like these in university campuses provide the opportunity to move well

beyond simple indicators of excellence with citation counts and the student experiences

large private endowments enable. They also invite us to move beyond phenotypical bean-

counting that accountabilities with statistics can invite in assessing the logics of diversity.

Globalizing knowledge can inform our own theories and practices of diversity and

inclusion, much as engaging theories and practices of diversity and inclusion ought to

move the worldly imaginations and practices of universities with soul.

That, however, might require that we take the transformational solidarities of

knowledge activism more seriously.

Transformational Solidarities of Knowledge Activism

To some degree, diversity has been a euphemism enabling those who feel racial

justice beyond the purview of a proper academic mission to accept the value of racial

diversity for making a better project in collective learning. Diversity can be diversion for

those who demand academic institutions recognize past and enduring racial injustice in

order to make amends with different admissions and curricular transformations. But we

do believe the discourse of diversity creates a space, given its legitimacy, for moving

racial justice if there is sufficient constructive irreverence and sociological imagination at

hand.

This combination is obvious on national terms, but it could be more powerful on

global terms too if solidarities could move beyond the direct and proximate, categorical,

and even the discursive affordances of dominant public spheres and their decolonizing

extensions. If we take the relational power of transformational solidarity seriously,

knowledge activism might realize a consequence beyond expectation. It might not only

38

“reveal” injustice and mobilize immanent solidarities. Its practice might help us to

envision them beyond existing networks and leading counter-hegemonic imaginaries.

Universities of course need to be grounded. Universities should have the most

profound obligations to those indigenous communities on whose land they sit, as Brown

University does the Narragansett and Wampanoag. That recognition can move the

university as community and its authorities to consider commitments to others too, to a

more distant Navajo nation, to indigenous Hawaiians, to the first nations of Canada, and

to other indigenous peoples across the world. The expropriation of the indigenous was

not just the act of particular settlers, but those particular actions were part of a larger

systemic transformation that reallocated resources toward some, even while expropriating

others and their descendants.

This solidarity from those most proximate to a categorical solidarity with the

indigenous is relatively secure in oppositional terms, and might be developed ever more

consequentially with articulations of institutional responsibility. Actors within

universities, without much institutional transformation, could realize just that by

considering, for example, how indigenous rights and communities could be put to the

center of international and global research, teaching, and engaged learning. Some

environmental institutes already do this. In this effort, it would be difficult to imagine

globalizing knowledge without racial justice in mind, notably that which recognizes the

dispossessions with which the modern world system has been made.

That’s different from the ways in which the Black Diaspora has been by and large

made. From Frantz Fanon through Audre Lord and beyond, a globalizing university that

recognizes the power of Blackness to challenge conventions of white supremacy in

definitions of security, universality, and freedom should seem obvious. But often these

39

global articulations are provincialized within Africana Studies and their associated

knowledge cultures, making the whiteness of university-wide international studies even

more evident. But whiteness has been challenged in many other parts of universities;

what’s the difference?

If we can articulate and act on those injustices within the USA, it seems hard to

deny the value and importance of moving theory and practice around racial justice toward

others whose lands have been expropriated, whose lives have been denied, whose bodies

and minds have been shackled and destroyed across the world. This movement in

globalizing knowledge is not unprecedented, of course, and rather has ample historic

precedent.

To move from Black Solidarity within the USA to the struggle against apartheid

in South Africa was obvious at the time, but today Palestinian solidarity does not enjoy

similar readiness. These political contests deserve more critical engagement, not only in

terms of debate, but in joining philosophical principles around academic freedom to

sociological studies addressing the conditions of recognition and influence in academic

life. We need to be mindful of how various principles of diversity and inclusion can be

mobilized against one another in order to reproduce dubious claims to innocence in a

world powerfully interconnected. Denial and ignorance are not vehicles for mobilizing

globalizing knowledge with racial justice at heart.

In such work we can also consider how racializations work beyond the USA, and

even beyond the racial logics of west European empires, in order to address how other

empires figure their people’s differences, oppressions, and claims to redress and justice.

With Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, Israel, the former Yugoslavia

and Soviet Union in mind, decolonizing struggles in these places can help us imagine the

40

variations of intellectual and institutional responsibilities universities have to variously

racialized publics across the world.

Solidarities might be conceived in categorical terms defined by western imperial

oppressions, as the decolonizing movement suggests. While that, by itself, more than

inspires, we might also consider how our knowledge activisms could be informed by

translating injustices across different parts of empire – as we have seen in the dialogue

among Palestinians and those in the Black diaspora – and across empires themselves.

Work by Göcek, Gusia, and Korhonen inspire.

It would be sociologically naïve, however, to fail to acknowledge that some

academic solidarities are easier than others. Academic freedom’s defense is obvious in a

world that values freedoms more generally. It’s harder for skeptics to deny the justice of

solidarity with those whose lands were stolen to enable your university’s construction, or

from which people have been expelled or whose slave labor was used to build its

infrastructure. It might also be easier to acknowledge injustice for those peoples, and to

define a principled solidarity in that recognition, when there are no consequences for that

knowledge activism. However, it also becomes harder to recognize racism and

imperialism when distinctions among peoples are harder for outsiders to appreciate, or

when sophisticated information campaigns are at work to diminish injustices by

scapegoating the innocent, or at least those less criminal. And that’s where globalizing

knowledge might sit with justice.

Globalizing knowledge with racial justice at heart is not only about scaling up to

recognize colonial and imperial injustices but also their proximate expressions in

university environs. It’s not only about recognizing categorical similarities among

indigenous communities and across the Black diaspora, but also to figure directly how

41

social relations connect universities as institutions, and their ecosystem, to those thefts of

land, labor, and life itself. And it’s about supporting the work to learn across the

expropriated, to do the work of connection and translation that enables mutual

recognition of analogous fates, even when empires are not familiar, as the Ottoman is not

in most US circles. And in this, we might move a knowledge activism to develop a

transformational solidarity that moves more globally articulated, and better, futures.

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EVENT COMMENTARIES

Notes in anticipation of "Global Imagination after Versailles: Alternative Histories of Social Science in Eastern Europe" has been accepted for the 51th Annual ASEEES Convention to be held at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, November 23-26, 2019. 

Chair: Maria Todorova, mtodorov@illinois.edu, U of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignRoundtable Member: Małgorzata Mazurek, mm4293@columbia.edu, Columbia URoundtable Member: Michael Kennedy, Michael_Kennedy@brown.edu, Brown URoundtable Member: Katherine Lebow, katherine.lebow@chch.ox.ac.uk, Oxford U (UK)Roundtable Member: Mirjam Voerkelius, mirjamvoerkelius@gmail.com, UC BerkeleyRoundtable Member: Joanna Wawrzyniak, wawrzyniakj@is.uw.edu.pl, U of Warsaw (Poland)The Panel Abstract:

With the ‘global turn’ in social and humanistic sciences, one often wonders: does Eastern Europe generate ‘world-scale’ ideas? As historians have critically examined geopolitical hierarchies in the making of ‘global knowledge,’ the history of science can be now, in principle, be told from any place where people have reimagined their relationship to a shared global modernity. This panel addresses the salience of this insight for modern Eastern Europe, building on a recently published special issue of Contemporary European History edited by the three panelists (Katherine Lebow, Małgorzata Mazurek and Joanna Wawrzyniak). This roundtable looks at scholarly innovations to tell an alternative history of science. Its point of departure is that post-Versailles Central Eastern and Southeastern Europe – parallel to late imperial Russia and early Soviet Union - were particularly fertile spaces for the production and circulation of social scientific ways of knowing. Our agenda is to recover the radical and world-scale potential of some of these forgotten projects. In this sense, the panel discusses scholars and ideas who have fallen through the cracks of binary ‘cold war’ and ‘center-periphery’ histories, and ethnocentrism. It also considers how the geopolitical shift from a world of empires to one of nation states, which started in the Balkans and East Central Europe in 1918 and continued in dependent and colonial territories after 1945, impacted knowledge globally. The proposed roundtable will explore these global aspects of Eastern European science, bringing together scholars of social and human sciences driven by broader questions of historical epistemology.

My remarks:

I am so grateful to participate in this discussion, and am so grateful for the collection inspiring this assembly. I especially appreciate the introduction by Lebow, K., Mazurek, M. and Wawrzyniak, J. 2019. To Making Modern Social Science: The Global

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Imagination in East Central and Southeastern Europe after Versailles. Contemporary European History 28: 137–142, doi:10.1017/ S0960777318000474

This collection, and discussion obviously has so much to say to my last volume, Globalizing Knowledge. I finished writing in 2014, and it appeared in 2015. In the years since that volume, I have taken up much more seriously post-colonial and Du Boisian intellectual initiatives, and left my focus on Central and Eastern Europe a bit behind. I appreciate being able to return to it with this panel.

1. I would consider this special issue with its focus on central and eastern Europe to be a critical complement to the more substantial efforts developed under the rubric of postcolonial studies with its focus on trans-oceanic empires. I am especially gratified to see how, in this collection, we move beyond the familiar European and transatlantic networks in which ECE intellectuals and ideas are most typically embedded to see gestures toward the articulation of the postcolonial and the postcommunist. The only one recent publication I might wish to acknowledge is Lenny A. Ureña Valerio ’s “Colonial Fantasies, Imperial RealitiesRace Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920.”

2. We are invited here to consider whether ECE generates any world scale ideas, and if so, how.

When I used to lead a lecture course on ECE at University of Michigan, I would invite the class to consider what made the region distinctive. I proposed that we might try to explain the prominence of the arts – plastic, musical, and literary – to rest in the contradictory existence the elites of this region experienced, with as much intellectual culture as one could imagine, and as white as those with empires abroad, but without the economic development or political power that was supposed to come with knowledge and racial privilege. They might aspire to make up for it with artistic accomplishment. That’s less true with social science.

So, before we ask what world class ideas ECE has generated, we might begin by comparing knowledge cultural fields, and ask for what kinds of knowledge cultural products are ECE folks best known, and which are they least known?

3. That last sentence invites a critical complement. Among whom are these products and producers best or least known? In this conference, where English is lingua franca, where American referents and knowledge cultures are unifying, it is still more multi-lingual, and internationally referent, than my more familiar sociology culture, EVEN when we claim to be global and transnational. BTW, for the next ASA meeting, I’m organizing a session with this as its premise:

4. Finally, what do we mean by ideas? Are they free floating or attached to a scholar, school, or a knowledge network?

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Durkheim’s ideas around cohesion were certainly powerful, and moved Czarnowski’s work, as I learned from Joanna’s contribution to this volume. But Czarnowski’s work on St Patrick, while influencing James Joyce, must have realized their influence in French, and neither in Polish, or English. And Czarnowski’s influence is enabled by his attachment to the Durkheimian school, initially, but was extended by his shifting intellectual locations in Polish higher education subsequently.

Indeed, one of his students was an economic historian whose 17 citations in Wallerstein’s first volume on the modern world system would suggest great indirect influence. But I doubt few in this room would be able to name that scholar besides Joanna, and even fewer would recognize his link to Czarnowski.

This particular illustration suggests that when we think about prominent ideas we need to be specific about their variations. Ron Suny and I tried to develop that approach to variation, by the way, in Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation back in 1999.

5. Rather than ideas, I find it easier to think more about individuals and schools and particular cultural products. When I prepared a paper for the Polish Sociological Association meeting in 2004, for instance, I tried to figure out how to measure the prominence of Poland in the American sociological imagination over the last century, and its variation by decade. In some decades, issues associated with Poland moved substantial amounts of scholarly attention. In the 1980s, of course, the Solidarity movement inspired.

In the 1920s, Znaniecki’s work with Thomas moved more discussion than any other particular piece of scholarship. And that has had a path dependent effect – anyone who talks immigration should talk about the Polish peasant in Europe and America.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mel Kohn’s work first with Wesolowski, but then especially with Slomczynski, became especially prominent. They inspired a number of high quality publciations, and were especially prominent within their school. But their work did not travel too far.

Ivan Szelenyi’s work did. But even here, we might struggle with what prominent means within the body of his work. Clearly, he is best known for his work on the intelligentsia’s class position and politics, during and after communism; it resontated powerfully with discussions in the late 1970s and 1980s about new class theories. Even today a new volume is forthcoming with a number of folks in it demonstrating his significance in sociology; he was the only east European Miguel Centeno and I found to make the top 10 influentials in US sociology.

But what did Szelenyi find to be his most critical work at the turn of the century? Socialist Entrepreneurs. Its reception was disappointing, and hardly what he would have expected.

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6. There are other ways I worked this out, but here’s the point: I tried to explain prominence of Polish and east central European ideas, intellectuals, and issues. The volume we discuss does something different. It explores why some ECE ideas, intellectuals, and issues are not as prominent as they ought to be. That, of course, has great resonance in American sociology nowadays.

7. One of the most important books in the last decade has been A Scholar Denied, about WEB Du Bois by Aldon Morris. Indeed, its engagement would even work well on this panel, as it features the exchanges between Max Weber and Du Bois, and the importance the former attributed to the work of the latter.

In fact, I’ve taken that encounter one step further recently to consider how a Du Boisian approach might resonate, and challenge, the approach Kloskowska takes to majorities and minorities in ECE. I wonder, in fact, why Du Bois is not more substantially engaged in Poland… are the reasons the same for why he was denied in the USA?

8. That’s partially an aside, but here’s the commonality: Morris wrote that volume on Du Bois not just to explain his denial, but to challenge the authority and power structures of US Sociology in order to elevate Du Bois. And in that wake, various assemblies of Du Boisian scholarship emerged to elevate the significance of that work with a coherence that reflects Du Bois himself, including DuBoisianNetwork.com, stating this: “Seeking to enact emancipatory change both within and beyond the academy, we advance a critical intellectual agenda, collaborate with communities and movements, and create scholarly support systems for this work”.

Would this initiative, could this discussion, have a similar coherence?

9. Based on those readings, and some of my own prior work, then, I’d like to propose that we think in comparative terms, with likelihoods shaping our approach. Here are a few propositions.

a) ECE Ideas are more prominent to the extent they are associated with already prominent intellectuals, schools, or networks;

b) ECE ideas are more prominent to the extent that they inform issues that are important beyond the region as such, or articulated in such terms;

c) ECE ideas are more prominent to the extent a global discourse, in English, magnifies their public;

d) ECE ideas are more significant to the extent they are embedded in a genealogy where they are not easily overlooked;

e) ECE ideas are more critical when they enter a contradictory space and transform its sense;

f) ECE ideas are more important to the extent they move beyond their particular fields, and enter into a broader public or cultural space.

The work we do here in effect increases likelihoods across all the intellectuals and ideas we discuss.

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I drew upon past work, including

(2015) Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation (Stanford University Press) (for the book’s commentaries, etc. see https://www.academia.edu/27756653/Extensions_of_Globalizing_Knowledge )

which draws upon

(1999) “Poland’s Critical Sociological Significance: A Comparative and Historical Approach to a Nation and Difference”, pp. 239-63 in A. Jasinska-Kania, M. L. Kohn and K.M. Slomczynski (eds.) Power and Social Structure: Essays in Honor of Wlodzimierz Wesolowski. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

(1999) “Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation” (Michael D. Kennedy and Ronald Grigor Suny) pp. 1-51 in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy (eds.) Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation.

(1999) “Towards a Theory of National Intellectual Practice” (Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy) pp. 383-417 in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy (eds.) Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation.

(2004) “Poland in the American Sociological Imagination” Polish Sociological Review 4(148) ’04 361-83 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241669781_Poland_in_the_American_Sociological_Imagination and in Wlodzimierz Wesolowski and Jan Wlodarek (eds.) Polska, Europa, Swiat (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe SCHOLAR)

(2007) “Internationalism and Global Transformations in American Sociology” (Michael D. Kennedy and Miguel Centeno) pp 666-712 in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Sociology in America: A History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/An American Sociological Association Centennial Publication).

(2013) “Mobilizing Justice across Hegemonies in Place: Critical Postcommunist Vernaculars” pp. 385-408 in Jan Kubik and Amy Linch, eds. Post-Communism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony. New York: SSRC/NYU Press.

And I’ve written these subsequently, but they are relevant:

(forthcoming) “Normative Frames and Systemic Imperatives: Gouldner, Szelényi and New Class Fracture” in pp 25-51 in Tamás Demeter and Katalin Füzér (eds.), Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Prospects for a Critical Sociology Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2019.

(under review) “National Cultures and Racial Formations: Articulating the Knowledge Cultures of Kłoskowska and Du Bois”

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10/24/18 "Facts, Objects, and Visions in the Design of Globalizing Knowledge"Center for Advanced Study MillerComm2019, Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:00pm Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum 600 South Gregory, UrbanaUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Since the publication of Globalizing Knowledge (2015), I have engaged in a number of global conversations with radically different scopes of imagination, principles of design, and visions of consequence in the articulation of transformative knowledge cultures. In this presentation, I juxtapose three: a) a technocratic approach to governing the future, associated with the Oxford Martin Commission and Pascal Lamy https://www.feps-europe.eu/resources/publications/532-prioritising-people-and-planet-a-new-agenda-for-global-progress.html ; b) the pragmatic imagination of ecosystemic design associated with the work of Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown http://www.pragmaticimagination.com/; and c) an AfroFuturism made popular by the cinematic debut of the Black Panther and the more transgressive works of John Jennings, Stacey Robinson and others https://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Underground-Grimoire-Speculative-Discontent/dp/1941958788. This comparison illuminates radically different assumptions about innovation's source. More importantly, it moves possibilities in the design of knowledge networks and their public effervescence by establishing a different sense of connection among facts, objects, and visions in the design of globalizing knowledge. 

10/19-20/18 “Knowledge and Learning in the Transition to and in the Defense of Democracy: Commonalities and Contradictions in the Transformations of Knowledge Activism” for The Graduate School for Social Research, Institute of Philosophy and SociologyPolish Academy of Sciences, A conference inaugurating the new academic year“Pivotal Ideas of the Last 30 Years: Democracy, Society and Markets at the Turn of the Century, October 19th-20th, 2018, with Organizers, Michał Federowicz, Jan Kubik, and Andrzej Leder

Knowledge and learning do not function in the same ways in stable democracies and when cast in opposition to political authorities. But they also function differently when cast in opposition to communist rule and in opposition to populist illiberal rule. I synthesize various accounts of the forms of domination characterized by each of these anti-democratic governmentalities. In particular, I emphasize their modes of truth telling and knowledge denigrations. I also elaborate forms of learned resistance. With these practices in mind, I propose a set of cultural rules and resources animating each epoch’s contradictions and conflicts around knowledge and learning. I am especially interested with this ideal typical contrast to refine knowledge activism’s quest to realize a more consequential culture of critical discourse animating public life.

Communist rule depended on, among other things, a kind of social schizophrenia in which publics knew socialism’s radiance was but an occasionally good paint job, and

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certainly not based on good engineering, much less one with the sense of an open and critical social science grounded in intellectual and moral integrity. Nonetheless, intellectuals and their institutions and networks could delight in their influence; in speaking truth to power, or accommodating power with compromised if not captive minds, knowledge and learning could also be painted as consequential. Furthermore, in resistance to communism’s systemic lie, pluralism, legality, and publicity could animate an inclusive opposition with intellectuals leading in that civil society’s definition, with flying universities as one of its best expressions. The limits of this hegemonic counter-hegemony only become evident when knowledge and learning is expected to defend democracy after democratic transition was thought realized. Populist illiberalism denigrates the refined understanding communist rule unintentionally elevated, and threatens most intellectuals and their institutions and networks as potentially alien to the soul of the people privileged by a nation’s cultural presumption. In this circumstance, new strategies for managing public relations, most notably around diminishing perceived gaps between intellectuals and the common sense and cultural soul of a nation’s anxious, need be found. I review several ideas for that knowledge activism in conclusion.

11 Theses Beyond Globalizing Knowledge

Michael D. Kennedy

July 8, 2017

I can think of few more appropriate settings to discuss my 11 theses of Globalizing Knowledge than in European Humanities University’s Second Year Seminar Retreat focusing on the development of an integrated social science curriculum. I am struck to see how many themes I raise in my book’s conclusion resonate with issues you face, especially when you think about how European Humanities University might, itself, be a case for your study.

Let me offer 11 theses beyond my book that might be relevant to what you discuss here today, and what you plan in the future. But first let me clarify what I mean by “globalizing knowledge”.

What is Globalizing Knowledge?

GK refers to “the process by which distant regions’ knowledgeabilities are implicated in the particular cultures fusing those understandings. The form of GK will vary given the different historical and institutional contexts that shape such learning GK is, therefore, relationally composed. The Sociology of GK concerns the conditions, manners, and implications of that fusion.” (p. 9)

In the book called GK, I considered “different kinds of knowledge agents among intellectuals, institutions, and networks along with their media.” I addressed “their foci and partners in publics, contexts, and flows. I developed these explorations with an eye toward making explicit the schemas extending cosmopolitan intellectuality and

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consequential solidarity, particular expressions of intellectual and institutional responsibility” (p.316). But you don’t have to follow all that I did. Let’s really begin with a brief recounting of where I suspect we all agree with the first thesis.

1. Knowledge matters, but for whom and for what? Clearly we cannot answer this question in general. But we need foundational methods to figure how we answer these questions for whom and for what knowledge matters. Those methods include being able to understandA) the meanings of particular questions on their own terms;B) how different kinds of actors variably value those questions and answers;C) the implications of different questions and answers for different kinds of

actors; and D) how engagements of these matters differ across global contexts.

This is clearly a hermeneutic sociology.

2. Hermeneutics is a great method. I have developed my own method in Globalizing Knowledge by borrowing from hermeneutics; I was delighted to see that student Anastasiya Tumel declared yesterday it to be one of their favorite concepts, and even words! I propose that for any question we must

A) recognize the matter first within its own context, by understanding it in terms of how those most directly implicated “understand” the issue;

B) see then how, if we are not part of that context, work to “translate” that issue into something we ourselves understand, fusing our understandings in a kind of dyadic translation;

C) then figure its implication in a more general system of meaning – what enables it first to be recognized, and how might we translate that recognition so that the original framework is itself deepened and broadened. Whether our original framework is individual dignity or global sustainability, acquiring and then expanding insights from contexts insufficiently recognized or misunderstood in that framework is part of globalizing knowledge.

3. Language, Power and Identity: We need to consider what kinds of learning is necessary to be able to ask these questions meaningfully, to develop hermeneutic methods in the social science, and to think about globalizing knowledge as something other than a projection of our predispositions onto others’ realities. And that begins with learning languages.

A) Language learning is critical. English IS a global language, and thus Americans are privileged. Indeed, that you all discuss in English because of my lacks in Russian and Belarussian indicate just how much privilege there is.

B) To ask what language beyond English Americans learn is different from asking what languages beyond Belarusian and Russian you learn. To figure that answer is meaningful – for what languages you learn ultimately determines your points of reference and what you value, what cultural treasures you celebrate, and what peoples will embrace you more readily than

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others. It seems quite appropriate to learn Lithuanian given the hospitality of this nation to you, even if it is less globally useful. On the other hand, learning it, like learning Korean as one of your students intends, makes you far more distinctive than learning German or French, even if those languages make you “more European”.

C) These questions of language are tied to the sociological imagination, a course I just taught at Brown University this past term. It’s on my mind.

4. What is the Sociological Imagination in the 21st century? A) C. Wright Mills wrote the book in the 20th, and identified three questions

central to that imagination: a) What is the structure of society as a whole?b) Where does this society stand in the whole of human history?c) What varieties of men and women prevail in this society?

B) A decade and a half later, Anthony Giddens wrote in Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction, that sociology is composed of three kinds of imaginations:a) The historical – much like Mills, how to recognize the place of a society in

history;b) The anthropological – unlike Mills, introducing the question of societal

differences in cultural and power terms, not only in evolutionary terms; and

c) The critical: how we can combine variations over time and space to be able to imagine alternative futures for the worlds we inhabit. We might use other terms Giddens uses elsewhere for this too: sociology is about increasing our reflexivity, our capacity to understand what we are doing and why we are doing it in order to better monitor our actions and decide best courses. Globalizing Knowledge is, itself, an exercise in this, an exploration of intellectual and institutional responsibility for those that believe knowledge matters.

C) Questions like these are foundational, it seems to me, to discussing social science: one needs an approach to figuring the place of one’s own location in global history and global power relations of the present. And that’s important to increase the reflexivity of the EHU project.

D) At the same time, it seems like these reflexive approaches could be enhanced by a more refined approach to thinking about structure and agency, or the conditions of social transformation. In my book, I emphasize Bill Sewell’s work, and name his approaches to structure and agency the “Sewellian list”:

E) I have synthesized his approach to transformation with five aspects that, for ease of reference, I call the Sewellian list in Globalizing Knowledge. The first three are especially helpful when it comes to structural approaches to transformation. The latter two are useful when we emphasize changes in knowledgeability.

1) The multiplicity of structures: any social unit is going to be composed of a variety of structures which are unlikely to be entirely homologous or in synchrony with one another. This variety of structures can lead to conflicting claims and social conflicts.

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2) Unpredictability of resource accumulation: enactments of schemas can produce quite unforeseen outcomes, and those outcomes, if sufficiently altering the power relations in a given social unit, lead to a transformation of structure.3) The intersection of structures: structures with different schemas and different resources overlap and interact in any given setting, making their smooth reproduction always potentially problematic given the contradictions that could emerge from their contact.4) The polysemy of resources: the multiplicity of meaning potentially attached to any set of resources means that these resources can be interpreted in different ways, with various consequences for social transformation. Those with greater authority in interpretation, with greater knowledge, have disproportionate power in this transformation.5) The transposibility of schemas: actors are capable of taking schemas or rules learned inone context and apply them to another. While this capacity is also universally distributed, those with a wider knowledge of different contexts, and different rules across those contexts, should have disproportionate influence in shaping change, ceteris paribus.

This approach to structure and agency could help address the next thesis.

5. What is EHU’s Sociological Imagination?

A) To think in terms of Mills and Giddens could increase EHU’s historical awareness: to be able to imagine where a society is located in global history is critical; indeed, to understand Europe and your place in Europe is obviously important.

B) That Anthropological awareness is also important for recognizing various points of view on your own project. Here, a critical note: it’s fully understandable why EHU focuses on its Europeanness, but to those from the Global South, or even from the USA, this identification misses the problem of imperialism in constituting the geopolitical epistemologies (the concentration my former student, Bee Vang, developed, and undertook, at Brown University)

C) Geopolitical epistemology part 2: While those from the Global South might critique EHU Eurocentrism, those from EHU might critique their naivete about how geopolitical epistemics works in this part of the world, where the most obvious imperial contest setting the conditions of possibility is one between Russia and the European Union;

D) As we introduce epistemology and reflexivity into our discussions, however, we must also introduce Normativity: how do we recognize better and worse conditions for the flourishing of the human experience and for societies and globalities? Anatoliy regularly introduces these questions, asking you to consider why you consider the imagined future of EHU practice superior to that which Lukashenko offers. You need a robust answer as to why, not only for the sake of philosophy, but for justifying your own investments here.

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E) You are not alone: my students and I from my introductory sociology course last term worked hard at identifying how society, and the world, are changing in the Time of Trump. Among our conclusions were not only that he was introducing greater measures of hatefulness and white patriarchal supremacy, but also that he was destroying our confidence in our ability to recognize facts, and to value truthfulness. Of course this is nothing new to those who have experienced communist rule, but it also means that those who know how to understand communist rule and its aftermath might be able to understand better the world that is being made more generally.

F) I would propose, in this globalizing knowledge problematic, that you think about how your own analysis of the EHU experience could in fact inform the analysis of places and spaces beyond EHU. In fact, think about how you can bring others into the analysis of your work, those who don’t recognize its initial premise, but can think with you about its proposed extension. I certainly would help you in this.

G) Indeed, you can think about what your values are, your historical trajectory has been, and your comparisons are and how that could inform the open society mission. Given what has happened to CEU in the last year, and what has happened analogous to EHU on that, there is one and important place to start. But you must begin by thinking about how to analyze EHU’s structural location.

6) What is EHU’s Structural Location?A) Most universities establish their structural location with reference to rankings

in a globalizing world. Can EHU play in that game? In some ways yes, but you also should think about how EHU is different.

B) It is not a state institution like most universities in Europe and many in the world. However, it does receive support from a variety of state actors, including Lithuania, Sweden, and the European Union. It is also dependent, like many other universities are increasingly, on the support of private actors. What does that mean?

C) Here, the idea that universities must be free and autonomous is a myth we need to preserve; we need to act as if we are free in order to maximize our value; at the same time, we need to be able to understand what enables actors with resources to support universities. We need to demonstrate the functional value of universities. (Chapter 3 in Globalizing Knowledge discusses all this at length).

D) Here, then, we need to be able to establish how EHU is important; other universities typically demonstrate that with the STEM disciplines, for they are the value beyond politics, what the Chinese are increasingly investing in to elevate their universities beyond others in the world. What can EHU do?

E) EHU has more purchase on, and potential access to, elevating the value of truthfulness in the world. This is not just a humanities question, as discussion yesterday suggested. It is also a question of looking at evidence critically; figuring how to research questions properly; and even figuring out what are the more important questions to ask. In our intro class, we asked not only

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about fake news, but how hateful speech distracts us from asking about more important questions about the allocation of resources toward a sustainable and just society.

7) What is EHU’s Place in History?A) For the most part, EHU is considered as an institution exiled from a nation

that has not taken the course of transition that the rest of Europe has. In this, for nearly 25 years, EHU has been seen as vanguard, Belarus as laggard, in the realization of democratic capitalism.

B) In recent years, however, Belarus seems to have anticipated some things to which the West has itself returned: authoritarianism, the elevation of alternative facts, careful control of borders, denial of western universalism.

C) Within this context, we see the rise of the global south, or at least of China and to some extent India, which is largely invisible in EHU’s sense of self;

D) We also see the rise of Russia exemplifying what I have called Ubermensch Escapism, an emphasis on will over rules, on power over collaboration, on the concentration of resources rather than its pluralization, on the rise of executive power rather than legislative governance, all conditions we see elsewhere in the world;

E) We also see what Saskia Sassen has identified as a trend toward expulsion rather than inequality as a condition defining our times. EHU has itself experienced that too, but by virtue of its survival, indicates the problem of defining what the boundaries of a system are;

F) So much of social science is built up around the notion of stable boundaries – among societies, of individuals, of communities. Boundaries are not so stable as the late 20th century suggested, due to war and flows of money, people, wealth and weapons (see GK’s Chapter on Flows).. We need to think about the character of the world in which EHU finds itself, in order that it recognize better its universality and particularity. I use other terms.

8) What is EHU’s Cosmopolitanism and Ethnocentrism?

A) In order to introduce truthfulness to the core of what you do, you need to think more about your own forms of cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism, and figure out how to bridge your core questions to those others care about.

B) Open Society questions are clearly central to that; but that kind of cosmopolitanism will connect you to some and not to others.

C) Analysing Gender and Sexuality is one of the most effective forms of globalizing knowledge; to incorporate that into your work in the coming year seems critical, not only for an analysis of EHU, but also to analyze how gender and sexuality work in the region to structure power and privilege.

D) Race is one of the most complex forms for globalizing knowledge – it is one of the most powerful vehicles for explaining how power works variously but coherently across the world; but its relationship to ethnicity is among the most important issues to consider. I’m part of a DuBoisian group at Brown that is working to figure how his work might be extended; one of our network is in Kosova, Linda Gusia, and she and I are working to extend those DuBoisian

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frameworks into an analysis of the Serbian/Kosovar relationship. An interview with Linda is forthcoming in this series.

E) In short, you need to deepen your expertise on the arenas in which you are distinctive, which, to my mind, is on how to develop open societies out of more closed ones, and how to recognize that process of reversal that we see across Europe. But that will be enhanced if you can think about how it relates to other forms of critical thinking, notably around gender, race, sexuality, and empires beyond those in which you are immediately implicated.

9) What are EHU’s Publics?

A) For most universities, the public imagined is that of the surrounding community or nation; that’s not so simple for EHU. I would propose that you consider researching what this actually means in the coming year, and move beyond the 20th century imaginations that have structured most university sensibilities of publics. You are tied to Belarus – in your mission; to Vilnius and Lithuania -- your proximate environ; to the European Union – your principal funder and reference; to Russia – who makes claim to owning the dominant language of your instruction and to protecting people who speak it; but what methods could you use to go beyond these apparent public relations? The fourth chapter of GK is devoted to this question of publics, but you might also keep up with the work of my university’s center on the cutting edge of this conception: the Swearer Center.

B) One of the most productive transformations in the social sciences over the last decade has been to move away from categorical thinking and toward relational thinking – the idea that the relationship among the parts is more important than the qualities of any part. Here, we analyze this in terms of networks and flows. The simplest way to signal this method is to do what Latour does, and “follow the thing”.

C) To “follow the thing” in imagining EHU’s relations could help you identify publics bya) Asking not only what languages are used in which courses, and what

original languages are referenced in which translations, but also which languages are used and how for different career trajectories, and how that is reflected in EHU’s own modes of instruction and governance;

b) Asking where and how students and alumni travel within their EHU time and beyond it. Can you map that travel?

c) Could you do a network analysis of various aspects of your institution? Consider, for example, with whom your professors collaborate in writing papers or conference participation? With whom do you collaborate in social media? Indeed, what your network might look like through selfies?

d) What about if you were to expect students to develop experiential learning with businesses, non-governmental organizations, and other bodies? Could you analyze your public engagements beyond categorical identities like nations or places? Even analyze what types of organizations, what distances from home and EHU, these ties represent? And how that itself reflects a more nuanced network identity than categorical identities?

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D) If we think about knowledge as a public good, which publics seem to benefit most from the production of EHU knowledge? How would you map that? Look at the readerships of its publications? The places that employ EHU alumni? The political figures and business leaders who invoke EHU itself? And how do they use and invoke all of these things?

E) Could you imagine producing a network that might itself elevate EHU status? This is not a public relations campaign simply, but consider the comparison: how do intellectuals acquire celebrity and global recognition? In my book, I discussed the case of Ashraf Ghani at some length. How might CEU learn from that trajectory? Or from that of Vaclav Havel? Even more, could you imagine developing something akin to Jadaliyya? What most closely approximates that in the Russian and English speaking worlds? Why and how do such public humanities and social science networks vary across different global contexts in the way that they do?

10) What is EHU’s mission beyond the production of outstanding students?

A) To survive as an institution, yes, but also to exist as a reminder of what an alternative conception of Belarusian intellectual and political responsibility is. And by virtue of that practice, create an alternative future for Belarus. Yes. But what else?

B) It seems too that EHU’s mission could be to help us refine, and elevate, what solidarity and hospitality mean. The institution as such is defined by this, but can this be more than a condition of gratitude and appreciation? And rather an object of investigation that itself might inspire more examples of this?

C) Above all, in a world that celebrates America first or Great Russia, or Brexit, or growing racism against refugees, or growing discourses declaring the inevitability of the war of civilizations, it seems that EHU could become a beacon of hope and meaning for what it means to combine scholarship and solidarity and hospitality.

D) Those associated with EHU have already experienced so much of this solidarity and hospitality I celebrated in my address to your 2017 graduation ceremony. I had not sufficiently appreciated, however, that this even preceded your arrival in Lithuania, and that you also experienced this when EHU was closed down and so many students were able to complete their degrees elsewhere, most notably with some 60 students in Smolny .

E) It is not easy to develop the notion of solidarity in scholarly work given how much we are encouraged to think first of ourselves and our own careers, about how good our ideas are rather than think about what ideas are best for all, and how to recognize that Aufhebung. But if any place could benefit from such disposition, it is EHU for EHU needs solidarity to thrive, and perhaps, we should say frankly, to survive. It has already enjoyed a substantial commitment over these nearly 25 years from scholars and students within the institution, and from a variety of actors across the world. That commitment is even more important, how, for the future.

11) Globalizing Knowledge Changes the World, but how?

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You tell me how EHU does it. And might do more of it. And why that’s good not just for EHU but for Belarus, for Lithuania, for the EU, for the world.

July 8, 2017 (notes for my) European Humanities University Graduation Addresshttps://www.facebook.com/pg/EHUOfficial/videos/?ref=page_internal

Michael D. Kennedy

Salutations to President Mikhailov, Acting Rector Jørgensen, my fellow Governing Board members, Ambassadors and Members of the European Parliament and Seimas, distinguished guests, the families of our graduates, and above all the 2017 graduates of European Humanities University.

You, my dear graduates, are those we honor today. Congratulations.

Шчыра віншую вас усіх! Мы гордимся вами! Сегодня – ваш день. Šiandien mes švenčiame kartu su Jumis! To jest wielka przyjemność dla mnie, dzisiaj być razem z wami

While we might learn much in English across the world, we cannot learn to think across the world without working in multiple languages. But because you are all listening to me now, you already know that. So let me tell you something you may not expect.

But first, let me explain why I am dressed this way.

This is how professors dress in the summertime.

I joke.

This is how we dress at our graduations. And depending on where we received our PhD, we have different colors in our gowns, and even in the styles of hat we wear. This gown is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is Carolina Blue. But I just wore it at Brown University when we graduated our students a month ago.

I know this outfit may be a little gaudy, but I asked your president whether it might be ok. He said it would be great. He knows his fashion, doesn’t he?

But let’s move away from how I am dressed right now, and think about the future.

When I think about the future, when we think about the future, we think about you.

We put our trust, our faith, in you.

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You represent the future.

But you are also grounded.

You are grounded in the venerable tradition of great European Universities.

But great universities cannot remain content with tradition; they thrive when that tradition enables consequential innovation and creativity.

European Humanities University does just that. It must do that.

In this year you graduate, EHU is approaching 25 years of its existence, with over the half of that time being here in Lithuania, a country which has offered EHU wonderful hospitality, and solidarity alongside other supporters from the European Union and others who appreciate what the EU has become, and still might be.

Hospitality and solidarity are not things one typically hears in commencement addresses. And that is because we too readily take for granted that universities are part of the world we have received, and part of an obvious future that is a smooth extension of the present.

But you know different.

Universities, although centuries old in conception, feel at risk in this world that is becoming. That is because ideas are becoming more powerful than they have ever been before.

Our economies depend on new forms of property, new kinds of sharing, new kinds of consumption.

Our science and technology find new partners in the imagination cultivated best in the arts and humanities.

Our social sciences are not only mapping the world, but they are also helping to design it. And when we do that, we are not only doing what we are told, but we are figuring what ought to be.

The highly educated can be dangerous, and universities, the producers of the highly educated, can be dangerous.

That wisdom is long standing, but it is becoming even more true today, for those who are afraid of the future can find their anchor in repressing universities, in telling them what they can and cannot teach, what is useful and what is frivolous knowledge.

Although we feel rumbles of that contest between the knowledgeable and the anxious all across the world, we can see that more clearly in Hungary today with the threat to force Central European University’s exile. But we can see that contest much earlier in the story of this university, in your story.

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Europe’s only university in exile – EHU – is your story, your tradition, and your foundation for innovation and creativity. I take inspiration from it.

Although I come from one of America’s oldest and most prestigious universities, l became something other than a typical American when I came to Poland in 1983-84. There, I learned what solidarity meant. There I learned what integrity means. There I learned what resilience is. There I learned something I could not have learned in America. But I learn that from you too.

And this is why your education may be more suitable for the world that is becoming than you might imagine. It’s not just that you have experienced solidarity and hospitality.

It’s also that you know you cannot take anything for granted.

That disposition is critical for the world that is becoming, that has recently been made.

We no longer have to travel to information; information comes to us.

Our biggest and most powerful corporations are not only manufacturers of things, but the makers of dreams, if we see the digital economy as living in cyber space as much as real space.

Our cities continue to grow and concentrate, but they assemble people for different purposes, not to make things but to network, to create, to communicate when you have to read someone’s face, and not just their text.

We are becoming increasing interconnected not just through technology, but through our fate. Global warming is not something the rich can simply escape, that America can overlook because its military arsenal is the greatest in the world. Our security is common, and that is why solidarity is central to our future, and hospitality a disposition we need.

So, thanks to Lithuania, thanks to the European Union, for supporting European Humanities University. But more, thanks to you.

Why?

You are the future because you students of Belarus and your fellows in this Belarusian university in exile anticipate the future we might wish if you have learned well.

This future of hope and creativity, of hospitality and solidarity, is by no means assured.

Indeed, there are forces of reaction that threaten it in order to provide a false sense of security based on repression and fear. I see that in my country, and I see it closer to where we now stand.

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But closest to me now, you 2017 graduates of EHU, are far more than this, for you have imbibed the qualities essential to your own personal success, to our own collective well-being.

Yes you have all become great designers, lawyers, media managers, political scientists, cultural heritage specialists, sociologists, and other vocations, but

1. You have developed a sense of resilience that the creative need to persevere;2. You have acquired a sense of possibility, for both good and ill, that those who live

in privilege can’t know; and3. You have cultivated a sense of responsibility that learning at EHU demands.

Whether you reside in Vilnius or in Belarus and learn at a distance, studying at EHU has demanded more effort, more awareness, more intention, than at most universities.

We cannot have a world for the better without the resilient, creative, responsible, and intentional 2017 graduates of the European Humanities University leading the way. I feel better about the future of the world when I think about the future of you, my dear graduates.

Congratulations on what you have accomplished in this graduation, but more, thank you in anticipation of what you will accomplish.

And when you accomplish those things, think back on the solidarity and hospitality you have enjoyed in this university, and anticipate how you might extend those qualities in the future.

This is an academic tradition that assures a future of which we wish to be part.

And I am grateful to have been able to be part of your sendoff.

But I want you to remember this sendoff. So, get ready…. And figure out how you wish to be part of the #profkennedyselfie and check it out on Instagram later today!

3/19/17 Notes in preparation for Story in the Public Square Television Interview about the power of narrative around various themes, including intellectuals and universities in the time of Trump, and in Central and Eastern Europe, and the sociological imagination. Broadcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5P88I4YuD0

On Narrative and the Sociological Imagination Back in 1959, C. Wright Mills described the sociological imagination as the articulation of biography and history; we might then declare him as the patron saint of your show.

Stories are the things we tell to ourselves, and tell to one another, about how we all connect with each other.

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Those stories can be based on harmony or on contest. They can be open, or they can be closed. They can, knowingly or unknowingly, elevate some and deflate others.

A sociologist likes to think about the different kinds of stories we tell, how they affect our public life, and what kinds of power, privilege, and solidarity that are sometimes out of public view.

Those stories, then, are not just about how we are connected, but reflect, and can even transform, the power and privilege organizing our society, and the ties that bind us in the public sphere.  On Trump’s America and the World

America was not prepared for Trump’s America. Indeed, the world is not prepared for the world of 2017. The social contract of democratic modernity organized around the trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity, or as I would rather say freedom, justice, and solidarity, is broken. While it had been fraying since 1989-91 and the end of the Cold War, the globalization of markets leapt ahead of the globalization of justice and solidarity over the last 25 years. That meant that the rope tying democracy’s trinity together finally snapped. That’s obvious with the election of Donald Trump and the triumph of Brexit in the United Kingdom. We see other rejections of globalization’s freedom too, but I would say that 2017 is a year of revolution whose end is not obvious.

On Central and Eastern Europe I wrote my first book on the Solidarity movement of 1980-81, and second book on the meaning of the broader region’s transition from dictatorship to democracy and from the planned to the market economy. That region, from the Baltics to the Balkans, has been seen world historically as a place “in between” great powers. It’s been defined by the movement of state borders, of national conflicts, of genocides and ethnic cleansing. It’s also a place of incredible artistic creativity, of deep and thoughtful work on democracy and freedom, and what diversity and multiculturalism can bring to beauty and decency. It’s a region filled with contradictions.

After communism’s collapse, and the movement of the European Union and NATO to include most of the region, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and others saw this as a golden age for their nations, a time of security, stability, and economic growth. And it has been, at least until the world explicitly unravelling after 2011.

After 2011 with unfulfilled Arab uprisings and abiding war in the Middle East and North Africa with their consequent migrations, after a failed democratic uprising in Russia, and a successful Ukrainian democratic uprising, we see the resurgence of authoritarianism with Putin in the lead. Putin’s aggressive stance, already evident in the Bush administration but taking off under Obama, means that this region is once again in between, and waiting to be betrayed yet again. One word for this region conjures up a whole story of this region: Yalta, the meeting place in Crimea where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt divided up Europe, and betrayed those, most obviously the Poles but also others, who thought themselves the West’s allies.

I like to think of this region as my site of inspiration, for imagining the worst that this world might offer, and also the best. We need pay attention to this part of the world not only for its own sake but to anticipate the larger world in the making.

……

On “Leaders are informed by their nation’s history.”   It certainly does apply to Trump. But Trump is of course peculiar. He is a businessman, and in that, he could represent that familiar American story of how the rich businessman rules American democracy. But that would be inadequate.

He is also the celebrity, and of course America has been defined by its fascination, for love or hate, of the celebrity. But that’s not all.

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He is a know-nothing, and that anti-intellectual streak is strong in American culture. People like me could point to all his contradictory statements, his policy ignorance, but that would miss the ways in which he somehow is authentic for many Americans. How often have you heard people says, “he tells it like it is”.

But those are all abiding narratives of American history he channels. He is doing something that is part of a global narrative, reflecting a broader insecurity the world faces.

The complexity of the world is increasing exponentially. if I can borrow a line from the Oxford economist Ian Goldin, no wall is high enough to insulate us from the risks spreading as fast as our capital flows and airplane travel. The world knows this, and even more, feels it. Like the memory impaired elder who is lost and wants to go home to find the security of their youth, publics across the world yearn for the stability they vaguely recall. Those who promise that control, whether with walls, deportations, travel bans or exits from transnational trade agreements or the EU, give the illusion of security. So, it’s not just history that makes this president; it’s the contradictions of the present that shape him.

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Putting that all together, I fear that we cannot escape a profound legitimation crisis, a crisis defined by Trump having too little cultural authority to back up his legal authority I can only anticipate three pathways forward:

a) Somehow the more responsible leaders of his administration wind up containing Trump, if nto even sidelining him. That’s my hopeful scenario.

b) My frightful scenario will be that Trump continues to escalate fear, not only among those from or with meaningful ties to non-white folks, but even for white folks. When he declares the press the enemy of the people, he is setting up the conditions for civil war, not like we saw in the 1860s, but for a war of position between those with different kinds of legal authority, to which Trump could only respond with more force.

c) My expected scenario is that those who are responsible around him, and those responsible Republicans in Congress, will ally with mainstream Democrats to impeach him based on something so relatively innocuous as the emoluments clause in the constitution, or discoveries of illict Russian associations during the election and before.

 On elitism:  There are so many different kinds of elitism – there’s elitism based on class, which most of Trump’s cabinet apart from his military express. There’s elitism based on political power – which is what establishment politics is all about. And yes, when I celebrate intellectuals, universities and learning, one can see that as elitism too. But I see it as profoundly different for two reasons, one empirical, and one moral.

a) I celebrate knowledge and learning, but not only the intelligence of those with the right credentials. I learned so much from my grandparents who were servants on a millionaire’s estate – I learned humility and commitment from them. I learn so much from my friends, colleagues, and students of color, about what white privilege means, something universities like Brown themselves still work to learn. I’ve been fortunate, too, to have gone to school in North Carolina and to have worked with people like Katie Cohen and Karida Brown with roots in Appalachia whose scholarship, and knowledge networks, go well beyond the so called intellectual elite. Their scholarship rather embraces everyday folks whose stories and lives are not sufficiently recognize in our imagined community.

b) And here’s the moral point: For me, being intellectual means not only recognizing what you don’t know, but hungering to learn more from anyone who might teach you. Everyone has knowledge to share, and if we elevate that plurality of knowledge, if we can respect what a life of hard knocks, of abiding discrimination and dispossession teaches us, we might not only learn more but elevate a culture of mutual respect and dignity for all. That culture is the foundation for the solidarity in which I believe.

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On Nationalism

Nationalism is an ideology whose root is simple: each nation deserves its own state. That ideology organizes the world. It’s dominant. Craig Calhoun once called it the trump card of all ideologies. Indeed, tell me what word stands opposed to nationalist and has a positive connotation: cosmopolitanism? Globalism? Multiculturalism comes closest, but for that to be legitimate, it always has to be described as somehow enhancing the nation.

Rather than define nationalism, we need think about how it varies. We have nationalisms that commit genocide; we have nationalisms that celebrate a

constitution and welcome immigrants to its community. We have nationalisms with strict hierarchies and exclusions based on religion, race, and

ancestry, and we have nationalisms that expect only that one obey the law, and maybe speak a nation’s language, or languages.

We have nationalisms that celebrate free trade and we have nationalisms that define themselves by subordinating the economy to the national interest.

Trump’s nationalism is first and foremost economic, but it’s not clear what part of the American society he promises to save with this economic nationalism. His nationalism is also clearly white – you can hear him say “the African Americans” or “the Hispanics”, but you never hear him say, “the whites”. That’s because the whites are at the top of his national hierarchy. His nationalism is also quite patriarchal, as the women’s march has made quite clear.

On America First:

So, America first is fine so long as it’s an inclusive America, one that is not code for racism and in that particular instance, anti-Semitism.   I fear that we cannot escape a profound legitimation crisis, a crisis defined by Trump having too little cultural authority to back up his legal authority I can only anticipate three pathways forward:

a) Somehow the more responsible leaders of his administration wind up containing Trump, if nto even sidelining him. That’s my hopeful scenario.

b) My frightful scenario will be that Trump continues to escalate fear, not only among those from or with meaningful ties to non-white folks, but even for white folks. When he declares the press the enemy of the people, he is setting up the conditions for civil war, not like we saw in the 1860s, but for a war of position between those with different kinds of legal authority, to which Trump could only respond with more force.

c) My expected scenario is that those who are responsible around him, and those responsible Republicans in Congress, will ally with mainstream Democrats to impeach him based on something so relatively innocuous as the emoluments clause in the constitution, or discoveries of illict Russian associations during the election and before.

On Intellectual Responsibility:

That means two things:

a) intellectuals need to get out of the academy. I love teaching my students, but I love even more working with folks in all walks of life to learn from them, and to share with them what I have learned from them. There’s a major movement within sociology and the academy more generally – sometimes it’s called public sociology or public humanities, sometimes it’s called engaged scholarship. It can go badly when it is practiced with condescension. It can be magnificent when it is a time for that effervescence of mutual discovery.

b) It means that everyone is potentially an intellectual. It’s not a status, it’s really a way of engaging the world. It happens whenever we try to explain what’s going on. It happens when we try to figure out why someone is virtuous, and why someone is hurtful. It happens when we ask why some story sounds good, but excludes somebody’s experience. And it happens when we ask how a story might be made more inclusive so that the policies and practices that follow that story speak to more people.

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I am committed to knowledgeable change, by which I mean ““marshalling truthfulness, evidence, reason, and vision beyond political conventions and calculus, while challenging power on different scales in their name” (Kennedy 2015:74) in order to realize a greater global public good. We are in a different epoch where those values, truthfulness as such, is being shut down. We need to On Trump’s critique of globalism and my approach:  I am not a political person first and foremost. I am first an intellectual, and I know that words have different connotations based on their contexts, who is using them, and who is hearing them.

Rather than be simply critical of globalization and globalism, simply, I’d like to know what dimensions we’re talking about. If we are talking about a globalism that allows communities to be destroyed by the free flow of capital to invest in jobs overseas, I’m critical. If we are talking about how that free flow of capital is creating opportunities for development in those places once poor, I’m not so critical.

I AM critical of the celebration of know-nothingism and the manipulation of people who are vulnerable and who deserve better.

I celebrate the globalization of knowledge. I might treasure my country, but one of the reasons I can treasure my country is because it learns from the world, and it recognizes its sins and how it can be greater tomorrow than it is today.

On Fantasy:  Fantasy is above all a story about desire, but a desire that can never be fulfilled. The fantasy of super heroes, the fantasy of sword and sorcery, the fantasy of science fiction are all familiar to us; they are part of our culture. But we are less familiar with the fantasy of politics in the time of Trump even while it is still, also, there. How? This fantasy is partially based on the celebrity culture and model wife and rich playgrounds that Trump himself promotes in his own celebrity remaking in the 1990s. It’s about making that a national story, one that everyone can have for him or herself if only in smaller more realistic form. At the same time, the fantasy’s power rests on the fact that everyone knows that that cannot be for everyone, it’s only for winners. Everyone can’t be a winner, especially in Trump’s America. But you MIGHT be one. Thus, just like we know superheroes are not real and we still love them, we know that Trump’s fantasy may not be our own, but we still love it, and love imagining that it could be us. But of course, this is a fantasy more readily accessible to white folks, for that fantasy also depends on having poor folks take care of things you are too busy to worry about, and having women so desperate for your attention that they allow you to grab them. It’s a fantasy that’s based on domination in the end, but without ever acknowledging that to be the case.

3/13/17 Reflections on Liberalism and Illiberalism in the Academy (prompted by so much conversation among peers and others following Frank Bruni’s piece:

I wrote the below before I had the chance to read Allison Stranger’s piece, the colleague who was to interview Charles Murray and who has been injured as a result of their violent response. She manages the balance I admire, and in particular says far more clearly what I might also say: there is no place for violence, as she suffered. At the same time, we need be aware when principles are weaponized in political contest, as I fear happens in debates about free speech on college campuses. That is why we need not only look at an event, but understand its immediate and broader context.

Friends from my Davidson College undergraduate days have asked me to comment on Frank Bruni’s piece, seeing me as someone who, given my Brown University experience,

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might have good thoughts to offer. I do celebrate free speech, as most who have seen what overt political repression can do, but at the same time, I am also acutely aware of how many can use precious ACLU values to reproduce extraordinary power and privilege. The debate proceeds between University of Chicago and Brown University, representing opposite poles of the supposed spectrum.2 However, often that debate rests on principles without empirical anchor. We need to understand the underbelly of particular cases before we go off half-cocked to pronounce righteous stands. That’s something I’ve learned at Brown. I’ve also learned that it’s not easy to stimulate productive dialogue even when people are not shouting.

I recall one event to create a more meaningful dialogue among white faculty and administrators and students of color under the rubric of allyship.3 Instead, what appeared, especially to those who might have read Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s work,4 is the reproduction of white privilege itself even in the ways in which we putatively recognize that kind of racialized practice. Hannah Duncan, one of the organizers of the panel, posed the challenge clearly in a subsequent op-ed,5 embedding it in a larger project at Brown called “transformative conversations”.

These transformative conversations might be consequential, especially to the extent it moves from a safe vision that defines racism as a problem of misunderstanding toward a sense of racism as a deep structure of injustice, one that reproduces privilege even when nobody in the room recognizes the racist moment. When transformative conversations invoke misunderstanding one another misses the point: people victimized have been talking long enough, and are not heard. When transformative conversations are about building network capacities to name injustice and to figure ways not only to protest but also to transform institutional structures so that a university’s ideal form can be more reasonably approximated, then that’s worth our investment. I have already seen, at Brown, some of the fruits of that work. But it builds on a particularly painful moment: the so-called “Ray Kelly Incident” at Brown University.

I would like to know more the underbelly of what happened at Middlebury before we turn that into a principle that redefines the debate in this country. I know that because some tried to turn the Brown University debate about Ray Kelly into just such a fracas, based, in fact, on profound, but perhaps deliberate, misunderstanding what happened. That Ray Kelly contest illustrated the gulf among different communities on campus, so

2 http://www.browndailyherald.com/2017/02/05/freedom-speech-talk-stirs-debate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/brown-university-president-safe-spaces-dont-threaten-freedom-of-expression-they-protect-it/2016/09/05/6201870e-736a-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html 3 A report on the event: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/10/16/panelists-check-white-privilege-dialogue-race/ and the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIA4tvkWxSo 4 http://www.amazon.com/Racism-without-Racists-Color-Blind-Persistence/dp/1442202181 5 http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/10/20/duncan-15-makes-transformative-conversation/

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powerfully illustrated and documented in this presidential committee report.6 Many have worked to change the campus dialogue that has emerged from that time.

I wrote about that moment in my book too. In order to invite people to think more empirically, I share what I wrote about the Ray Kelly case in Globalizing Knowledge (pp. 141-42)

The Taubman Center for Public Policy invited former police commissioner of New York City Raymond Kelly to give the endowed Noah Krieger Memorial Lecture on October 29. He intended to speak, in his words, on “proactive policing”.7 A substantial number of students protested that event, claiming that such tactics depended on racist profiling. They in effect shut down the lecture. That action, in turn prompted a storm of discussion on whether Brown University supported free speech or not (Jaschik 2013). It also, however, prompted important discussion on how race and class shape the terms in which freedom of speech is itself considered (e.g. Khalek et al, 2013).

This debate engaged the proximate public, including its alumni. For instance, Elizabeth Castelli (Class of 1979) wrote to the university’s president that this was not a matter of free speech, but of endorsing a practice those in New York recognize to be racist.8 And the matter went global too. In The Guardian, Doreen St. Felix (2013), one of the protesters, elaborated the movement’s trajectory, and not only the speech’s shutdown. She also challenged the claim that Brown was only functioning as a neutral space allowing for the free exchange of ideas. Instead, she said, the university is “deeply enmeshed within that structure of systemic injustice. Discourse facilitated, legitimized, and moneyed by the few in power is not true ‘discourse’ at all.”

In this contest, we not only come to appreciate the importance of open public discussion within universities, but also the challenge of assuming an even playing field for that discussion. Were it not for the donations establishing the lecture and the informal networks that facilitated Ray Kelly’s invitation to Brown, the matter would never have been broached. Were Brown’s protesting students and Providence allies not connected with publics considered victimized by stop and frisk in New York City, they would not have experienced such a visceral reaction to Ray Kelly’s invitation. Understanding free speech is critical, but so too is the way in which inequalities are built into that very constitution of debate.

6 Report of the Committee on the Events of October 29, 2013, February 2014http://brown.edu/about/administration/president/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.president/files/uploads/Report-on-Events-of-Oct-29-2013.pdfSecond Report of the Committee on the Events of October 29, 2013, May 20, 2014http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/president/Events-of-Oct292014Committee.pdf7 The Brown Political Review obtained the transcript of that talk, and is available here: http://www.brownpoliticalreview.org/2013/12/ray-kellys-leaked-brown-university-speech/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 8 This was also distributed on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/notes/elizabeth-castelli/letter-to-christina-paxson-president-of-brown-university-on-ray-kellys-appearanc/10152069041869180)

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However, we should also consider how this debate reflects the stratification of Brown University’s core proximate public itself. In this contest, we see only those communicatively privileged – faculty, students, academic administrators and alumni. There are other potential members of the university’s core proximate public. Staff are often, depending on rank, among the least privileged in public discussions, although there are circumstances, events, in which they become publically prominent.9

In short, let us consider the structuring of an event. We should not only debate abstract principles, but also discuss how inequalities of access within universities and beyond them shape the terms of power and privilege in communicative practice. After all, reason is not the only thing one learns in college; it’s also about networks, and we should analyze these abstract debates to understand how real politics shapes debates about principles.

After all, who was not sympathetic to the CPAC when they decided not to turn away their past darling provocateur when it turned out he was also celebrating pedophilia? Principles of free speech are not typically contested when more than academic politics are not also lying with them.

The Globalizing Knowledge of Kimberly Kay Hoang

Notes in anticipation of and following the 3/1/17 6:00pm - 7:30pm meeting at the Chicago Seminary Co-op in their Urban Readers Series where I spoke with Kimberly Hoang about her book, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. https://www.semcoop.com/event/urban-readers-series-kimberly-hoang-dealing-desire-michael-d-kennedy To listen, check out https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TJdS19iv9CdExoaXZ5c1Nobjg/view?usp=sharing

“Kimberly Kay Hoang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago.  Her book, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (2015) published by the University of California Press. This monograph

9 Although the episode in James Hynes (1997) on Captain Cook’s conference is fictional, it is only slightly masked, referring to a conference on culture one of my colleagues organized at the University of Michigan. Hynes misses the major drama in that conference, however. In that conference, as one of the clerical staff working at the University challenged the organizer’s representation of race and gender in using a Benetton poster to promote the conference. That clash illuminated the typical presumption of faculty superiority in articulating cultural representations of university life.

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examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam's informal economy. Dealing in Desire  is the winner of seven distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association,  the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Association for Asian Studies.” That much comes from her website, but I have so much more to say.

Kimberly’s book was published in the same year as my own on globalizing knowledge, and I am profoundly sorry to say that her work does not figure in that book. This is not because her work is not a brilliant intervention in globalizing knowledge and its sociology as I have conceived it:

globalizing knowledge refers to the process by which distant regions’ knowledgeabilities are implicated in the particular cultures fusing those understandings. The form of globalizing knowledge will vary given the different historical and institutional contexts that shape such learning. Globalizing knowledge is, therefore, relationally composed. The sociology of globalizing knowledge concerns the conditions, manners, and implications of that fusion (Kennedy 2015: 9).

Because globalizing knowledge is not a single discipline or even field in the Bourdieusian sense, and is rather relationally composed in networks that, at best, bear family resemblances to one another, it’s not surprising that I would not have known Kimberly’s work before her award winning book was published. We traveled in different networks of scholarship – my principal point of reference is east and southeast Europe, not east and southeast Asia; I focus on intellectuals and their institutions and publics, whereas in this work Kimberly focused on sex workers, their clients and embodied work; I see my work as first a cultural political sociology, and while Kimberly’s work contributes importantly to that field, her principal points of reference are economic sociology and the sociology of gender and sexuality. But in order to make up for what is obviously my loss, I’d like to offer a few reasons why this is such an important work in globalizing knowledge, and how its extensions might build the field in important ways. Before I speak of it as a scholar and its student, let me reference this as a teacher.

Just last week I introduced this book to my introductory sociology class where several students went out and bought the book to read on their own because it so stoked their sociological imaginations. For graduates, Kimberly is a role model – not just for her success, but for succeeding in ways that break conventional career modes and advice in so many ways. But one piece of advice should be followed by all: make your first book a major scholarly intervention.

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Her basic argument is this:

Dealing in Desire explores how high finance and overseas economic remittances are inextricably intertwined with relationships of intimacy. For Vietnam’s domestic superelite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption provided both a lexicon of distinction and a means of communicating hospitality to potential investors. With the opening of Vietnam’s economy to foreign investment, a new ultra-high-end tier of sex workers emerged who deployed vocabularies of consumption and sexuality in an elaborate symbolic dance tailored to needs of individual capital deals. In a slightly lower-tiered niche market catering to overseas Vietnamese men, sex workers were valued not only for their beauty but also for their ability to project deference around their clients while highlighting Asia’s rapid economic rise. Sex workers who catered to Western men in the two lowest-paying markets worked to project poverty and dependence to help men negotiate their personal sense of failed masculinity in the context of Western economic decline. As such, different configurations of racialized desires, social status, business success and hope for upward mobility all play out differently in the four niche markets in which I conducted fieldwork (pp. 4-5).

And as this passage makes clear, Kimberly’s prose is not just clear, but often soulful, conjuring images as an artist might of scenes few sociologists have themselves explored.

Where Kimberly’s work resonates powerfully with the themes of Globalizing Knowledge comes in her elaboration of context. Of course all sociologists work in particular historical contexts, but when your work is published in the USA and your scholarship focuses on a place unfamiliar to most American sociologists and other scholars, you need elaborate, and even justify, the context of your work. As I had to do with my first book on Poland, Kimberly tells the story of Vietnam from the modern colonial period onwards. But it’s not just a national context she needs elaborate.

Her work is about Ho Chi Minh City too, and its dramatic transformation from a colonial, then post-colonial, then communist, then rather post-communist city in the midst of a global transformation marked by Western decline and Asian ascendance. Indeed, her ethnography is situated with the 2008 global financial crisis in the middle. Just as those of us writing about communist rule and transition, regardless of method, had in the 1980s and 1990s to learn to write in an ethnographic presence with global historical awareness (my Cultural Formations of Postcommunism marked this problem

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explicitly)10, Kimberly’s work exemplifies how this need be done with terrific refinement, especially given the complexities, insecurities and uncertainties of global transformations in the 21 st century.

Context moves far beyond global transformations, national trajectories and urban spaces, however. As the summary paragraph above indicates, the heart of her work is about the comparison of four market niches for sex work, each catering to differently classed and raced masculine desires with different kinds of capital, women’s labor varying not only in practice but in “competing technologies of embodiment”, social contracts, and perceptions of Asian ascendance and Western decline. Indeed, her summary table on p. 51 is itself a picture that conveys much of the comparative contextual work of the book. Read it before you begin, and then consolidate your learning by viewing it on your read’s conclusion.

Kimberly could not have managed that kind of contextual work without the refined, and innovative, mode of ethnographic work she undertook. Her methodological savvy extends far beyond my own, and in fact, inspires many of the students with whom I now work, but not only for the months in the field and the relationships she builds with her research partners. It’s also because she is up front about the challenges of this kind of work, magnified too by the ways in which the racialized and gendered qualities of her own work are implicated in a profession still organized around men and whiteness. Her methods for dealing with the condescension and presumption in the book’s extensions are as instructive as her presentation of fieldwork and, in particular, the embodied costs of her ethnography.

A caveat from our discussion: Kimberly not only has moved my approach to globalizing knowledge, but also my own approach to carnal ethnography. My work in teaching martial arts and its sociology has always been premised on the notion that we study the body, and bodymindfulness, in order to figure its possibilities and potentialities. While applicable to women, it’s also rooted, as Kimberly pointed out in this session, in a masculinist approach to embodied work. Her ethnographic work around the body was organized around loss and limitation, whether in shaping her body to fit into an economy organized around male desire, or in the challenge of drinking alcohol every night in order to be a proper hostess.

As that caveat and the book’s title itself suggest, desire is a keyword for her analysis, something economic sociology is not exactly known for.

10 When I thought about Cultural Formations of Postcommunism during our session, I realized that it may not be too late to return to my studies of transition culture at the turn of the century, especially to consider under what conditions the sex industry can be so central to defining the terms of foreign direct investment. A Ukrainian-Vietnamese comparison here could be quite interesting.

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Much economic sociology is organized around some notion of interest and/or rational choice, and in order to fit into the subdiscipline, it sometimes seems that Kimberly casts desire less in its own terms than as a description of the field in which calculations of costs and benefits are made. Action may be organized around desire, but its “function”, at least in the up-scale scene, is clearly “economic”:

In a highly speculative market driven by emotional calculations of risk and potential rewards, businessmen must establish informal relations of social trust to secure investment in speculative real estate markets and urban renewal land development projects (p. 12)

Too, the “mommies”, the women owners/managers of the establishments in which hosting takes place, seemed to be exemplary economic agents in a field most economic sociologists don’t consider. As Kimberly puts it, they are not trafficked victims but shrewd entrepreneurs.

In general, however, something beyond rational choice approaching desire does seem to characterize the men better than the women, especially when it comes to men exercising dominance over other men. White men like to recover their lost masculinity in Asia by declaring their sexual prowess with Asian women superior to what Asian men can offer. But this desire for dominance is also apparent among the most calculating sorts: after turning down an offer from Americans to invest in a project, a wealthy Vietnamese businessman explained why he humiliated them

They think they own the world. I want them to come here and see that Vietnam is not a poor, backward country anymore. I want them to see these buildings and feel the energy on the streets. Then I want them to know that we don’t need any of their money. They don’t own us. They will feel the pain when they have to go home with no deal in their bags. (p. 57).

Much of the story about women’s motivations could, however, be cast in more conventional economic sociological terms if the broader setting for women’s agency could be properly recognized. However, while one might look to such explanation for the extraordinary solidarity the women offered to one another in their workplace, Kimberly tells a story of mutual support that seems to go well beyond what any variation on exchange theory would expect. Her account does, however, challenge me most when I think about how solidarity functions in my own sociology.

For me, solidarity is one vital dimension of my own critical sociology, something that is a resource for transformative praxis, on the one hand, and on the other, a quality of mutuality that defines an alternative future better than the conditions of domination and exploitation we now experience. While

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all of us enjoy some combination of Michael Burawoy’s 2X2 table representing professional, policy, critical, and public forms, Kimberly’s work is less, conventionally, critical than I would have expected in part because the normative is so complicated.

Her professional side is readily evident, not only in the methods enabling her to gather data and the precision with which she elaborates her account of the relationship between economic development and intimate exchanges among men and women. I was especially impressed by how her careful invocation of references across a wide range of typically distant scholarly fields casts a new coherent feminist political economy of desire and development.

Kimberly’s policy side is also apparent, especially when she discusses how different global signals and local initiatives articulate in episodic and occasionally contradictory expressions of the law and executions of “legitimate” force. Her public engagement is visible too, but even more so with the substantial discussions her scholarship has moved in the Vietnamese Press. But her critical side remains, for me, most complicated mainly because her “normative” argument is least apparent. And that was the toughest question I had for her in the evening, but as the conversation continued, I recognize that the problem was far more on my side, and indeed, for that broader “Western” disposition, than it was in her work.

I have always imagined the critical to be organized around the trinity of power, praxis, and normativity. Her analysis of power is fully evident, and the practice she identifies, of both men and women in these various niche markets, is clearly identified. The normatively desirable is identified, in part, with how relationships extend far beyond the transactional, where women take care of one another, their families, and their villages, and even their male clients occasionally come through to help the women and their dependents too. In her celebration of the moral economy underlying what many Americans, including many American feminists, would consider “deviant” behavior or oppressed practice, Kimberly casts a different normativity. She moves the choice of women in these settings ahead of the expectations of those who don’t know anything about them.

Kimberly is, of course, part of this large debate about how prostitution in its varied forms ought to be viewed. She emphasizes how the women in her study should not be viewed as “trafficked victims”, and whatever sex for money they undertake is consensual. Indeed, she emphasizes that the life as hostess is superior in many ways to the life as garment worker or other kinds of work the white savior industrial complex would have these women do.

Kimberly’s critical sociology is, then, not one that identifies an emancipatory alternative, a condition of freedom with which to contrast existing condition of want or oppression. But her critical sociological

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difference is more than that too: she is going up against much conventional Western feminist and religious conservative thinking without a movement she can identify as posing an alternative, and desirable, future. And that’s where she stands even more distant from one of the most important books in critical sociology recently published.

Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: WEB DuBois and the Origins of Modern Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015 offers a critical sociology of domination and exclusion, of scholarship as emancipatory praxis, all with a clear implicit sense of how things ought to be in an anti-racist society. DuBois, as Morris, could develop their insurgent intellectuality within a system whose racist domination was clear with a set of normative judgments that allowed clear distinctions to be made between, for example, DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and between the way in which Max Weber recognized DuBois and how Robert Park excluded DuBois from the discipline.

Kimberly offers no clear signposts for recognizing that movement within a Vietnamese community struggling to define the emancipatory project for women. Too, if there are villains in the story, they are those who fail to appreciate how hostesses and their mommies have crafted lives of relative accomplishment within very circumscribed patriarchal conditions. But instead of arguing that these women need rescue, she argues they need to be recognized and understood. That, it seems to me, is the starting point for a critical sociology that needs as much a mirror as it needs a sharper lens to recognize alternatives in these times.

Whatever its relationship to critical sociology, Kimberly’s work is exemplary in its articulation of globalizing knowledge, and I expect that it will bear much impact in the years ahead.

Solidarity and Social Change: A 2016 Synthesis -- Notes accompanying the final discussion in my undergraduate seminar on Solidarity and Social ChangeDecember 15, 2016

Michael D. Kennedy

With so many appeals to solidarity in public discourse within the USA, and across the world, we should imagine that the sense of the concept is well developed, its sociology elaborate. But it is not. After this term of collaborative learning with you, it is much better.

Its sociology does have clear anchors. When Marx spoke of class consciousness, at the root of his and his successors’ argument was a notion that the conditions of work under capitalism ought to generate, increasingly, a notion of solidarity among those whose livelihoods depend on their capacity to sell their labor power to those who own the means of production. That common class condition, worsened by immiseration, should generate a class consciousness that turns the class in itself to a class for itself. That condition is solidarity.

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However, the problems with this assumption are many, even while the conditions Marx anticipated, including the concentration of wealth, the limited autonomy of even a democratic state, and the immiseration of the proletariat and not only a lumpen proletariat, appear even more useful foundations on which to understand 21st century capitalist societies, especially in the USA. The many revisions of Marxism, not least those that follow in the cultural train of Laclau and Mouffe, address some of the problems that Marx had with solidarity.

First and foremost, it is sociologically reasonable to believe that those who work together, in physical proximity, can develop a class consciousness, a working class solidarity. But there is no reason, sociologically, to believe that that should extend across workplaces. More work is being developed around this theme, but this tension between working class solidarity in place, and working class solidarity across regions, races, genders, and even nations, has been one of the greatest challenges facing the Marxist tradition in sociology. It has also inspired terrific revision.

One of the legacies of the Marxist tradition across social science has been to ground idealism in materialism, consciousness in living conditions, knowledge in social position. There is no reason why work and class should be privileged in that argument, however, especially when life chances are so powerfully shaped by other axes of difference, notably around race, gender, sexuality and position in the world system.

For all of those various conditions, we can see a range of scholars taking positions alongside, in dialogue with, in transcendence of, Marx and that tradition. When WEB DuBois speaks of those on the other side of the color line from whites across the world having a common experience in racist oppression, when feminists argue that a global patriarchy needs be recognized and an alternative solidarity based on women’s sensibilities expressed, when postcolonial theorists and anti-imperialist transformative actors identify the common oppression of those dominated by empire and global capitalism, we see that commonality, and face some of the same problems that the Marxist tradition has found. What enables a putatively common oppression to be turned into a solidarity of resistance and transformation?

One answer rests in education, which was an answer the Leninist tradition provided to the Marxist problem. Recognizing that bourgeois class domination was based not only on control over the means of production, and over the means of violence through that class influence over the state, but also through cultural hegemony, the communist tradition relocated the source of solidarity from the working class to the Party that claimed its consciousness.

For many outside the Marxist tradition, that is all they know about Marxism and its legacy, or that may be all they think is necessary to know. But Lenin and his associates had many critics, not only among social democrats but also among the revolutionaries. Rosa Luxemburg is enjoying even now renewed attention, for example; we need keep that popular current in mind as we think about the formation of solidarity.

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Too, Gramsci’s work on cultural hegemony and organic intellectuals has been critical for most on the left ever since the 1960s, offering a very different vision of education than what the Party model has suggested. Stuart Hall is a good person to read here.

More generally, we need keep in mind the critique of that communist become totalitarian tradition; more than a few have evoked George Orwell’s concern for truthfulness vis-à-vis totalitarianism as relevant to our times, in our country. Critiques of untruthfulness, whether coming from left or right wing traditions, from communist or racist heritage, are ever more important, signaling the importance of independent intellectuals and education in our times.

Even if there is no party that defines for the masses the appropriate consciousness, the numerous ways in which the hubris of white privilege, male privilege, Western privilege, defines the terms with which solidarity is made returns again and again. Chandra Mohanty exemplifies that concern, but of course throughout the term, our critiques returned again and again to a question of “whose solidarity” counts. It returns, because these other axes of difference matter, despite the claims of some to define one, or another, axis of difference essentially, necessarily, determinant.

Of course that becomes feasible to the extent one grounds work in the realist tradition of philosophy. Critical realism is developing apace in American sociology and it allows us to sort which dispositions resonate with deeper structures organizing society -- like the commodity or race – and those which resonate with less anchor – perhaps money or ethnicity. As you develop your ideas on solidarity, you do need to figure your relationship to different modes of explanation in sociology, and that’s why Reed’s work is so important for you to digest. Do you see solidarity as reflecting some deep structure, that makes solidarity somehow more real? Or do you see solidarity as something more communicatively constructed, real only to the extent we believe it to be real, with that belief weighted in the depths of symbolic power articulating our life experience?

This is where the Durkheimian tradition becomes so important. Everyone should know his distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, but in the former we need to keep in mind the ways in which he made soul sociological. We didn’t read Elementary Forms of Religious Life, but he offers an account of “soul” there that helps us imagine solidarity rooted in the symbolic, in powerful identifications of life in that which cannot be seen. Durkheim believed a soul real because through shared mental constructs and ritualistic practices people solve a problem that is existential: how is it that the community lives on even after an individual dies? It exists in the “conscience collective”, that consciousness and conscience where “inborn essences and fabulous collective identities” thrive.11 12 One of the more charming reads I had this term was of the imagined dialogue between Durkheim and DuBois that Karen Fields developed.

11 Durkheim’s language can be hard not only for the translation from the French but also from the beginning of the twentieth century. Karen Fields, “Translator’s Introduction” p. xviii in pp. xvii-lxxiii in Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life New York: Free Press, 1995 is wonderful for how she clarifies the meanings of such complicated notions, here especially collective conscience (p.xlii).12

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We typically develop this approach to solidarity and symbolic power through the idea of the nation. We can all see this in the elevation of the flag, or any other national symbol as something to which we need pay allegiance. Those symbols have a power that they can move people to sacrifice their life, or that of others, in defense of the symbol, or that for which it stands. But what is intriguing about this kind of solidarity is that, once again, we pour into that symbol what it stands for variously.

I would propose that one of the key items issues for further research is to consider whether the qualities of symbols, and even their materialities, has consequence for the kinds of solidarities, the kinds of nations, made in their name. Recall what I have said about the Solidarity movement itself:

For those who don't know the story about the origins of the famous script for the Polish Solidarity movement of 1980-81, consider this: “Its author, a young Gdansk designer, Jerzy Janiszewski, recounts: “I saw how solidarity appeared among the people how a social movement was being born out of that and how institutions joined in. This all had a great effect on my spirit and I decided I wanted to join the strike”. In his design, Janiszewski used the white and red of the Polish flag. The symbolism of the logo is simple: the letters cannot stand by themselves; each needs the support of its neighbors. The letter N carries a little Polish flag. The idea of solidarity could not have found a more befitting expression. Jan Kubik: p. 195, from Laba, 1984. “I chose the word because it best described what was happening to people. The concept came out of the similarity to people in dense crowds leaning on one another – that was characteristic of the crowds in front of the gate. They did not press or push each other but they leaned on each other… Finally I added the flag because I was aware that that is is not a regional group question but a universal movement. The letters have a disorderly look because that is their strike attribute” http://www.theartofposter.com/RED/Red.htm.

More generally, I would propose that the qualities of symbols have consequence: that loyalty to a constitution has different qualities than loyalty to a flag, and that communities made in the name of the former have more reflexive qualities than those made in the name of the latter.13

Many of you have been quite taken with Jodi Dean’s approach to reflective solidarity, though I would prefer the term reflexive. Note what she does to solidarity; it is no longer “reflecting” something more important, whether underlying structure or some symbolic condensation of invisible essence, but something made intersubjectively. She wrote,

“I define reflective solidarity as the mutual expectation of a responsible orientation to relationship. This conception of solidarity relies on the intuition that the risk of disagreement which accompanies diversity must be rationally transformed to provide a basis for our intersubjective ties and commitments. This means that the expression "we" must be interpreted not as given, but as "in process," as the discursive achievement of individuated "I's." Such an opening up of the notion of "we" makes possible a change in

13 Read this when available Genevieve Zubrzcycki (ed.) National Matters: Nationalism, Culture and Materiality (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

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our attitude toward boundaries, a change which requires that each individual view group expectations from the perspective of a situated, hypothetical third.

Simply put, solidarity can be modeled as an interaction involving at least three persons: I ask you to stand by me over and against a third. But rather than presuming the exclusion and opposition of the third, the ideal of reflective solidarity thematizes the voice of the third to reconstruct solidarity as an inclusionary ideal for contemporary politics and societies. On the one hand, the third is always situated and particu-lar, signifying the other who is excluded and marking the space of identity. On the other, including the third, seeing from her perspective, remains the precondition for any claim to universality and any appeal to solidarity. Conjoined with a discursively achieved "we," the perspective of a situated, hypothetical third articulates an ideal of solidarity attuned both to the vulnerability of contingent identities and to the universalist claims of democratic societies.

Traditionally, solidarity has been conceived of oppositionally, on the model of "us vs. them." But this way of conceiving solidarity overlooks the fact that the term "we" does not require an opposing "they," "we" also denotes the relationship between "you" and "me." Once the term "we" is understood communicatively, difference can be respected as necessary to solidarity. Dissent, questioning, and disagreement no longer have to be seen as tearing us apart but instead can be viewed as characteristic of the bonds holding us together.

This notion of solidarity underlies my interest in what I wrote recently about a “transformational solidarity”, one that moves beyond the imposed solidarity of unreflexive loyalty to an elected president, a solidarity of opposition between “them” and “us”, and a solidarity based only on “dialogue” that is, itself, premised on certain presumptions beyond dialogue (i.e. coastal multicultural elites not understanding whiteness while in fact it’s more likely that this dialogue is premised on denying its whiteness). We ought ask what enables this kind of reflexive solidarity, especially in conditions when certain hegemonies demand universalisms on their own terms, as whiteness in America does?

Luczewski et al invite that exploration. The team devised six steps in realizing solidarity – to face reality, seek the good, work on yourself, serve others, strive for agreement and forgive in truth. These are really compelling and deserving of deep reflection. They introduce each so powerfully, not least because they are able to bring people into dialogue in this history that today cannot speak with one another with their divergent locations across ideological barricades. To listen to my colleagues speak today of the offense they suffer with the words and actions of their political opponents is riddled with such pain, and such resentment. It is no wonder that dialogue is so difficult, but they are working to figure the bases of that dialogue leading to solidarity. In that spirit, they offer 10 principles.

1. The identity of the parties to dialogue must be defined; there can be no dialogue between people who do not know who they are. Sometimes the identity of the parties is only revealed at this stage. 2. The parties undertaking dialogue must do it honestly and with good will.

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3. The parties are mutually open to one another, they identify with their cause, they do not arbitrarily select who they are going to talk to; an opponet becomes a partner, who may be in the right.4. Both parties are open to changing their mind, accepting that they may not be in the right. 5. Both parties demonstrate commitment to dialogue, they react to one another’s voices (responsiveness) and they are predictable. 6. The means of dialogue is a peaceful exchange of thoughts, which is transparent and with the same access to information and resources. 7. The means of dialogue is opposition. The partners in the dialogue most oppose one another. 8. The aim of dialogue is compromise. We note that compromise may be an aim in a practical dialogue concerning a conflict of interests, which may be partially conceded; yet in a solidarity dialogue, compromise is not the aim; at most it is a milestone on the road to the next two aims. 9. The aims of dialogue is the rebuilding of ties and an exchange of gifts. 10. The aim of dialogue is a common quest for truth and goodness. (Łuczewski et al, pp 118-19).

This is a foundation, I believe, for transformative solidarity. But can it be sufficiently open?

Here, one of the tenets of a theologically informed solidarity like theirs illustrates one of the challenges facing this kind of solidarity. There is no higher order element to which one might appeal that automatically includes all. There is no constitution, and the God of this theology may not be the God of another. There is, however, work in theology that can help in this: Paul J. Griffiths, Problems of Religious Diversity Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Thinking about religious diversity differs for the non-religious and the religious, he claims. He seeks to clarify the depth of disagreement in fact papered over by many secular presumptions: the non-religious feel pressed to make decisions about all religious, while the religious differentiate among religions in their presumptions (p.19) .He does write from a Catholic Christian perspective, but exemplifies in such the very point he seeks to make.

Religion is a difficult concept. There is lack of consensus as to its meaning. Augustine may have thought of religio as worship, with its right and wrong ways of so doing (p.3) but not in the sense of comparative religions we use now. “The idea that religion is a type with tokens is largely a modern invention” (p.4). and European at that (and Christian?). p. 6. He uses religion as a “form of life that seems to those who inhabit it to be comprehensive, incapable of abandonment, and of central importance” (p.7).

How then do we think of religious diversity? Some try to minimize the differences by finding the “truth” in all religious expressions (Kant—all moral duties are given by God and there are equally valid expressions of this across religions; Hick makes his argument as a “Real” is unitary, while the human is particular and thus potentially

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contradictory. (37-44). Wittgenstein treats religion more as an assent that is not subject to empirical verification, and therefore, religions are of equal validity but are fundamentally nonequivalent, since they are not also verifiable outside their systems of belief – however, religious communities do challenge each other on these very points, argue with each other and present their claims as if understandable (48). And, one might also argue, religious claims themselves vary in the degree to which they are verifiable in sensibilities across communities.

There are various kinds of incompatibilities among religions. There are real contradictions and differences among religions, for example: there is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet, vs. belief in another God (32); that what exists is momentary, vs. the eternal qualities of divinity (33); the Koran says that God is neither begotten nor begets, vs. Christian assumptions (p.33). Sometimes, claims appear contrary, but it’s also possible that neither is true. Finally, there are also another incompatibility he identifies to be noncompassibilty where each religion prescribes an action that an individual cannot perform both, like giving all to a religious community. But in whatever instance, it is often difficult to understand a claim from another religion, embedded as it is in a “complex and highly ramified account of things” (p.35).

He makes an interesting argument based on his Catholic foundation seeking an “open inclusivism”, finding that alien religions can teach truths, because these other forms of life can be informed by the triune God (61). But are there truths that the Church itself does not yet know? The answer is yes, for while all that is taught is adequate for salvation, not all religiously significant truth has been made explicit in the implicit teachings that are now available (62). This allows for the value of religious diversity, but does not force the parity position, which is impossible for religious communities to adopt since there are certain axiomatic issues that must be believed to be religious in particular, for instance the notion about the significance of Jesus of Nazareth. This latter point is at the core of the religion’s meaning, and thus cannot be challenged without ceasing to be such.

For the non-religious, an approach guided by parity is appealing, for it need not, and in fact denies, that some religions are more or less truthful, and thus carries with it neutrality (50). But it is “impossible for the state consistently to legislate and to interpret the meaning of legislation as though all religious claims were on a par with respect to the truth.” (p.51). Some religions are slighted (peyote forbidden, e.g.) while others are esxplicitly not followed – legislation as implementation of the Koran and the Hadith (p.52). Indeed, the American solution, drawing on Locke, to “privatize” religion and treat it as a choice indicates this very point. For many religions, it is not so -- assent to a point, that this is the “Lamb of God”, is not a matter of choice, but a matter of fact for being of that religion. “If you assent to a claim you take it to be true and it makes a claim upon you” (p.26). Assents can be traced to a decision to join a community, but they are conditions, and not choices, of that community’s membership. They are involuntary. With this, evidence and argument may be irrelevant to the assent and incapable of abandonment, and are true (46-47). To identify some affairs as matters of state, and say religious cannot intrude, in this Lockean fashion, means some religions are not admissible on certain grounds (108). He draws on the case of Planned parenthood vs.

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Casey in regard to abortion to make the argument that this cannot be just a matter of private belief (81). But this of course depends on a model of subjectivity as the following: “individual preference and unfettered choice of consumers are fundamental goods, and they ought to be restricted as little as is compatible with the existence of a democratic polity..” (84). But are religious goods the same as consumer goods?

This solution is of course attractive to the non-religious, but not to the religious. It treats choices individually, and not as part of a larger system of meaning, or in relation to a larger environment in which truthfulness might be recognized better – as whether, for example, the earth is the center of the universe or not, or whether evolution is real. With this approach, “it is difficult for religious people in the United States or Europe to maintain an epistemologically critical response to diversity, and increasingly tempting to follow the pull toward epistemic parity suggested by privatization. To the extent that this temptation is succumbed to, though, a religious account ceases to be offered even when its form and rhetoric remain. It is one of the ironies of the American experiment with religious liberty that it has become implicated in these ways, causally if not intentionally, with he destruction of properly religious forms of life.” (88).

However, he quotes the Dalai Lama favorably, showing how religious toleration from a religious point of view does not diminish the value of religion per se (110), but it is different than what he might suggest about Christianity’s proselytizing. Therefore, religions differ on how they engage religious diversity. This is conversion’s discussion, which overlaps interestingly with a critique of secularization, which is itself another kind of conversion. Critiquing Rorty, who wants to push religion, in the form of tradition, back (126). This, however, denies religious communities a foundation for their public action.

He has a final chapter on salvation, arguing interestingly about how it is related to religious diversity, and conversion, with specific points on restrictivism and universalism, arguing Christians have to acknowledge the possibility of both, with God’s unbounded love, and freedom’s possibility of an individual’s refusal. He also argues that this cannot be known, for this is between God and the individual, and sometimes the individual does not even know (165-66).

This, of course, is not the position Talal Asad takes, for he is more interested in elevating the problem of the secular for its presumed neutrality, than in elevating the value of a religious commitment to figuring out diversity. This is something I need explore more, but for the purposes of figuring solidarity, I need not. All I need say is this:

We need a mode of reflexivity that is humble, and more curious and open, than defensive and assertive. But it needs, ultimately, be based on recognizing injustice.

Here, the example of what has happened at Standing Rock is illustrative, and ought point the way to a meaningful solidarity that is based on deep respect, on the one hand, and humility, on the other, and terrific consequence at large.

At least we saw humility in that act of apology Wes Clark Jr. made on behalf of the Veterans who stood with those at Standing Rock. And we saw generosity of the

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Standing Rock Sioux in their invitation to others to join in solidarity, even if they also insisted that they would themselves determine the terms of solidarity. This was not the familiar solidarity from presumption, but solidarity based on proximity to care for one another, and care for life giving waters, and care for the sacred.

We should also view this solidarity in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline as itself modeling an alternative, even solidarity economy. Liz Hoover’s work on how people were fed is a terrific point of departure here.

Solidarity among the indigenous also is a critical step forward in producing a humility in how we define that solidarity. The power of the Sami in forcing a Norwegian bank’s divestment from the pipeline also suggests its consequence.

All of this suggests a kind of ideal, where solidarity is based on non-violence, mutual respect, humility, and consequence. But solidarity does not always have these accents.

One can’t see presumption in this struggle, at least I can’t. But at the same time, it’s critical to keep in mind the ways in which solidarity with presumption has worked in the past. Solidarity based on the terms of the powerful, telling the subordinate how to be grateful.

I was very fortunate throughout the term to work with Syeda Masood in teaching this course. She led different sessions. In one, she had us read Brown, Wendy. Subjects of tolerance: why we are civilized and they are the barbarians. 2006. Barker, Adam J. "Already occupied: Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism and the occupy movements in North America." Social Movement Studies11.3-4 (2012): 327-334. and Dhawan, Nikita. "Coercive cosmopolitanism and impossible solidarities." Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 22.1 (2013): 139-166. These texts indicate just some of the problems associated with the presumption of the powerful, but this issue is most notable in the ways in which US military power claims solidarity as motive.

For example, we ought compare that power’s exercise in Afghanistan, where Hirschkind, Charles, and Saba Mahmood. "Feminism, the Taliban, and politics of counter-insurgency." Anthropological Quarterly 75.2 (2002): 339-354 so clearly identified the ways in which solidarity was performed, rather than enacted. I want to read this up against the ways in which NATO solidarity was exercised in Kosova against genocide and ethnic cleansing. That’s a future project.

In these exercises of solidarity, we need to at the very least mark the presumptuous foundation for solidarity itself and consider whether it’s an exercise in such, or an exercise in coercive cosmopolitanism as Dhawan suggests.

Perhaps, depending on the character of the solidarity itself, we might find critical variations. What is it that makes it more possible to see a resonant solidarity around migrants and refugees when they declare that “no human is illegal”; is it because we are focusing on the total human and their care rather than the rules and needs of a system?

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Should we conceive of solidarity much as the religious conceive of their work, as something that is superior to the systems that organize us? That might “tame” the imperatives of capital accumulation and coercion? Or is it possible to imagine solidarity as defining the terms of a society? Where systems are defined in their terms?

Clearly we see such efforts in solidarity economies, and in sanctuary efforts. Sociologists need be at work here, understanding their constraints, their possibilities, and work from within a practical problem. However, it might be helpful if we had larger more abstract concepts to which to return from time to time.

I like to think in terms of structural codes, and here, solidarity is evident in opposition to egoism, on the one hand. But to other things? Violence, not necessarily. War to stop genocide? To system needs? Not necessarily (like the sanctity of water for life!). But as an ideal type, as a formal opposition, it might help. And here I draw on all of our discussions across the term to conclude with these final tables.

Types of Solidarity:Direct Social Ties InterdependentCategoricalPublic CommunicationTransformative

And think of how these differ in terms of scales… Direct Social Ties / CommunityInterdependent / all levelsCategorical / easiest up to national levelPublic Communication / easiest up to national level, but complicated by language beyond thatTransformative – of conditions? of relations? of systems?

And finally, use this method of representation as a means for thinking through what solidarity means in practice, in transformation, in potential and in oppression.

Solidarity Selflessness (negation of self) or Selfishness (hegemony of self)14

Reflexive UnreflexiveCommunicative ImposedTransparent ManipulativeMutual /Consent/Cooperative ExploitativeHorizontal/Equity HierarchicalInvited15 ImposedModesty16 HubrisListening Declaring

14 Cameron Johnson suggested this opposition to solidarity…15 Cecilia Garza and Ruby Goldberg suggested this kind of opposition16 Syeda Masood suggested this quality in solidarity’s fuller expression

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Community SystemAwareness AlienationSoulful TransactionalQualitative Evaluation Commodified evaluationGiving/Long Term Exchange Immediate ExchangeRelational thinking Object & Commodity FetishismFull Human Function of SystemSustainable17 Exhaustion/ExpulsionW/ the past historical ignorancew/ the future Presentist Open Boundaries hard boundariesQueer Love18 Objectification

We should, however, conclude with critical questions. Here are some:

What are solidarity’s nightmare questions? Where is the space for “creative destruction?” and innovation?What relation to “external” systems does solidarity involve? – Develop a theory of solidarity’s association with other articulations. What institutional forms might support solidaritiy? What distributions of resources? What kinds of rules?What are solidarity’s boundaries?What forms of relations exist within a condition of solidarity?What kinds of power work in solidarity, and what forms in the anti-solidary?What kinds of scholarship might be developed in relation to solidarity? Is engaged scholarship necessary? How might “professional sociology” express a different kind of approach to solidarity? In the end, what is enough for solidarity?

It might be, in the end, to give us companionship, care, and hope.

And working to extend that beyond what systems determine is enough for my sociology of solidarity.

Notes accompanying the final seminar in the Sociology of Culture and Knowledge:“Knowledge Cultural Sociology beyond its Globalization:Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Empire”

Michael D. Kennedy

December 8, 2016

17 Vandhana Ravi suggested this opposition18 I suggested love, but Cameron Johnson thought queer love a more appropriate characterization for its openness.

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I taught my graduate seminar on the sociology of culture and knowledge, and other undergraduate courses on similar themes, previously as an anticipation and reflection of my Globalizing Knowledge. In that, I focused on developing aspects of that book around the sociology of knowledge, intellectuals, universities, publics, contexts, flows, and transformation around design, cosmopolitanism and solidarity. That is done, and thus I was able to leave that, even if it remains rather foundational for me, and consider different topics as smooth extensions of what I have done and other topics as challenges to what I have done, as well as new areas entirely. I learned much from those also in the seminar – Prabh Kehal, Maria Ortega, Amy Chin, Kat Pongrace and Ariel Zhu. I hope they see their good influence on my own learning!

The smooth extensions are here:

Beyond our reading my own book, of course, we also read Sewell. My book is so deeply informed by a Sewellian approach to sociology, with its approach to culture (distinguishing between system and practice; thinking about the historicity of social science, along with its emphasis on context and sequence and event). But my work is also more critical19, I would say, than Sewell, for nowhere does Sewell emphasize the normative, as I do. Nowhere does he explicitly theorize practice and the relationship of sociology to transformation. It’s not hard to do that, with a Sewellian lens, but Sewell does not in that volume.

So, one of my first questions for me, and for those who do cultural sociology but also a sociology of theoretical innovation would be, to distinguish between an absence of something in a body of work, and an obstacle to something in a body of work. What makes a work, for example, hospitable to, or open to, a variety of critiques, and what kinds of critiques? Is it just a matter of adding a variable or a substantive area, or does it involve an epistemological challenge, and all that lies in between. Can we theorize and analyze that variation in rigidity and resilience in theory work?

I hadn’t engaged Isaac Reed before writing GK, but I should have. He clarifies some of the logics I have used in my own work, notably with his distinction of three modes of explanation beyond the positivist – i.e. realist, normative, and interpretive. I have been drawn to the realist mode before, but frankly have an ambivalent relationship to it. I would rather think of myself as a fellow traveler in its practice, willing to consider, for example, that the power of the commodity and of the color line are more than just interpretations. I can cede that readily, given their effects. But still, I don’t know that they have a different ontological status than money and ethnicity. The perspective that clarifies that relationship is something I seek, for I do want to understand, better, the varying depth of different cultural concepts in structuring social relations.

Reed’s work on the interpretive is his forte, and I think it’s important for all sociologists to be able to engage that array of accounts he offers. But his work on the normative is somehow, for me, left wanting. And that is perhaps because that is the most critical omission in sociology. When folks say we explain what is, not what ought to be, that’s

19 Understood as a disposition that combines an analyses of power relations and practice alongside an explicitly elaborated normative account of the good society. See for example my first book.

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only half true. We can’t imagine what is without having the ought surround us in a variety of ways. It’s just implicit. I think sociology ought to make these things explicit. And that is a knowledge cultural sociology.

I regret that I did not make that term explicit in my book. I want to develop it more. In my piece for Items, I wrote that, “Over the last several years, I have been using “knowledge cultural sociology” to locate my own sociology. It clearly builds on the work of friends and colleagues who write of “knowledge cultures”. In this sense, I propose to turn that concept into an adjective much as economy births economic, and political economy births political economic. It also connotes a transformation similar to what happened with the mutation of the sociology of culture into cultural sociology. Rather than treat knowledge as dependent variable only, I work to figure how different knowledgeabilities, as different symbols and schemas, might shape social change.”

That knowledge cultural emphasis is critical for any sociology that discusses power and inequality. After all, we can’t talk about power without talking about norms. But that original disposition, which I always thought to make me a critical sociologist, is not, quite, enough for engaging those sociologists I find most compelling today. And that starts around race, gender, and sexuality.

I bear the imprint of my beginnings, as all of us do. I began my critical sociology in the wake of Marxism’s reentry into US sociology. For me, being critical was about class and political power. None of the courses I took in graduate school seriously addressed gender, sexuality, or race. My critical sociology was, in retrospect, remarkably and extensively white cis male and heteronormative. Being at Brown, more than being at Michigan, has challenged that.

That was, in part, because there were enough folks beyond that hegemonic positionality at Michigan to allow some to see the hegemonic positionality I, and folks like me, embodied to be marked as one position among many. Here at Brown, that positionality is marked in a less pluralist fashion, and is rather seen more as an oppositional condition, partially because there are so few folks beyond the hegemonic position in sociology and other similar departments (American studies, for example, is an illustration of how things might be otherwise within Brown).

Thanks to that challenge, I feel compelled to move beyond a pluralist, live and let live disposition, one I fear insufficient for thinking about the challenge of whiteness for an institution or set of practices as we have at Brown.. Indeed, much as feminist scholars challenged us to think about the missing feminist revolution in sociology decades ago, and in history even just a decade ago, I don’t think we can address the challenge with the method of add and stir. Rather, we should look more at how whiteness shapes our own work, and that of others who are not, ostensibly, writing about race. In what follows, I begin to explore that in my own work in light of the works we read over the course of the term.

Ironically, or perhaps interestingly, the work of Ann Shorla Orloff, Raka Ray and Evrin Savci (eds.) Perverse Politics: Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, Multiplicity, a special issue

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of Political Power and Social Theory volume 30, 2016 posed the least challenge to my sense of knowledge cultural sociology in general, and globalizing knowledge in particular. In fact, it seems like a terrific extension, one that shows how the ethnocentrisms of US White feminist sociology find their greatest expression in marking as “perverse” the politics of gender and sexuality that the volume’s contributors invite us to consider. I’m struggling to figure out why that is so “comfortable”. I think it rests in their emphasis on the multiplicity of axes of conflict and difference, and how the notion of perverse effects fits with my own sense of the complexity of politics and power relations. Ironically, might I say, it poses the smallest challenge to the hegemonies I reproduce in my own work because it recenters American presumption, rather than whiteness per se.

I also find that G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats and Media Constructed a New American. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014 fits readily with my own sense of knowledge cultural sociology. In fact, I would propose, it exemplifies its premises because it makes quite explicit how a category of identification draws upon all sorts of cultural competencies and forms of expertise to make something “real”. It emphasizes the plasticity of categories, even while they are embedded in deeper structures of inequality and power. But, again, those power relations are multiple.

Even the American Sociological Association Plenary, “Protesting Racism”, with Charlene Carruthers of the Black Youth Project 100, Kimberlé Crenshaw of Columbia University and “#SayHerName and Mariame Kaba of Project NIA, moderated by Aldon Morris http://videoarchive.asanet.org/presentation/?fw__param=protesting_police_brutality_and_racism feels to me like a smooth extension of how I would identify the knowledge cultural sociology of globalizing knowledge. The participants on the panel exemplify how knowledge claims can be contested and authorized using different bases of expertise and different schema. In their challenge, and in the elaboration of intersectional thinking, I find remarkable resonance with what I have learned especially from my feminist colleagues in Kosova.

However, the other parts of this course have been more challenging for me to claim as a smooth extension, including challenges I want to take up more substantially in the future, and I shall in Chicago on March 1 when I discuss Hoang, Kimberly. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendency, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

As a contributor to perverse politics, Kimberly has affinities with my own approach to GK, but in this larger book version, I can see how it’s not quite the same. First and most forthrightly, there is no explicitly normative politics, beyond recognizing the dynamics of alternative positionalities and contexts. I want more, need more, and I’m going to be spending the next couple months making my concerns more elaborate than simply marking an absence of explicit, or even readily legible, normative grounding. Indeed, I think the difficulty in my recognizing that “ought” rests more in my own presumptions than in any lack Kimberly produces.

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I want to think about Kimberly’s work alongside what I have learned from Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: WEB DuBois and the Origins of Modern Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. In some ways, Kimberly bears an affinity for what DuBois has done, but has received some, but not all, the recognition that DuBois has gotten that can be explained beyond the decades in which they write. In this sense, I want to read Kimberly’s work, and Aldon’s work on DuBois, alongside one another to think not only about the globality of the color line, and the feminisms that might or might not flow easily within that stream, but also the ways in which an ethnography of desire plays differently than the statistics of racial injustice within the knowledge cultures of sociology itself. Inequality is a sociology staple. Sociology is less ready to deal with desire. I might pursue this exploration in a way that Latour could embrace, or in a way that Zubrzycki’s collection (Zubrzycki, Genevieve (ed.) National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) on materialities and nations could refashion.

These two books by Aldon and Kimberly are, themselves, things that circulate, flow, and have effects independent of the humans implicated in them. We might follow these volumes as things that recast social relations, or at least knowledge cultures. Indeed, we can find a neat merger between what is a classic cultural sociology of interpretations of race and colonialism and what is attentive to the materiality of things, and their own agency. But there is still something more that needs elaboration, and I’ll offer that in Chicago. I’m not sure what it is yet, for I am circling back on my own self-criticism.

I wonder if I’m not just contrasting desire and inequality, but also because I’m looking for that kind of big abstraction, that great synthesis, that elegant parsimony or that profound critical theory that is the legacy of my founding education. I might be addicted to that hegemonic disposition even in counterhegemonic struggles.

I actually see that same disposition in Julian Go’s work and our discussion of it. Those great syntheses that claim to master bodies of work, accounts of the world, reflect a presumption that I like, and might even be foundational to works of greater nuance. Nevertheless, they alsoemanate from a privilege I enjoy. Latour does that in ways, despite his claims to resist such grandiosity, that Zubrzcyki does not with her own resistance to elaborating theory beyond context. That variation in theoretical ambition can also be found in the imperial entanglements of sociology.

We read sections of Steinmetz, George (ed). Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. On the one hand, this volume is exceptionally ambitious, for even as it identifies the limits of these grand accounts associated with Durkheim et al, it still feels like it is grand theory setting. It manages that, in part, by rewriting grand theories and the contexts of their elaboration. I especially loved seeing how Durkheim’s imperial embrace was marked in that volume by Fuyuki Kurasawa. I like it because it helps me to recognize my own reflection.

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I wonder if Globalizing Knowledge is not, itself, a bit like Durkheim’s own sociological project. Like Durkheim, I am dependent on the reach of the metropole, and like him too, I propose to critique the ideologies and practices of that metropole (for him, evolutionary thinking, for me, ethnocentric globalizations) from within the privilege of the metropole itself. This demands that I think much more about the institutional infrastructures enabling globalizing knowledge itself.

In particular, I have not given sufficient attention to the ways in which I have appropriated insights from others. I have wanted to see my collaborative spirit as an asset to my colleagues elsewhere, not so much a burden. But I have to wonder more about that, especially for what I have learned from Tressie McMillan Cottom, “’Who Do You Think You Are?” Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity” A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology #7, 2013 http://adanewmedia.org/2015/04/issue7-mcmillancottom/ especially what I read this morning.

I have never theorized my whiteness in this, despite the fact that I have been such an advocate of reflexivity (here, thinking about Kimberly Hoang’s reflections on reflexivity bear reconsideration) for marking the ways in which the culture of critical discourse that distinguishes intellectuals is itself limited by various axes of power. I certainly have appreciated in here our own critiques of narrow dimensions of professionalism, and the ways in which public sociology escapes, and reproduces, some of the limitations of that professionalism. I like what I read by Michael Burawoy yesterday, on how public sociology can enhance a global sociology that is simultaneously more humble but also more real. But in that appeal, what is this intellectuality that I occupy?

I have begun to try to write about the whiteness of the times in which we live, but not of GK in those terms. But even when whiteness is on my mind, and American empire on my desk, I wonder if these casts of power are the right lenses with which to unpack the limitations of globalizing knowledge.

My doubts ultimately redound to the place of Marxism and its legacy in the world. I identify readily with those who grapple with that legacy and its oppressions. That means my critical sociology is informed by that erstwhile second world in the global geographical north, much less than across most of the global south. I can imagine those legacy laced engagements in Cuba and Viet Nam, and certainly in China and Central Asia, as places latter day DuBoisians might put among those led by the “darker races of men”. Thinking about emancipatory politics with the experience of communist rule as history is a common ground I appreciate. Indeed, that’s one reason why I so appreciate the dialogue Katherine Verdery and Sharad Chari have had, but it’s also why I struggle to understand my place in terms of empire and whiteness. But then I wonder.

When I focus on DuBois’s embrace of the Community Party at the end of his life, I need to understand better what that has to do with the color line. I wonder if that also is a retreat into whiteness, a knowledge cultural sociological move to restore white privilege in the discussion given that Marxism as oppression, rather than as complement, to critical

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thinking, is primarily an angst I have heard mostly among white, and occasionally Asian, men. At least it gives me a relatively novel point of entry in rethinking my own whiteness in globalizing knowledge and critical cultural sociology.

Notes Anticipating a presentation entitled “Globalizing Knowledge for the Future, Then and Now”

Michael D. Kennedy For http://instrat.pl/future-insights-inauguracja-cyklu/

November 3, 2016

I am grateful to Jan Zygmuntowski for the invitation to participate, and to be present, at least virtually, with people I met last June in a marvelous conference organized by Malgorzata Bonikowska.

In appreciation of what you all envision here, I prepared a few remarks which I have entitled “Globalizing Knowledge for the Future, Then and Now”.

In these last nearly 40 years of studying sociology and conducting sociological research, I have always focused on the future. I called my early scholarship “critical sociology” as I was focused on alternative futures embedded in the possibilities of the present. That commitment to critical sociology was formed in Poland, hence my dedication to the place. My doctoral dissertation focused on the Solidarity movement of 1980-81. To study Solidarity in the 1980s meant to focus on those alternative futures embedded in the present. But those futures were different then than they are now.

One of my subsequent students, Daina Stukuls Eglitis, made a terrific argument about how the revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s against communist rule were struggles to realize normality. Of course there were many different versions of normality – based on what might be elsewhere, or what was once. The utopia of that time was really eutopic – a valuation of what ought be normal. The common sense of the time was that the struggle for utopia, for that communist utopia, contributed to the making of dystopia. I was in Poland in 1984, and I read George Orwell repeatedly, there, or should I say here, given that my voice, if not body, is in Poland now.

Even if that normal animated a struggle for, a hope for, an alternative future different from a future based on a smooth extension of a communist ruled present, it required an imagination of how things could otherwise be. And that imagination was easy. One needed, if one looked to the West for the normal, merely, if possible, to travel or watch Western movies. If it was a normal based on the interwar period, one need only talk to one’s grandparents, if they could talk. Imagination needed not be too imaginative.

That’s all different now. And that’s why my book, Globalizing Knowledge, is much more an invitation to constructing a field than it is an explanation for a historical transformations as my first two books were. Globalizing knowledge, I would like to

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think, is part of a movement, part of a knowledge network, that takes the point I am about to make as point of departure.

There is no more normal.

The societies in which we live are, not, “normal”, and certainly the futures we wish to see, or are afraid to imagine, are not normal either. Even the normative is being shredded.

If we wish to thrive, if we wish even to survive, we cannot imagine the future as a smooth extension of the present in which we live. We need a much more vigorous sense of what can be, what ought to be, and a network of mutually interested and caring people to help create it. For that reason, I am glad to be with you virtually today.

To start, consider, after all, how unsustainable our present is. We are in the midst of systemic crises made worse by the denial of too many to acknowledge our location in that crisis. We all should know of the planetary crisis global warming produces. Too few know of, but thanks to Jyoti Sharma more shall know of, the global crisis of water consumption we suffer.

Too few know of the drift toward war more and more experience. The crisis of Crimea and eastern Ukraine motivates those on NATO’s eastern flank to prepare evermore seriously for Putinesque violations of peaceable conventions and the boundaries that assure them. Americans hear of this occasionally, with this account of Estonians recently causing quite a stir of interest.

The wars that continue to destroy Syria and Iraq, the instability surrounding Afghanistan and its borderlands, cannot be contained in their boundaries or even the neighborhood. Refugees not only threaten the ease with which we divide the world into us and them, but threaten our very moral foundations if solidarity still matters. The European Union, rather than a beacon of hope and vehicle for a form of globalization based on more moral principles than markets allow, becomes instead a fortress desperately trying to figure out how to remain afloat. Brexit is just the tip of an iceberg threatening to sink that EU Floating Fortress.

Each of these crises, each of these expressions of unsustainability, rests on a systemic crisis of a different sort, a kind of communicative crisis made all the more urgent by the measure of communicative capacities we now enjoy.

This communicative capacity, enabled by but not exhaustively connoted by the information and communication technological revolution, moves us to consume images and sounds on an unprecedented scale, with some sense of proximity and thus familiarity. However, simultaneously, it creates a proximity inflected by a measure of distance that enables us to feel remote, and not responsible, even as things are familiar. It produces a new level of alienation from our common humanity.

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But it’s not just this imbalanced sense of familiarity that our new communicative capacity produces. It also changes our identity, and ought change the way in which we construct our identifications.

We now have new identities based on networks of information and communication that appear to be captured with categorical labels like Web-Kids, Millennials or Fundamentalists. But these labels don’t suffice. These new identifications move far beyond common attitudes or convenient demographics, and are rather based on the intensity of information sharing within networks. That in turn reinforces the conviction that one’s newsfeed is the right feed.

With this mode of communication, we see an escalation of distrust, a collapse of generalized authority, and an increasing alienation from the systems that envelop us. We are more readily able to assign to others if not demonic powers then at least demonic intentions. And given the precarious state of our life worlds, such attributions can find ready resonance.

We give ourselves license to disregard those beyond our network. That in turn can move those beyond our network to behave in ways that appear to confirm the justice of our own alienation from them, of our damnation of them. Civil war, or at least systemically disruptive violence, is now something we can worry about, even in America.

In short, the real crises destroying the foundations for our biological survival, in the increasing temperature of our planet and the depletion of our water supplies, are amplified by the failures of our communicative systems. Those modes of information and communication fragment our interpretation of very real crises, which in turn make us turn away from the real problems to address pseudo problems as if they were the ones most pressing.

Of course you can hear the American in me right now.

Our electoral contest for President has become the worst instance I can imagine, although Poland rivals in its own political circumstance. Somehow we have become the land where the wrongful use of email servers supplants meaningful debates over how to address the refugee crisis, global warming, increasing violence by the state against its people, and intensifying war. That focus on political hate will become a self-fulfilling prophecy; the reckless politicking we have seen in the last year will likely produce a political crisis, possibly even a civil war I can only hope remains non-violent. And that self-destructive spiral to hell will prevent us from addressing any of the systemic crises that threaten our very survival.

Such dystopian thinking threatens to ruin my reputation as an optimist. But I do see hope.

I see hope in the kinds of work that issues forth from those who struggle to redefine the relationship between knowledge and practice. Certainly this is apparent in Ashoka networks that are both at SGH and University of Warsaw, just as they are at Brown, and, as I have learned recently from my student, Isabella Luksic James, in Chile. She is

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studying how Ashoka and like-minded actors translate the principles of social innovation and social entrepreneurship to make them suitable in Chile, much as my Polish colleagues, Maria Rogaczewska, Maria Szymborska, and Ola Goldys, studied that translation between Providence and Poland. I might propose that this interest among academics in social innovation reflects the ways in which academic authority is dispersing, or where, at least, we are beginning to recognize the variety of ways in which we might measure academic value and worth. That, to me, is all to the good.

I also see hope in new kinds of protest. #BlackLivesMatter is a terrific example of how various social media have enabled a consciousness to take root. While we might hear refrains of #AllLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter, that very response illustrates the ways in which murders of Black people by state authorities is now part of the broader American sensibility, and not just a familiar matter for those in and with ties to the Black Community.

I see hope in the struggle in North Dakota against the routing of an oil pipeline across lands sacred to the Sioux people, threatening water supplies that could endanger their very survival as a people in place. The measure of solidarity, both performed from a distance and actual in place, that enables that protest to continue, and even become global while remaining rooted in Standing Rock, suggests a new subjectivity emerging, one that sees connections across distant places, one that enables us to see in the fates of others our very own possibilities.

I see hope in new kinds of scholarship that work across very different disciplinary domains. Let me recommend to you all, for it is very much in the spirit of what you discuss today, a work by Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown called the Pragmatic Imagination. In it, they invite us not only to move beyond the deductive and inductive imaginations that seem to shape our social sciences and political discourses all too much for the kind of crisis world in which we live. The invite us too to engage abductive reason, that “kind of best guess hypothetical reasoning” which relies more on speculation, less on existing facts. Indeed, for those of you who appreciate jazz music, who see the value in abstract art, who can see the point of humanities pointing us beyond the conventions of our no longer normal world, you will find in the guidance of this computer scientist and architect a new way of approaching the world.

They have six principles in this pragmatic imagination that you might yourselves enjoy considering as you yourselves anticipate futures this evening. I think focusing on these 4, which I summarize in my own way here, might be the best way to start.

1. Consider where the imagination sits in the entire spectrum of diverse cognitive processes as an entire spectrum of that organize our activity.

2. Consider how imagination can both resolve and widen the gap between the unfamiliar and the familiar… and reflect on when sense-breaking can be as important as, or even more important than, sense making.

3. Envision the pragmatic imagination as one that pro-actively imagines the actual in light of meaningfully purposeful possibilities and sees the opportunity in everything.

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4. Finally, remember that thought and action are indivisible and reciprocal, but that the disruptive imagination is especially important when you live in a world that requires radically new visions and actions.

We live in that world today. There is no normal, and there is too little normative. But we need a new way to connect, to produce a new way of being, a new kind of solidarity, out of the networks we inhabit. We need those communicative structures to become more inclusive, not more exclusive or hateful. We need to find ways to develop an imagination that does not rely on ever narrower sets of interests and concerns, but wider arrays of what matters and why. We need be open to learning. And we need figure the modes of information and communication that direct our attention to the crises that demand a new imagination to address.

I trust that in your community today, you have that commitment, and that possibility. We need it.

Notes anticipating, and following, “The Cultural Politics of Globalizing Knowledge”20

Michael D. Kennedy

October 31, 2016 

In these 15-20 minutes, by drawing on Globalizing Knowledge and its extensions, I’ll propose that we can recognize more clearly the ways in which cultural politics work if we mark agents and their fields of engagement by distinguishing those who are institutionally embedded from those relatively autonomous, on the one hand, and those, on the other, who are explicit about their cultural engagement from those who are more implicit about their cultural work. To illuminate these distinctions, I’ll extend my past work on Pussy Riot, University diversity politics, design intellectuality, and globalizing the next left, and compare these projects with a 2X2 as springboard.  

In this workshop, I was honored to offer the first brief presentation following these principal points.

I’ve written about cultural politics for over a decade now, and have used the same definition throughout: “attempts to influence and transform the meanings, identities, values, and representations accompanying the exercise of power and influence” (Kennedy 2015:19). In GK and elsewhere, I’ve analyzed policies around the movement from dictatorship to democracy, planning to markets, and the formation of military alliances in these terms. Cultural politics is different from the politics of culture.

20 For a panel on the politics of culture and the political roles of cultural institutions at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Transnational Studies Initiative/Politics and Social Change Workshop and the Cultural Analysis Workshop in the Sociology Department. 

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I admire work that focus on the politics of culture. Indeed, our host, Peggy Levitt, focused on her most recent book, Artifacts and Allegiances, on how cultural museums variously engage local and cosmopolitan politics in Europe, the USA, Asia and the Middle East. When I revisited GK in light of reading Peggy’s volume, I rethought how it dealt with the politics of culture.

My most direct engagement of Peggy’s work came in my analysis of the University of Michigan’s exhibition of Russian art from the Hermitage Museum in 2003, and how it was implicated the politics of empire and the newfound US articulation of terrorism as enemy. Perhaps performance art is within the sense of the politics of culture – certainly my accounts of Glenda Dickerson’s play, Kitchen Prayers, and of Pussy Riot, fits here too. While we think of performance, we ought also think of celebrity intellectuals, another GK theme, from Vaclav Havel to Cornel West, and how public engagement changes the meanings, and possibilities of intellectuality as performance, and intellectual responsibility as not only a moral act but a dramatic gesture. Indeed, how does the online world change our sense of celebrity and publicness? The variously networked public intellectuality organized under the heading of Jadaliyyah sets a bar worth considering in this performative rubric.

But what about scholarship per se? There were certainly important performative elements in the University of Michigan’s treatment of the Polish Round Table negotiations of 1989 and the Workshop on Armenian Turkish Studies initiated by Ron Suny and Muge Gocek. Indeed, I ought rethink my book in light of the critical work Hiro Saito has offered in bringing the performative into globalizing knowledge ala his interrogation of Beck and Latour.

However, one should also view these notes and reflections, and the workshop itself, as part of the performance GK sets up. Indeed, Andreas Glaeser has recently outed my intentions in his review of the book in Contemporary Sociology:

“Kennedy urges us rightly to see intellectuality as potentially cropping up outside of the usually suspected places; and since he also insists that true intellectuality is consequential (something I would take issue with), he searches to find it far closer to the actual exercises of practices of all kind, notably those undertaken for the public good. Since he is interested in a specifically globalizing intellectuality, he searches and finds it in people, networks, and organizations that cultivate transnational connections articulating ideas across spaces, disciplines, and professions..”

Regardless of how we implicate performativity in our analysis of cultural politics and the politics of culture, we do need to think about universities in this light, especially conceiving them as cultural institutions. To be sure they have their own political economy, but they rest on simultaneously precarious and durable schema legitimating their role in the world. Thus, when we think about the politics of culture and cultural politics in institutions, universities, per se, ought to be on our reading list.

I expected that one of our workshop stumbling blocks would be around how we use the concept(s) of culture (as our discussant, Bo Yun Park, so thoughtfully invited us to

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clarify); and here I draw on one of my favorite essays on the subject. Bill Sewell, in Logics of History, offers my definitional starting point, considering culture to be

• “a dialectic of system and practice, as a dimension of social life autonomous from other such dimensions both in its logic and in its spatial configuration, and as possessing a real but thin coherence that is continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation” (William Sewell Jr. p. 169 in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation” University of Chicago Press, 2005),

Which for such an agentic sociologist as I, this approach to culture sets up cultural politics nicely, as an opportunity for actors “to play upon the multiple meanings of symbols” (p. 168) in their transformational practice. However, actors are themselves embedded variously into schematic and actual structures that shape how they can develop consequential intellectual practice. It could matter whether they are loosely embedded or tightly embedded, and it could matter just how explicitly cultural their environment is perceived to be.

Given that we were to discuss more artistic ventures throughout the worshop, I thought to contribute one of the most artistic expressions sociology has itself had to offer: the 2X2 table, in order to invite, much like an abstract painting might, various interpretations.

Table 1: A Sociological Artifact in the Explication of Agents and Their Fields of Cultural Politics

Structuring Resources

Relatively Unembedded Institutionally Embedded

Explicitly about Culture Pussy Riot University Diversity Politics

Organizing Schema

Implicitly about Culture Design Intellectuality Globalizing the Next Left

In these notes, I drew not only on what I had to say about each of these themes in GK, but also more recent products worth mention.

On Pussy Riot, how Trump, and not only Putin, are now the objects of Nadja Tolokonnikova’s critique;

On university diversity politics, drawing on subsequent transformations, especially at Brown, around notions of accountability;

On globalizing the next left, especially those encounters between Chilean and European socialists, including some of my subsequent reflections;

And finally, around design intellectuality, especially in the elaboration of the Pragmatic Imagination by Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown.

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While the next left appears least about “culture” per se, given its focus on winning elections and altering the rules of a global political economy, it is profoundly about cultural politics too – notably about the ways in which, given the diversity of the world and places within it, we can imagine the articulations of left and progressive. My own sense of that identification is profoundly cultural political, and can be seen here.

While Pussy Riot is obviously cultural and political, it might also be seen as less transformative over time, as it must perform to familiar audiences and extend its celebrity. At the same time, that very celebrity requires it to violate conventions, which may be hard to beat in the land of repressive tolerance and not in an easily offended overt dictatorship.

University diversity politics is overwhelmingly cultural political, with very high stakes in the game given how much universities depend on reputations to assure their own political economic security. How to assure the fusion of excellence and diversity, on the one hand, and to ensure the buy-in of the alienated and the authoritative, is no easy cultural political maneuver. It does, however, seem to depend on a cultural politics of compromise and inevitability, the opposite of which one might find in the pragmatic imagination.

While APJ and JSB are both especially emphatic on the importance of cultivating the imagination through a variety of techniques most typically associated with the arts, their invocation of science around perceptions, and comparison of deductive, inductive and abductive reasonings, position them well beyond a cultural identification, per se. However, that is, itself, part of the performance: they don’t invoke only the vision of the artist, but the visionary status of change-makers, working to figure how to make change and not only express yearing for it.

In this, then, we can see clearly the limits of the 2X2, and rather we ought imagine another way of seeing how cultural politics figure in all sorts of transformations of power, privilege, and function. And here, I learned much from my colleagues in presentation.

Harvard is exceptionally fortunate to enjoy Martha Tedeschi as the new director of the Harvard Art Museums. http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvard-art-museums-name-new-director Although she is not a sociologist!, she did evidence, and inspire, the sociological imagination in a number of ways. I just want to call out one that illustrates why 2X2 tables have the effect they do: on the cultural politics of adjacency. She illustrated it by reference to the juxtaposition of two apparently similar ceramic pieces (apart from their glaze) from very different circumstances, with the work of Dave the Potter as prompt. Here, my 2X2 sits in this performance of adjacency, asking us to imagine, frankly, the place of imagination in Pussy Riot, university diversity politics, and the next left, and how it is cultivated, stimulated, and made consequential.

Our third speaker was my colleague, and friend from University of Michigan Days, Fred Wherry, who built on his collection with Nina Bandelj to discuss “cultural wealth” as a resource in politics and economics, and especially to consider whether museums are reflections, or engines, of evolution. Clearly much good work has been done to show how World’s Fairs have codified evolutionary, racist, notions but there are other kinds of

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exhibitions that require a much more subtle accounting of how symbolic and economic resources articulate, as Fred’s work with Crosby on the Culture Bank in Mali suggests.

His example, and the larger theme of the workshop, set up Bo Yun Park’s question about how culture and power articulate. That deserves much more extensive conversation sometime, but I think we ought to put it into a larger conversation, too, about how explanation works in different epistemologies, especially contrasting those which see their work as apart from the objects of their study, and those which see their work as implicated in that work’s own consequence. After all, it is cultural political work to establish distance from one’s cultural objects, one’s research subjects, one’s research partners, one’s scholarly audiences and political effects. Thinking about the cultural politics of scholarship should not only be left to those who are public sociologists, after all; but too infrequently to those who wish to think only about the scholarly or professional aspects of their work think about the implication of that decision for the conditions of their own contribution.

Clearly, Peggy Levitt and all her colleagues, including my local colleague Irene Pang, and our most gracious scholar facilitator, J ohn Arroyo , have a really good thing going in this ongoing workshop! Best wishes to them!

Notes anticipating a presentation to the 2016 Mini-Conference entitled, “Can Comparative Historical Sociology Change the World?”, August 19, 2016, Seattle.21

Kosova’s Place in the Transnational Imaginary:A Comparative and Historical Account of Becoming Policy Significant

Linda Gusia and Michael D. Kennedy 

University of Prishtina and Brown University

July 15, 2016

Abstract: The debate over the relationship between comparative historical sociology and policy’s address moves Kosova’s historical transformations to the center. First, its place in English-language scholarship makes clear what is only implicit in more general discussions: there is a vast difference between focusing on the efficacy or determination of policy, and the articulation of that policy with publics in question. The bulk of Kosova-related scholarship is in the first register. Second, instrumentalist and expert focused policy is not the only kind of work done in policy schools; indeed, the turn toward social justice opens the door to a kind of policy work that is publicly engaged, but more difficult to realize in transnational policy environments. In the latter, an orientation toward transnational elites is more familiar, and when publicly engaged, can be more symbolic than substantive. However, comparative, historical and ethnographic analysis of the mechanisms by which the discrepancy between policy commitment and policy

21 http://chsminicon2016.squarespace.com/program-1/

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performance is reproduced can deepen public engagement. Finally, by attending to those marginalized in scholarly and policy discussions, one can move beyond the instrumental approach to policy that makes publics, themselves, invisible not only in Kosova but beyond as well. Kosova is, only, an extreme example of a more general point if we want to develop not only a more inclusive kind of policy, but also one that is more substantively viable and dependent on the insights of a comparative, historical, and ethnographic sociology that elevates vernacular knowledge in the definition of justice.

Kosova’s Place in the Transnational Imaginary:A Comparative and Historical Account of Becoming Policy Significant

Linda Gusia and Michael D. Kennedy 

In this paper we consider Kosova’s place in the transnational imaginary of policy-making and world historical transformations, but with more general theoretical questions at heart, and particular methodological and practice recommendations as consequence.

Theoretically speaking, under what conditions does a nation become prominent in the transnational imaginary informing policy, and what dimensions of that nation’s experience form the centerpiece justifying its place? Practically speaking, we consider how a justice lens reframes the problem of visibility and introduces new ways of considering how comparative and historical sociology and public policy inform one another. Indeed, by putting justice at the center, we elevate the problem of recognition and in so doing make Kosova’s relative invisibility a springboard for refashioning a more inclusive, and justice-oriented, scholarship around policy through comparative, historical and ethnographic sociology.22

We establish the argument in four steps.

First, we deconstruct this thing called “policy” into a variety of expressions. First, we distinguish policy-focused work from work focused more on context. Within those distinctions, we differentiate those approaches that are more focused on policy from those focused more on power. When we consider Kosova in this context, we find that most English-language scholarship focuses overwhelmingly on questions of war and its effects, but mainly from a policy point of view, with minimal contextual accent. This becomes especially apparent when matters of security, rather than of justice, frame the dominant policy formations that shape the interpretations of all others.

A contextual emphasis, consistent with a comparative and historical sociological approach, is not, however, necessarily public in its imagined audiences, even when policy oriented. This is not a policy-reflex; policy schools are increasingly interested in developing a social justice approach to scholarship, one where public engagement, within

22 As those who participated in the CHS debate, we do not differentiate strongly between comparative/historical and ethnographic methodologies, finding at least in the latter two a necessary concern for the worlds of meaning of those whose lives are addressed in policy as a kind of vernacular and public scholarship. We can take up that question of the distinctions between comparative historical and ethnographic sociologies in discussion, but rather see it as a distraction from more important questions.

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a more reflexive and less instrumentalist knowledge culture, becomes part of the agenda. That contextual expertise, however, is more difficult in a transnational environment where policy makers and their analysts are not necessarily part of the community in which that policy is embedded, to which that policy is applied.

A more publicly engaged and critical approach to transnational policy is, however, possible, and facilitated by the development of an approach to policy that not only focuses on justice, but also recognizes its performative in addition to its functional values. To ask about the symbolic, rather than substantive, impact of policies requires us to consider policy’s relevance both to those who are subject to it and those who enact it. By considering especially performative policies, as around LGBTQ rights in Kosova, and more substantively consequential policies moved offstage by more “important” issues, as have policies about victims of sexual violence in war, we are able to move policy analysis directly into dialogue with those who wish to elevate the importance of reflexivity, recognition, and justice in the making and analysis of policy.

Finally, it’s not obvious that Kosova’s history would be relevant to those who don’t know where the nation is on the map or when it became independent even while they might be reading papers that talk about the “lessons” of Kosova. But in fact, precisely because of that relative invisibility, we argue that it is a critical case for elevating the importance of public engagement in the making and analysis of policy, especially since it has been identified as the foundation for a different kind of warmaking in the 21st century. But we shouldn't need that particular example to make the point. Transition culture, so far absent from the debate in CHS, ought be a central case for understanding the relationship between these two knowledge cultures of policy and CHS.

Comparative Historical & Ethnographic Scholarship around Policy after Communism

The distance between policy-oriented work and comparative historical and ethnographic sociologies can appear great for a number of reasons we discuss below. But for those living in and analyzing the region once ruled by communists, that distance is unfamiliar because the dialogue has been so intense.

One of the most transformative transnational policy regimes at the turn of the 20th century was what Kennedy (2002) called “transition culture”: the making of more democratic and more market-driven societies out of communist-ruled countries.23 In this domain, we see incredible dialogue among comparative and historical sociologists and other kinds of social scientists informing policy makers about how to make private property, electoral systems, regional governance, and a host of other matters.24 There is much work analyzing innovation and diffusion of policies and practices on which we can build; it’s especially useful for our purposes to consider those accounts that compare policies and domains of their implementation.

23 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cultural-formations-of-postcommunism24 Consider most recently the work of this European transnational team working to figure how to minimize the distance between formal and informal institutions in the Balkans http://www.formal-informal.eu/en/home.html

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In an eloquent comparison of places and issues, Wade Jacoby25 found that to explain variations in policy embrace and contextually motivated innovation, one should compare the density of recipient actors and of international organizational rules in particular issue areas. For example, when domestic actors and foreign rules are both sparse, as in consumer protection, there are relatively few policy innovations and outcomes. When those rules are few but those actors are many, more indigenously driven continuous learning tends to take place, as in health care. When there are more foreign rules than existing domestic actors organized to care about them, he notes a kind of scaffolding, as when EU regional policy helped to make domestic regional interests and actors. Open struggle between transnational and national actors emerges, however, when there are both lots of rules and many previously constituted actors, evident in the reform of agriculture for the EU and of the military as those nations formerly ruled by communists moved into NATO. We summarize his argument in Table 1.

Table 1: Variations in Transnational Postcommunist Policy

Many International Rules Few International RulesDense network of recipients Contest over Agriculture &

Military ReformHealth Care Reform: innovation by existing actors in light of new rules

Sparse network of recipients Adoption of Regional Policies and Constitution of Regional Interests

Consumer Protection: Light transformation of rules and little constitution of actors

This is but one of many comparative, historical, and ethnographic analyses of policies and practices in transition culture, lending itself nicely to thinking about how different kinds of policies, authorities, and publics interact with one another to predict different kinds of policy outcomes. It is obvious that policy work and CHS can go well together. In fact they need each other even more than what Jacoby presented.

His work and much other work in transition culture make many assumptions that a comparative and historical sociologist more distant from transition culture’s assumptions might want to interrogate. Above all, it pays little heed to the broader context in which those policies are transferred, treating the overall embrace of transition as, itself, something intrinsically desirable.26 That assumption was relatively easy to hold onto when the European Union looked like an obviously superior destination to a world defined by Russian hegemony with an inferior economy and less substantial assurance of human rights. Kennedy (2002) expressed it in this diagram.27

25 Wade Jacoby, The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.26 The following draws on Michael D. Kennedy, (2008) “From Transition to Hegemony: Extending the Cultural Politics of Military Alliances and Energy Security” pp. 188-212 in Mitchell Orenstein, Steven Bloom, and Nicole Lindstrom (eds.) Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.27 In that volume, Kennedy used the concept to rethink the artifacts produced by the World Bank and others to map transition, the negotiated revolutions of 1989, business practice, and interpretations of freedom, nationalism, environmental problems, civility and loss in the first decade of postcommunist life. He focused especially on Poland, Hungary, Estonia, and Ukraine, with the penultimate in that list becoming transition

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Figure 1: The Knowledge Structure of Transition Culture

Plan Dictatorship Russia Past Particularistic Bureaucrat Dependency Ukraine--------- ~ --------------- ~ --------- ~ -------- ~ --------------- ~ ------------------- ~ ---------------- ~ -----------Market Democracy West Future Comparative Entrepreneur Opportunity Estonia

This knowledge culture is not so secure today, but in its heyday many of its practitioners also overlooked a critical element assuring transition culture’s desirability. The Wars of Yugoslav Succession were co-present in transition culture’s first decade, and an implicit warning for what could happen if transition failed. Therefore, for those nations whose ends to communism were also wrapped up in war and extreme violence, transition culture had different meanings.

Publics in each postcommunist society might appreciate emancipation from communist and/or Soviet domination, but Kosova’s transition culture is different from every other post-communist and postwar society because it was founded in war and only realized independence from a genocidal Milosevic regime with the aid of a relatively united West. To speak of policy in the history of Kosova over these last 25 years we must, then, consider it in light of this founding sensibility. An independent Kosova is an historical accomplishment for the Kosovar Albanian people in ways a newfound sovereignty for other postcommunist nations is not.

For example, while we might find in other nations those who might have a kind of nostalgia for communist days, Kosovar Albanians articulate that in very different ways. 28 Only the most urban and educated Kosovar Albanians were integrated into the Yugoslav system, and even in that circumstance, suffered a subordinated status. The contradictions and ambiguities of communism’s modernizing mission were most apparent in Kosova, as it was the poorest, most underdeveloped part of Yugoslavia with the worst levels of unemployment. More than economic underdevelopment, the duplicity of communist rule was felt most acutely among Kosovar Albanians; the socialist promise of overcoming ethnic and national division, epitomized in Yugoslavia with the famous slogan ‘ brotherhood and unity’, seemed hollow, a “policy” that was symbolic and performative at best, and hardly substantive in outcome. Yugoslavia suffered, especially in Kosova, a growing crisis of legitimacy. As Sabrina P. Ramet puts it quite sharply,

The SFRJ (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) was a state permanently in crisis. It was in crisis because its system had not resolved some of the most important problems-above all the problem of legitimacy, but also the problems in the economic sphere, problems of participation and demand for democracy, and the challenge of creating a shared political culture, not to mention the state’s continues abuse of human rights in Kosovo and elsewhere.29

culture’s exemplar, and the last, its exemplary warning, as the diagram above suggests. 28 Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, “Invisible-Inaudible: Albanian Memories of Socialism after the War in Kosovo” in Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.) Post-Communist Nostalgia. Bergahn, 2011.29 Sabrina P. Ramet Thinking about Yugoslavia Scholarly Debates about Bosnia and Kosovo, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005

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We might therefore discuss transition culture’s policies around property rights, elections, and press freedoms, but those policies must be understood in light of the particular kind of struggle and identification Kosovar Albanians undertook to win their independence, and their very survival when discrimination turned genocidal.

For that reason, it’s especially appropriate to recognize an alternative to transition culture within post-socialist studies. Jan Kubik and Amy Linch proposed a social science “from the bottom up and inside out”.30 Linch summarized the alternative by suggesting we focus on “how people enact their vernacular visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges”31 rather than focus on the policies that were supposed to move societies from an inferior to a superior system. Not only did this volume propose we move to the vernacular, but it also suggested we move away from an approach to the good defined by system attributes, and toward a conception that was more dialogically defined.

Justice, rather than democracy or markets per se, became the new watchword, inviting us to explore, within contexts, how people would define the ethically superior as normatively just.32 In this, vernacular publics are, therefore, essential to understanding historical transformations and the policies and practices accompanying. But not all policies are the same in this regard; indeed, we need to figure that variety before we move on to consider Kosova’s place in the transnational imaginary of policy making and world historical transformations.

Comparative Historical Sociology, Policy and Scale

In recent debates in the American Sociological Association’s section on comparative historical sociology about its relationship to policy, policy is, itself, treated as hugely variable without sufficient ordering as to its distinctions.

Lane Kenworthy illustrates that variety of policy with a range of questions sociology might address when it comes to policy (“Do social policies reduce poverty? What kind of healthcare system yields better health? Will reforming schools improve education? Do gun control regulations reduce crime? Do high taxes impede economic growth? How can government boost happiness?”).33 Elisabeth Pearson speaks of tax policy,34 Peter Evans on computer policy making in Brazil,35 Fred Wherry on household

30 Jan Kubik and Amy Linch, eds. Post-Communism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony. New York: SSRC/NYU Press, 2013. 31 P. 10 in Amy Linch, “Postcommunism in a New Key: Upside Down and Inside Out”, pp. 1-26 in Jan Kubik and Amy Linch, eds. Post-Communism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony. New York: SSRC/NYU Press, 2013.32 Kubik’s methodological approach, “contextual holism”, is organized around five principles: relationism, historicizing, social construction, a focus on the informal, and localism, the last of which emphases a “situated agency”.33 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Kenworthy.pdf34 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Pearson.pdf35 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Evans.pdf

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finance and credit policy.36 We might structure that variety by orders of significance, as Monica Prasad does by suggesting different measures of world historical importance (climate change and poverty being “big” questions).37

Sometimes, when sociologists speak of policy, they move beyond the matters that might be taught in schools of policy, as Isaac Martin does when he speaks of DuBois accounting for the slave trade’s decline.38 Likewise, when Ho-fung Hung writes about movements, revolutions and development,39 when Vivek Chibber contrasts the rise of democracy (good) or of racialized states (bad),40 or when Michele Lamont discusses her work on successful societies,41 we are back to more familiar comparative and historical sociological territory.

Liz Clemmons summarizes this variety neatly. By addressing “variations across interventions; the relation of outcomes to more encompassing policy regimes; or they may theorize alternative models of social organization and process”, comparative and historical sociologists can engage policy.42 We think this variation can be made even more clear by specifying the more critical differences that obtain when we talk about sociology and policy.

In the Kenworthy paragraph, policy is conceived in relatively narrow terms, where policies have pride of place in explaining short term outcomes; in the following paragraph, broader conjunctural features, historical processes, and intersecting arenas explain outcomes.

Table 2: Variations in Imagining Policy among Comparative and Historical Sociologists

Specific Domain Societal OrderingIntervention-Centric Most Policy Work More Political WorkContextual Emphasis Bounded CHS Grand CHS

Contrasting the two rows of Table 2, we can see the top row elevating the importance of the intervention itself. Policy analysts typically evaluate that intervention in terms of efficacy or consequence; that focus is itself more typically part of the policy scholarship domain. Sometimes, of course, focus may be less on the intervention’s efficacy, and rather on how the distribution of power shapes the policy or its outcomes. That, then, tends to veer more into a political more than policy sociology.

36 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Wherry.pdf37 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Winter2016_Prasad.pdf38 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Martin.pdf39 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Hung.pdf40 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Chibber.pdf41 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Lamont.pdf42 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Clemens.pdf

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Sometimes, however, the intervention itself becomes less significant, and melts before the context in which it takes place. In that circumstance, whether in more bounded analysis of a specific policy or its regime, or in the analysis of grander transformations like those of democratization, revolution, or reform, we are far more likely to find comparative and historical sociology at work and policy schools missing.

And where is Kosova in all of this?

Although the debate in CHS newsletters mentioned places across time and space, they were used mainly to illustrate other points. However, there is an ordering to how places function in English-Language social science and policy-making. Most in the comparative and historical sociology section would recognize readily the relative US ethnocentrism of American sociology, with a variety of sociologists having already marked that variation.43 But there is also an ordering and structure to place recognition in the social sciences, with France and Germany, for example, far more prominent in the sociological imagination than Ukraine and Kosova. That place significance varies over time and across fields, however, especially where and when events bring a society to the fore and its publics and intellectual and political articulators are relatively invisible to those beyond that nation.

Kosova in Policy Scholarship and Comparative and Historical Sociology

Kennedy (2015: 156-94) explores the place of different places in various kinds of scholarship, focusing in particular on Poland, Kosova, and Afghanistan. He begins by counting articles that invoke the place in leading sociology, anthropology, and international relations journals. Not surprisingly, Kosova and Afghanistan are hardly considered between 1980 and 2009 in sociology and anthropology.

Kennedy coded for Kosova, and Yugoslavia and Albania, to find all possible mentions of Kosovar Albanians. Most of the time, they were invisible in the scholarship on Yugoslavia, either because data were not collected on them, or the category, as such, was not in official statistics. In short, the familiar tools of social science and policy research did not recognize Kosovar Albanians. Kennedy (2015: 175-76) elaborates:

Albanians, one should imagine, can’t be absent from the question of ethnic difference in Yugoslavia. Indeed, the whole Yugoslav experiment was, like the Soviet one, an attempt to create a new kind of transnational identity. In 1994, the American Sociological Review raised that very question (Sekulic, Massey and Hodson 1994), with scholars from George Mason University (formerly from Zagreb University), University of Wyoming and Indiana University looking to

43 (2007) “Internationalism and Global Transformations in American Sociology” (Michael D. Kennedy and Miguel Centeno) pp 666-712 in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Sociology in America: A History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/An American Sociological Association Centennial Publication). Charles Kurzman, “The Stubborn Parochialism of American Social Science,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 19, 2015. Michael D. Kennedy, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation. Stanford: Standford University Press, 2015.

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understand who was most likely to identify as Yugoslav. They compared survey data in 1985 and 1989, before the outbreak of open war.

The authors (1994, 84) note that “apart from Bosnia between 1961 and 1971 and Kosovo, self-identification as a Yugoslav shows a general pattern of increase from 1961 to 1981”; however, “most people in Kosovo” think of themselves as Albanian or Serbian. While this distinction is noted, the difference among majorities and minorities, and their relative power, was not itself highlighted. Albanians were not only without their own republic, but they were more persecuted by Serbs than were any others, with a new cycle of intensity begun at the very times of these surveys. That condition does not matter for their empirical argument, however, since the data about Yugoslavia came only from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and did not include the data from Kosova. Even in a study of ethnic difference and Yugoslav identification, Kosova remained relatively invisible. Of course in the study of war it should be prominent.

Making a case for Yugoslavia’s significance in war’s study is, perhaps, obvious. Indeed, in a major American Sociological Review analysis of war’s dynamics, the wars of Yugoslav Succession appear to bracket the end story, and fit the narrative:

In the first phase of transition (from empire to nation-state), secessionist wars of ‘national liberation” against the ruling empire are likely to be fought. In the second phase, wars between new states over ethnically mixed territory may break out, and ethnic minorities might rebel against political exclusion by national majorities. The model predicts that such civil wars are more likely where ethnic discrimination is high, where governments are poor, and thus unable to accommodate ethno-political protest…(Wimmer and Min 2006, 876).

This appears to fit Kosova’s situation. Sort of. Wimmer and Min (2006, 894) themselves recognize that ”the patterns of warfare in the Caucasus and the Balkans in the 1990s resemble those on the Indian subcontinent in the 1940s, those of Eastern Europe during and after the World War I, and so on”. In this sense, Kosova, for the American sociologist, is just another place in the Balkans, and the Balkans, just another place after empire.44 And when there aren’t good data, whose absence reflected Kosova’s very position in socialist Yugoslavia, Kosova’s invisibility can appear, merely, technical and not too consequential.

However, Kosova is far from invisible in International Relations scholarship. Indeed, in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, it and the former Yugoslavia and Albania

44 Of course not all sociologists treat it that way. Indeed, in an article dedicated to recognizing and understanding the unprecedented, Peter Baehr, “Identifying the Unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Critique of Sociology” American Sociological Review: 67:7(2002) 804-31 wondered whether the war in Kosovo fell into that distinctive category (p.824)

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were more frequently referenced than Turkey, Brazil, and Nigeria, among many other emerging powers in the world system. But how is the place discussed?

To find how a place is discussed in policy-related terms, one can search using a most common phrase in the policy world. Kennedy searched through JSTOR to find publications that invoked some kind of “Lessons from Kosovo”.45

The first conclusion to be drawn is that there are relatively few lessons, apparently, to be drawn from matters that are not directly, or indirectly, related to war. One article addresses the lessons of developments in family medicine,46 and others address psychosocial interventions,47 higher education reform,48 and the reformulation of national identity,49 but even these are cast in terms of post-war conditions. The analysis of those post-war conditions might focus on a NGO efficacy50 and a variety of publics, notably of women,51 but for the most part the lessons are not for about Kosovars themselves.52

45 Kennedy used JSTOR Search function to find “Lessons from Kosovo” across all journals. He develops the following account based only on the first 5 pages of 124 such pages; to do this completely, a more thorough review of the following pages could be important. 46 Hedley, Robert N., and Maxhuni Bajram. "Development Of Family Medicine In Kosovo." BMJ: British Medical Journal 331, no. 7510 (2005): 201-03. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25460240.47 Pupavac, Vanessa. "Pathologizing Populations and Colonizing Minds: International Psychosocial Programs in Kosovo." Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 4 (2002): 489-511. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645060.48 Ian Bache, and Taylor Andrew. "The Politics of Policy Resistance: Reconstructing Higher Education in Kosovo."Journal of Public Policy 23, no. 3 (2003): 279-300. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4007819.49 Ingimundarson, Valur. "The Politics of Memory and the Reconstruction of Albanian National Identity in Postwar Kosovo." History and Memory 19, no. 1 (2007): 95-123.50 Anne Holohan, Networks of Democrcy: Lessons from Kosovo for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond. Stanford University Press, 2005 compares two organizations in different Kosova locales to help us rethink what makes an effective international organization. 51 Agnes Kalungu-Banda. "Post-Conflict Programmes for Women: Lessons from the Kosovo Women's Initiative."Gender and Development 12, no. 3 (2004): 31-40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4030653.52 Another question is why Kosova is so much more significant than Bosnia for these lessons is worth noting, and deserving of subsequent discussion: Daxner, M., & Riese, S. (2011). Long-time Effects from Kosovo, Little Ado About Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sicherheit Und Frieden (S F) / Security and Peace, 29(1), 24-30. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24233031

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The most important question53 for policy appears to be how the Kosovo case informs the use of force54 and its relation to diplomacy55 and the foreign policy/security architecture of warmaking powers.56 Because this was, according to Vaclav Havel, the first war launched in the name of human rights,57 there is also substantial discussion of the conditions for and relationship between humanitarian military interventions and human rights.58 Given the great reach of Noam Chomsky and his own critical account of the intervention,59 many take his work as point of departure or of critique. Others also discuss at length the post war condition, notably around civil military relations,60 in addition to more general discussions of postwar governance.61

53 We might imagine in a search across “lessons of” Kosova, we could find a more typical comparative and historical question, as in why did the war happen? Not surprisingly this was found in a more historically than policy oriented journal Vasquez, John A. "The Kosovo War: Causes and Justification." The International History Review 24, no. 1 (2002): 103-12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40110035; although it is useful to contrast this with a more policy oriented publication to see how causes become lessons:Webber, Mark. "The Kosovo War: A Recapitulation." International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 85, no. 3 (2009): 447-59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27695024 is also worth considering in a subsequent publication.54 Notably around air campaigns, Byman, Daniel L., and Waxman Matthew C. "Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate." International Security24, no. 4 (2000): 5-38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539314; Lake, Daniel R. 2009. The limits of coercive airpower: NATO's "victory" in Kosovo revisited. International Security 34 (1) (Summer): pp. 83-112, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40389186.55 Manulak, Michael. "Forceful Persuasion or Half-hearted Diplomacy? Lessons from the Kosovo Crisis."International Journal 66, no. 2 (2011): 351-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27976097.56 Wouters, Jan, and Naert Frederik. "How Effective Is the European Security Architecture? Lessons from Bosnia and Kosovo." The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2001): 540-76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/761705.Daddow, Oliver. "'Tony's War'? Blair, Kosovo and the Interventionist Impulse in British Foreign Policy."International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 85, no. 3 (2009): 547-60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27695030.Hehir, Aidan. "The Impact of Analogical Reasoning on US Foreign Policy towards Kosovo." Journal of Peace Research 43, no. 1 (2006): 67-81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27640251.Sperling, James, and Webber Mark. "NATO: From Kosovo to Kabul." International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 85, no. 3 (2009): 491-511. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27695027.Daalder, Ivo H., and O'Hanlon Michael E. "Unlearning the Lessons of Kosovo." Foreign Policy, no. 116 (1999): 128-40. Dunn, David Hastings. "Innovation and Precedent in the Kosovo War: The Impact of Operation Allied Force on US Foreign Policy." International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 85, no. 3 (2009): 531-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27695029. Dayton, Bruce W., Arjen Boin, Ian I. Mitroff, Murat C. Alpaslan, Sandy E. Green, Alexander Kouzmin, and Alan M. G. Jarman. 2004. Managing crises in the twenty-first century. International Studies Review 6 (1) (Mar.): pp. 165-194, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186560. I also ran across…. Kosovo to Kadi: Legality and Legitimacy in the Contemporary International Order https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2014/kosovo-to-kadi-legality-and-legitimacy-in-the-contemporary-international-order/57 Havel, Václav. “Kosovo and the End of the Nation State.” Trans. Paul Wilson. New York Review of Books 46.10 (June 10, 1999): 4-6.58 ISAAC, J. (2002). Hannah Arendt on Human Rights and the Limits of Exposure, or Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong about the Meaning of Kosovo. Social Research, 69(2), 505-537. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971560Mertus, Julie. "The Danger of Conflating Jus Ad Bellum and Jus in Bello." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 100 (2006): 114-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25660073.Mertus, Julie A. "Operation Allied Force: Handmaiden of Independent Kosovo." International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 85, no. 3 (2009): 461-76.

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Sometimes greater contextual expertise is necessary to pose critical questions in that latter genre, as in the impact of integrating KLA fighters on matters of governance.62 In general, however, expertise about Kosova in these policy debates, as such, is quite limited.63 Most policy-relevant discussions have little to no vernacular knowledge about which Kubik and Linch talk. Perhaps defenders of policy-centric study would argue that limited expertise about Kosova is not that important if one’s principal concern is to evaluate policy as such. In that case, Kosova becomes, merely, a case in a larger argument about the efficacy of airpower, the compatibility of humanitarianism and warmaking, or how to think about borders and peace.

Some issues, however, are difficult to debate without taking into account how Kosovars themselves think about the issue and debate the question. In some arenas, it’s much more difficult to bracket history and the institutional environment in which outcomes are made. Sometimes comparative and historical sociology and ethnography are critical to the address of policy, but we need to be clear about which debates find our disciplinary practice indispensable; additionally, we ought consider how that scholarship is made unnecessary. The sociological imagination and its tool kit may not be so important, for example, when it comes to figuring out the proper balance of airpower in making war, as it is to finding the place of justice in policy. Nonetheless, we might also try to figure how justice is eliminated from the question of security as such. Thus, we return to the question of justice later, after we consider the place of public sociology in policy’s address.64

http://www.jstor.org/stable/27695025.Kuperman, Alan J. "Mitigating the Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from Economics." Global Governance 14, no. 2 (2008): 219-40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800703.Pandolfi, Mariella. "Contract of Mutual (In)Difference: Governance and the Humanitarian Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo." Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10, no. 1 (2003): 369-81.Belloni, Roberto. "The Trouble with Humanitarianism." Review of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2007): 451-74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40072187. Mason, W. (2006). Kosovo: Unraveling the Knot. World Policy Journal, 23(3), 87-98. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4021003659 Chomsky, Noam. The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. London: Pluto Press, 1999.60 Cockell, John G. "Civil-Military Responses to Security Challenges in Peace Operations: Ten Lessons from Kosovo." Global Governance 8, no. 4 (2002): 483-502. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800360. 61 Jessen-Petersen, S. (2006). Challenges of Peacebuilding: The Example of Kosovo. Sicherheit Und Frieden (S F) / Security and Peace, 24(1), 6-10. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24231520Yannis, A. (2004). The UN as Government in Kosovo. Global Governance, 10(1), 67-81. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800510Goldstone, R. (2002). Whither Kosovo? Whither Democracy? Global Governance, 8(2), 143-147. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780033462 Barakat, Sultan, and Özerdem Alpaslan. "IMPACT OF THE REINTEGRATION OF FORMER KLA COMBATANTS ON THE POST-WAR RECOVERY OF KOSOVO." International Journal of Peace Studies 10, no. 1 (2005): 27-45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41852071; Wolfgram, Mark A. "When the Men with Guns Rule: Explaining Human Rights Failures in Kosovo since 1999."Political Science Quarterly 123, no. 3 (2008): 461-84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20203050.63 To engage the contextual and the political simultaneously is even more challenging; Slavoj Zizek, “NATO, the Left Hand of God” June 29, 1999. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-nato.htm offers one point of departure.64 Naarden, Gregory L., and Locke Jeffrey B. "Peacekeeping and Prosecutorial Policy: Lessons from Kosovo." The American Journal of International Law 98, no. 4 (2004): 727-43; Grodsky, Brian. 2009. International prosecutions and domestic politics: The use of truth commissions as compromise justice in

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Table 3. Lessons of Kosova

Military Intervention Public GoodsFunctional Expertise Warmaking &

SecurityPost-war governance

Contextual Expertise Humanitarianism/Rights Social Justice

To sum up this section, when it comes to policy and international affairs, Kosova typically figures in English as a place on which foreign policy was practiced. It was a site where lessons were learned for wars and postwar governance elsewhere. Kosovar Albanians were not treated as partners in this knowledge production, except to the extent they might be used as “good Muslims” to applaud the West.65 This means, then, that we need to move beyond the question of the type of scholarship we develop to consider the relationship between our scholarship, whether comparative, historical and/or ethnographic, or policy based, and our audience. That’s especially important in Kosova given that war’s effects on Kosovar publics remains underattended, a subject to which we return below. But the subjects of policy making are not always apparent either in more general debates about policy and sociology. They become apparent when we bring public sociology to the discussion.

Policy, Knowledge Culture, and Engaged Publics

George Steinmetz’s contribution to the debate about policy and comparative and historical sociology helps us to recognize policy work in its negative version: as something instrumentalized and subordinated to policy makers’ problem sets.66 He would rather see the CHS autonomy preserved, while also remaining political: “Merely telling the truth about the social world is already a critical and political act.“67 In this, he seems to envision policy as Burawoy might, without reflexivity or publics themselves as part of the process.

However, one might envision publics within policy worlds themselves; Peter Evans, for example, proposed influencing counterpublics within the state among

serbia and croatia. International Studies Review 11 (4) (Dec.): pp. 687-706, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40389162. 65 Although Mahmood Mamdani might have discussed Kosovar Albanians in Good Muslims, Bad Muslims (Doubleday, 2004) he does not. This is a good illustration of how Kosova fits into more critical discussions in geopolitics, or rather doesn’t fit so well. Instead, it fits into more anti-Muslim discourses as here: “But don't Arab Muslims care that the United States saved the Balkan Muslims and Albanians from extermination or exile? Weren't the Balkans a clear-cut case of massive U.S. military and humanitarian intervention on behalf of Muslims in distress?” http://www.meforum.org/166/the-arab-betrayal-of-balkan-islam 66 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Winter2016_SteinmetzReply.pdf67 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Winter2016_Steinmetz.pdf

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administrators and expert communities in order to exercise a more critical sociology. 68 Liz Clemons offers the most concise message of what might be done, in that spirit. Evoking Max Weber, she asked “how might our scholarship help publics and policy makers ‘gain clarity’ and wisdom, however incrementally and contingently?”69 But that “help” suggests many questions that invite further discussion and a return to Burawoy’s differentiation of sociology.70

Indeed, elaborating that half of his original table focused on those beyond the profession, we might clarify another dimension of this debate. In what follows, we draw not only on these published discussions, but also Kennedy’s experience in the reconstruction of a public policy program at Brown University.71

As in Burawoy’s original presentation, and keeping in mind the limits but also purpose of a 2X2 table, we might distinguish among forms of knowledge, one instrumental, one reflexive. In the policy domain, a more appropriate distinction might be between problem solving policy expertise and a discussion of ends in policy work. For the policy world, reflexive knowledge asks, recurrently, for whom and for what an intervention might be undertaken, while the instrumental focuses on refining the technique assuming that its proper execution can provide its author with the ideal outcome. Normative and ethical questions are more likely to appear in the reflexive category, even while proper execution by the proponents of the instrumental are assumed to realize the greatest good for the greatest number of people.72

Table 4: Variations in Policy Practice by Audience and Type of Knowledge

For Authorities For PublicsInstrumental Knowledge Data Analytics Social EntrepreneurshipReflexive Knowledge Reflexive Governance Social Justice

Many assume policy schools are focused mostly on developing expertise authorities can use. New techniques are recurrently introduced that meet that expectation; for example, approaches to “big data” provide a new way with which experts can give authorities new skills to evaluate their policy. However, civil society as such has become increasingly salient in conceiving public issues in policy schools, and “solutions” that rely on mobilizing civil society are found to be increasingly common in policy programs’ teaching and research. For example, new programs that emphasize the importance of developing social entrepreneurship are especially appealing for authorities, as it promises to develop a new kind of public that is more capable of resolving its own problems rather

68 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Evans.pdf69 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Clemens.pdf70 http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Public%20Sociology,%20Live/Burawoy.pdf71 http://watson.brown.edu/public-policy/72 Although that bears research, Kennedy finds it a typical normative goal left unstated but implicit in the more instrumental dimension of the field, and a goal that typically does not inquire as to who counts in this utilitarian reasoning.

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than relying on government to redress problems. It is also notably apolitical, as many policy schools struggle to be.73

Reflexive knowledge is also at play in the public policy field, early on mostly in the domain of ethics courses. However, it has found new forms of expression in newer policy domains. For example, reflexive governance, for authorities but with that “for what and for whom” tool kit, is present.74 And social justice establishes a new place, most notably around questions of equity as survivors see it. This became relatively clear in Brown University’s new Public Policy Program, and its debates about the place of “justice” in its articulation.

Brown concluded its first week of 2016 MPA orientation with a lecture by Professor Tricia Rose, a scholar focused on how race inflects various dimensions of American policy and practice. She illustrated the social justice opening to a broader conception of policy with this question: “Can public policy create just outcomes in an unjust world?” That question riveted her audience, but illustrates the challenge. Policy has been developed as a relatively neutral, apolitical project,75 but in so doing, it has had to moot questions of power and normative evaluation. With that institutional legacy, Brown debates how justice might find its place.

Some of the proponents (Kennedy included) of that vision envisioned creating a track called Social Justice, but that became difficult because it implied that other specializations, like Data Driven Analytics, was not so concerned. To accommodate, the program renamed it “Social Change and Advocacy” with the following description:

This specialization prioritizes social justice, diversity, and ethics by using the distance between the way things are, and the way things ought to be, to shape learning and to analyze and generate policy and public interventions. Courses facilitate rigorous, critical examination and assessment of public action in analytical as well as prescriptive ways, encouraging students to think about how norms for public action emerge, and their own role, as dedicated public actors, in that process. The specialization focuses on how power works, how change happens through policy and public mobilizations and partnerships, and how policy makers and analysts can develop not only maximally effective,but more ethical and just work. These policies and public ideas, practices and discourses might emerge from social movements and civil society, as well as from governments and the private sector.

73 https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/remko-berkhout/irresistibly-biased-blind-spots-of-social-innovation# and in this light, see too https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/amy-schiller/case-for-hard-why-social-transformation-demands-lots-of-social-friction and https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/david-lane-filippo-addarii/social-innovation-and-challenge-of-democracy-in-europe See also my discussion of social entrepreneurship in my June 2016 Warsaw University lecture reproduced here: https://www.academia.edu/10282109/Extensions_of_Globalizing_Knowledge 74 https://susprogramme.wikispaces.com/What+do+we+understand+by+reflexive+governance%3F 75 Among others, Deborah Stone illustrates how it cannot be apolitical, however, in Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Reason. New York: Norton, 2011.

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When we talk of social justice, we typically leave off the table questions of scale. What works at the urban level around housing might work just as well, ceteris paribus, for a national question about fiscal policy. Too, consider who gets to speak in a social justice question, especially when that question goes beyond the boundaries of one’s nation. Although many of the proponents of Brown’s social justice approach work beyond the USA, it’s more difficult to figure the place of advocacy and social change when one is not a citizen of the place in question. What does happen when authorities and publics are not members of the same imagined community affected by that policy and justice work? What happens when the community on which one’s policy is exercised is genuinely imaginary?

Engaged Publics, the Veil and Performative Policy-Making in Kosova

Although Jacoby does not attend to publics per se in his comparison of policy areas, at least to those beyond the professional domains to which the policies apply, the argument he develops is quite relevant to our own account of Kosova and transnational policy. In Kosova, the ease with which international rules are applied to national policy regimes does not vary so much, however. The exceptions to the rule highlight the power of that general claim.

Kosova became, after the bombing concluded and genocide halted in 1999, an international protectorate, and even after formal independence in 2008, remains subordinated to international supervision. In some ways, most of the domains of transition culture for post-war Kosova looked like the box occupied by regional policies in Table 1, with many rules overwhelming a sparse network of those who would implement those rules.

That sparseness is also, however, the figment of the international community’s imagination and constructed practice in the reflection of the veil organizing Kosovar life between its Albanian-speaking public and the international community overseeing it.

In Kosova, policy is figured and debated at two levels at least: among international actors and their top national interlocutors on the one hand, and on the other in more publicly accessible and familiar arenas, beyond EU languages and protocols. In a functioning democracy, these levels are relatively transparent, even if never fully integrated. In Kosova, they are not.

Despite its small size, Kosovar governance and policy look more like the Veil of which WEB DuBois spoke when he referred to the significance of the color line in the beginning of 20th century America. Itzigsohn and Brown76 invoke DuBois to describe its significance:

76 Jose Itzigsohn and Karida Brown, “SOCIOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS: W. E. B Du Bois’ Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity” DuBois Review (forthcoming)

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Du Bois introduces the theory of Double Consciousness in the first essay in Souls, entitled “Of our Spiritual Strivings.” There he describes the phenomenological experience of racialization for the Black American:

a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of 10 measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body (Du Bois 1903, p. 2)…..

In Dusk, Du Bois shows that no matter how clearly, articulately, or sincerely the people within the veil present themselves, the White world either does not hear, or completely misrecognize what they try to convey. Invoking Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Du Bois describes life behind the veil as being imprisoned in and cut off from the dominant world of Whites:

It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development; and how their loosening from prison would be a matter not simply of courtesy, sympathy, and help to them, but aid to all the world. One talks on evenly and logically in this way, but notices that the passing throng does not even turn its head, or if it does, glances curiously and walks on. It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing by do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world (Du Bois 1940; 130-131).

At the heart of the matter Du Bois is preoccupied with how the veil distorts the Black subject to the extent that their humanity becomes unrecognizable to others. Confronted with the systematic ignorance on the part of the world outside the cave:

the people within may become hysterical. They scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum and unheard and that their antics may actually seem funny to those outside looking in (Du Bois 1940, p. 131).

Although we don’t know of anyone who has used the veil to characterize the relationship between international policy and public engagement in Kosova, it seems fruitful to consider at greater length. We use it here to help structure our interpretation, beginning with the misrecognition of civil society itself.

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There was a particularly dense network characterizing Kosovar civil society over the 1990s in its “parallel state”, but instead of engaging it, the international authorities pretended it did not exist. Kosovar sociologist Mentor Agani wrote

there was no recognition whatsoever that the war in Kosovo was not a consequence of absence of civil society, but rather a result of its failure. Instead of trying to revive the previous civic spirit – of which Kosovans were still proud – the international mission started with tremendous efforts to create an altogether new one. It was pitiful to see how the same civic activists who under the horrific conditions of Milosevic’s dictatorship achieved to organize the entire social and political life in Kosovo through civic engagement, quite often risking their lives in the process, had to undergo a “civil society for dummies” type of education provided by international bureaucrats who had decided that it was civil society that Kosovo was lacking (Agani 2012, 15).

Kennedy (2015:181) summarizes Agani’s “impossible contradiction”:

…civil society was faced with impossible contradictions. If it is to counterbalance the state, it must limit the arbitrariness of the very international protectorate, dominant over the existing state, that feeds it while at the same time recognizing that state cares little about democracy in contrast to its mission around “security” (Agani 2012, 17-19).

This focus on security, at the expense of civil society and its publics, rebounds to affect security itself. As we have argued previously, failing to develop a meaningful mechanism to attend to the injustices experienced by the Kosovar public in that war and its aftermath, while privileging peace accords realized by elites without accountability, leads to democracy’s instability and the search for more extreme methods to find justice, and accountability, in this world.

This kind of instability is also apparent in America, the source of the veil’s original theorization. Naïve accounts of a post-racial society now explode with new and systematic accounting of the institutional racism that limits any celebration of democracy’s integration and functioning for all its citizens. Something similar happens in Kosova.

Within Kosova, the opposition has moved from verbal challenge, to throwing eggs and tear gas canisters in Parliament; simultaneously, more young men, as a percentage of citizens, join Daesh, or the Islamic State, than any other country identified with the West.77 This, we might propose, results from the failure to think about security

77 (2015) “We Are Seeing You: Protesting Violent Democracies in Kosova”, Michael D. Kennedy and Linda Gusia. Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 11 December https://opendemocracy.net/michael-d-kennedy-linda-gusia/we-are-seeing-you-protesting-violent-democracies-in-kosova Although important to mark the role of those who might recruit Kosovar Albanians to ISIS, it’s easy for those who fear such outcomes to overlook their implication in subverting democracy’s development and the extension of justice http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/world/europe/how-the-saudis-turned-kosovo-into-fertile-ground-for-isis.html?_r=0

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beyond defeating an enemy, democracy as rules on paper and not recognizing difference and inclusion in practice. It results from the failure to think about social justice beyond the question of war’s end, or legislation’s passage.

Of course, we might now say that all of transition culture’s policies were much less about engaging social justice and inclusion, or the issues and the publics who might address them. These policies were certainly less about justice and much more about the symbolic politics of identification and institutional alignment with the European Union and the West. But in this, transition culture’s policies were both functional and symbolic.

Embrace, for example, of the European Union’s desiderata enabled a number of postcommunist nations to join the European Union and enjoy some of its advantages.78 Indeed, as full member states of the European Union, these postcommunist nations, not so powerful as other members longer within and wealthier, nonetheless obtain certain functional advantages, not least of which is freedom of movement, visa-free travel, across the European Union.

Kosova is, here, quite different, but not in symbolic terms. In fact, in some ways, Kosova is an exemplar like Estonia with its rules looking most European. In some ways Kosova looks even better than Poland and other nations who have begun to shun some of the European Union’s greatest celebrations of tolerance.79

For example, the leaders of Kosova’s government join in the celebrations of sexual diversity, like IDAHO International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. They are willing to go against the dominant regional and national discourse, as well as popular and maybe even personal understandings on issues of LGBT rights, because participation in such events becomes in itself the embodiment of the European identity, as the video of the march clearly expresses.80 EU leaders expect this of the leaders of Kosova, for it signals their commitment to become part of and belong to a much-desired European Union. Other political leaders of countries still not acceded to the EU do not need such performance, but in Kosova it is expected and perhaps necessary.

National leaders are tuned into the importance of these symbolic acts, and perform so that they might be recognized as deservedly European, and perhaps even then a justification for extending basic rights like visa-free travel to the citizens of Kosova (citizens of Kosova are the only public in the region still excluded from the Schengen visa zone, therefore becoming the most isolated country in Europe). Such symbolic performance, even if distant from everyday practices of the nation and private dispositions of its leaders, is critical for increasing the chances of being welcomed to the

78 Kennedy (2012) “Cultural Formations of the European Union: Integration, Enlargement, Nation and Crisis” pp. 17-50 in Rebecca Friedman and Markus Thiel (eds.) European Identity and Culture: Narratives of Transnational Belonging Aldershot: Ashgate even argues that enlargement of the European Union was one of its most critical and legitimating polices. 79 See for example, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/poland-hard-right-law-justice-party-destroying-few-lgbt-rights-that-exist-1564620 80 http://www.epa.eu/human-interest-photos/people-photos/lgbt-activists-rally-against-homophobia-and-transphobia-photos-52762165 http://www.rferl.org/media/video/bosnia-kosovo-lgbt/27740882.html

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EU, and to the very survival of a fragile country like Kosova. But this points to a larger constellation of issues other societies may not highlight.

With this but one example, we need, then, to point to another dimension of policy analysis: its performative, and not just consequential or functional, side.81 We need to attend to this dimension in particular in those contexts where the gap between what publics know, and what those beyond the public can see, is great. Kosova helps make that clear, for it performs terrific justice on paper, but not in practice. Another example of this is to consider the ways in which the Law for Gender Equity works.

The framework of this law is more progressive than any other in the region as it was copied directly from more the legislation from more progressive European states. However, despite the struggles of the women’s movement to expand the policies and make them relevant to everyday life, the legislation’s progressive effects remain mostly as performance, not function. That very distance expresses the ambivalence of the national leaders over issues like gender equity. Such authorities treat struggles over social justice not as a framework within which to realize social and cultural transformations, but rather as a box to check, a performance, indicating that they understand they know what the EU expects of them but cannot, will not, execute the law in any consequential fashion. The performance of policy without grounding, and without effect, thus expresses the normative disconnect between the expressed law of the state and its execution in practice. Social justice becomes a feint, not a modality around which policy mobilizes and supports publics and their quest for a better life.

Publics can still be mobilized, but not like they were in the 1990s when there was a non-violent struggle for independence, an effort to build civil society, a parallel society. Movements remain most likely to develop around independent struggles, still again, except this time with a greater nationalist than democratic and pluralistic accent. In particular, fears of being turned into a dysfunctional federal state like Bosnia and Hercegovina mobilize opposition, as do redrawing borders with Macedonia. These actions are not only resented for their own sake, but because of their symbolism: without public discussion, state boundaries and functions are decided by global elites and the Kosovar political elite in power.

This, however, is additionally problematic for the ways in which corruption works in Kosova. Most recently, wiretaps have indicated that, while occupying different positions a few years ago, the current President of Kosova and the current chief of the parliamentary group representing the President’s party were using party affiliation to figure appointments. Protest by civil society organizations has developed and despite the claim by Kosovar authorities that no laws were broken, EULEX, the EU organization dedicated to enforcing and developing the rule of law in Kosova, has begun to investigate the case.82

81 We therefore appreciate those comparative and historical accounts that emphasize the importance of ritual and affect in understanding policy, from Laura Adams, The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 to Bin Xu, "Moral Performance and Cultural Governance in China: The Compassionate Politics of Disasters" China Quarterly (forthcoming). 82 http://rai-see.org/eulex-assessing-kosovo-wiretap-claims/

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The array of these policies and issues of international and public support and resistance can be dizzying, but in order to examine their articulation, we hazard yet another visual representation, summarized in Diagram 2.

International support is necessary for any kind of policy of consequence to be implemented. In some cases, as in municipal reform, international policy and local actors work together with the idea of constituting new kinds of publics. In this, policy actors work in relative harmony, without much dissonance between what the international actors do, and what the local actors and their publics do. Sometimes, however, clashes can develop.

This is most obvious in recent years with the negotiated settlements on internal and external boundaries, an agreement international actors and ruling political elites support, but which has stimulated substantial public opposition mobilized by nationalist sentiments laced with concerns over the corruption of ruling elites.

That corruption by ruling elites has now fallen into the public eye as wiretaps of conversations between the current president and current head of parliamentary group associated with his party have become public. What most people knew behind the veil of official democratic practice is now in full public view, leading international actors to challenge Kosovar authorities’ legal authority.

Of course the Kosovar public leads in the formulation of issues; were it not for the non-violent struggle of its civil society in the first part of the 1990s, and the subsequent action by the Kosova Liberation Army and the response by NATO, Kosova would not be independent. Nonetheless, Kosovar independence is still not recognized not only by Serbia and Russia, but by 5 states in the European Union who fear their own separatist movements. While there is progress on that score, the question of visa-free travel within the Schengen zone remains the principal object of power the international community holds over Kosovars, which is, itself, universally desired by the Kosovar public. 83

83 Jeta Xharra’s recollection is a vivid example of that challenge http://prishtinainsight.com/fools-errand-mag/

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Diagram 2: The Articulation of International and Public Engagement re Policy Issues

International Support

Internal, External Borders

MunicipalReform

LGBT Gender = Corruption

Recognition of Wartime Sexual Violence

Public Public

Support Resistance

Independence

Visa-FreeTravel

International Resistance

While all of these issues can be studied more or less on the English-language side of the veil, the question of justice for wartime sexual assault is far more complex, and deserves its own substantial articulation precisely because it is on the other side of the veil. And in this, we might draw upon recent work on other forms of denial to elaborate the story. Muge Gocek’s recent volume is exemplary in this regard.

In Denial of Violence,84 Gocek explains how the Turkish state managed to develop a regime of deception over Turks’ complicity in the violence against the Armenian people between 1915 and 1917. She began her work with this question: “Why did contemporary Turkish state and society still deny the collective violence committed

84 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/denial-of-violence-9780199334209?cc=us&lang=en&

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against the Armenians in their past?” (p.xiii) but found it so difficult that she had to reconstruct the research field itself in order to make manageable her research and accounting of it. She had to turn away from the why, toward the how – how did Turkish state and society veil that past violence to focus on present and future, over different historical periods (xvi). But in order to manage that question, she had to consider the complexity of denial as concept, the use of memoirs as an alternative data source for reconstructing the past that is denied, and a theoretical framework that enables her to implicate that denial in a longer duree of Turkish political culture through a contextualization of structural and emotional elements.

Not every element of Gocek’s approach is of course applicable to the Kosovar case, and perhaps the best comparison would be to take this up in Serbia, and not in Kosova. Nobody explicitly denies, among Kosovar Albanians, that Milosevic et al conducted ethnic cleansing and could have realized genocide had there not been NATO intervention. In the global community there is, however, much denial,85 and thus, quite different from the nearly universal recognition of genocide against Armenians. Therefore, we do need to think about how recognition of justice, and injustice, flows in international circuits.86

However, the denial of sexual violence has taken place at some length, and has many foundations which those on the other side of the veil, and even those who live within the vernacular, choose not to see.

In these 17 years since NATO military intervention on humanitarian grounds, during which time the “international community” has maintained a substantial presence shaping a state-building project in terms that were framed as properly Western or European and what was not. Local politicians have more or less embraced those terms, focused as they were on looking towards the future, and not dealing critically with the past, and positively denying a space for considering social justice in that context. Security and peace were considered paramount, and justice secondary. Indeed, in some circumstances, justice could even get in the way of the reconciliation among elites that the international community sought. That international and local elite quasi-pact created a sense of historical limbo; that priority erased the social and individual experience of war experienced by the Kosovar public. Laws and policies were developed that looked good on paper, but once again were written as if the trauma of war was irrelevant to the making of the good society. That historical context was written out of policy making. The story of sexual violence in war is especially powerful. 87

85 For those who continue doubts, this social science can help: See Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher, “Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo March-June 1999: A Report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” January 3, 2002. http://shr.aaas.org/kosovo/86 Western hypocrisy is not only a theme during World War I (Gocek, pp. 239-46).87 For example, in the spring of 2013, Nazlie Bala, a human rights activist, was attacked for leading the struggle to introduce an amendment to a law. That amendment to the law on the status and the rights of the martyrs, invalids, veterans, members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, civilian victims of war and their families would “provide survivors of sexual violence war crimes legal recognition, respect and public acknowledgement, as well as the right to receive compensation, rehabilitation and other forms of

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Linda Gusia has researched the subject of public recognition, representation and reparation of wartime sexual violence in Kosovo for many years.88 This subject is intensely contested and commonly mispresented. Gusia summarizes some of her work below:

The issue of wartime sexual violence in Kosovo is deeply entangled in competing public discourses of nationalism and remembrances. The so-called ’pantheon of male heroes’ structures and shapes national memory and identity, which in turn leads to the marginalization, narrowing and overshadowing of recognition of civilian experiences in general, and of women in particular. The legal recognition of wartime sexual violence had the potential for transforming the political framing of collective memory and place of women in society. But instead it has put them, once again, into a supporting role for the “real heroes” of Kosova – the men who fought in the Kosova Liberation Army. This is evident in a particular piece of legislation.

The Law 04/L-054 on the Status and the Rights of the Martyrs, Invalids, Veterans, Members of Kosova Liberation Army, Civilian Victims of War and their Families has functioned since 2012 and is the only legal framework that recognizes the war and deals with the past. After difficult and painful struggle by activists from civil society and women’s groups in particular between 2012 and 2015, this piece of legislation was amended and supplemented, resulting in a new category added to the list: “victims of sexual violence of war”.89 That amendment’s approach to reparation was guided by prior work of the United Nations General Assembly,90 improving on what survivors in the Bosnian war experience. In Kosova, unlike in Bosnia,91 survivors don’t have to provide witnesses to that violence in order for the state to recognize the violence they suffered. But the problem is not just one of procedural justice.

Placing Martyrs, Invalids, Veterans, Members of the Kosova Liberation Army, Civilian Victims of War in one legal category is highly problematic. Similarly, focusing only on women’s war experience of sexual violence flattens any differentiated and deeper understanding, as well as the recognition of, a women’s broader experience in war. For example, most women who

reparation.” See Front Line Defenders, “Kosovo: Human Rights Defender Ms. Nazlie Bala Attacked and Severely Beaten” http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/22176 posted 3/29/13 accessed June 5, 201388 Linda Gusia “Gender, Representation and Public Space” University of Prishtina (PhD Dissertation Under Review)89 Through the time of writing, survivors of wartime sexual violence have not received any reparation norhave they even been processed and identified through the legal system. Veterans are prioritized, but with some 60,000 people claiming to have fought for the KLA (a number far greater than most experts would have expected, leading to contest over those applicants’ recognition) the system has been jammed, and nothing can be processed.90 “Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of GrossViolations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/RemedyAndReparation.aspx91 Bosnia was the first, and Kosova the second, to introduce this kind of legislation.

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experienced sexualized violence also experienced other forms of torture and violence.

How we categorize these survivors of course has implications for questions of economic distribution on the one hand, and questions of status and recognition on the other. But the forms of legal recognition and the consequent articulation and conceptualization of wartime sexualized violence affects how people think about the issue as well as how one deals with the past. It shapes how people can think about political and social justice itself as a fundamental dimension of society.

Public rhetoric names the survivors of sexual violence as the nation’s heroines. From one perspective, this could be viewed as another attempt to dismiss the image of victimhood through the invocation of the cult of heroism that has been built up in post-war Kosova. Yes, it could offer a notion of agency for survivors by using existing notions of patriotic sacrifice and contribution to the national liberation war. However, by fitting these women within the distributive grammar of heroes and martyrs, this form of recognition, while a major source of artistic and activist engagement, has hampered women’s voices.

Arguably, such a rhetorical reproduction of the prevailing master narrative could be excused in a societal context in which many assume that being subjected to sexual violence in war is a fate worse than death. However, this rhetoric reduces sexual violence to a crime against ‘Our Women’, reinforcing an essentialized image of gender roles where women contribute with their body and men with their actions. In short, this rhetoric and accompanying legislation misrepresents women’s experiences by viewing women as merely cultural carriers and markers of boundaries, of male honour and of symbols of the nation. This logic, itself, enables wartime sexual violence. As women embody these boundaries (Yuval-Davis, Anthias, 1989, Menon,Bhastin, 1998) ‘they have symbolically become places of traffic for the exchange of messages by men and enemy nations, as their bodies become ‘ceremonial battlefields.92 Furthermore ‘as markers and as property, mothers, daughters and wives require in turn the defence and protection of patriotic sons…just as territory of the nation must be protected by male soldiers and national leaders, women’s bodies must be protected by fathers, husbands and the (national) state’93

Even if such discourse might be well-intended and the only possible entry point for survivors to the hall of national memory, it also reveals the structural rigidities and misrepresentations of survivors’ positions. Survivors are relegated to the margins because they don’t fit the distributive grammar of martyrs. It

92 Biljana Kasic The dynamic of Identification within Nationalist Discourse, From Gender to Nation ed Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov. 2002 A Longo Editore

93 Julie Mostov, Politics of national identity in the former Yugoslavia ed Tamar Mayer Gender Ironies of Nationalism Sexising the Nation Routledge 2000 p. 90

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reproduces an essentialized role of women in society and wartime, while leaving existing gender roles in society unquestioned.

The struggle over the legal recognition of wartime sexual violence had the potential for shifting the paradigm about women and the past, for reframing the romanticized and glorified thinking about the past. We could have imagined a different kind of law, one that focused solely for civilian survivors (and subsume those who suffered sexual violence underneath this category) rather than amending the existing Law on the Status and the Rights of the Martyrs, Invalids, Veterans, Members of the Kosova Liberation Army, Civilian Victims of War to include war victims of sexual violence. Had that been pursued, we might have imagined a different ensuing discourse, one that considered survivors among other civilians who also suffered during war, survived a war, and helped to win a war. Making survivors “heroes of the nation” will, I’m afraid, subordinate them once again to those who killed to win a war, and further silence them and render them invisible to the elaboration of social and legal justice.

Figure 3: Wartime Sexual Assault and the Reproduction of Denial Beyond the Veil

Although Figure 3 does not do justice to the many layers of struggle and denial around wartime sexual assault, it provides some of the story that we elaborate in presentation.

That account has its mirror too in the first monument to those who suffered sexual assault in Kosova. There were many stories of this monumental triumph94 but the very image and accompanying presentation suggests some of the problem.95 Women are presented as “typically” Albanian, even though women of different backgrounds, including notably Roma, were victims of wartime rape. They are still discussed and

94 See for example https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/adem-ferizaj/wartime-rape-is-no-longer-kept-under-wraps-in-kosovo95 See some of the critical commentary in this documentary, http://www.gendernet.info/en/project/non-traditional-heroines-2/

Male Shame for Failure to protect

Defeat of Aggressors

in War

Focus on Future

Diminishes Priority of

Justice

Public Mobilization for Justice

for Survivors

Atifeta Jahjaga &

Vlorja Citacku advance

Most internationl community discourage

Poliitcal Elite

Diminishes and

disparages those who raise issue

# of KLA fighters

grows and jams

system stopping benefits

Trauma of Wartime

Sexual Violence

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referenced as wives, mothers, and daughters (therefore recentering the male experience in war), and finally, they are presented as heroes, like the KLA fighters who are at the top of the memorialization of that period’s history. And even so, today that monument is obscured from most viewpoints, hidden behind bushes right across the street from the famous monument of Prishtina, NEWBORN. That is a statement on the challenge of this struggle for justice.

Here, then, we can begin to approach the question that Liz Clemons posed as a terrific question for comparative and historical sociology and policy: what policies and problems do we highlight in our work and why?96 Why is it that most policy makers concerned for Kosova focus on negotiating interstate boundaries rather than recognizing the traumas of survivors of sexual violence during war? And when they do, why is it that they need to frame them in secondary roles to male veterans of the Kosova Liberation Army? How do policy makers and analysts come to establish the priorities of legislation in social transformation? And how does the failure not only to grasp analytical contexts, but to feel the obligation to those who survived, to those who suffered, shape what seems important, and what does not? This is not just a matter of an international community ignorant of the war’s effects, but it is, rather, a practice of actively discouraging those who might wish to consider these issues from pursuing them at all.

In short, when we are dealing with transnational policy regimes where publics on which those polices are deployed have limited impact, we need to develop research schemes that not only figure out the distance between policy on paper and policy in

96 http://asa-comparative-historical.org/newsletter/Trajectories_Spring2016_Clemens.pdf

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practice, but to analyze why we focus on certain policies at all and how they reproduce the veil that enables the privilege of some and the disempowerment of others. We cannot pursue what is the normal academic practice within the policy world when the publics affected by policy making and analysis live beyond the veil. But then that concern for social justice is not only in Kosova; it’s just patently obvious there.

Kosova’s World Historical Place and Its Implications for the Sociology of Policy

The following two broad conclusions come from our analysis:

1. Places and Issues vary in their prominence in the practice of both comparative and historical sociology and policy engagement. But beyond marking that variation, we need consider why that patterns exists and what consequence it brings.

2. By overlooking public sensibilities in many policy efforts, even in the execution of war and address of its aftermath, problems made by war return and carry forward. That limitation opens the door for comparative, historical, and ethnographic sociology and the elevation of vernacular knowledge in policy work so that the veil does not distort how we think of policy’s functionality.

As to the first point, we discussed how invisible Kosova has been in most comparative and historical sociology, in contrast to its relative prominence in international relations scholarship. That latter scholarship, however, tends to treat Kosova as a place without its own scholarship or relevant public, one that is acted upon by (security) policies that bears lessons for other places.

Elsewhere, we have discussed the increasingly dysfunctional outcomes of this non-recognition of Kosovar publics for the establishment of peace and democracy within Kosova.97 Increasingly disruptive politics demanding justice appear in the stead of democracy’s institutionalization. Of course Kosova is far from alone in this regard; the politics of the Black Lives Matter movement is also premised on opposing this non-recognition, but it has an advantage that Kosovar Albanians do not. Their citizenship enables claims to recognition and policy transformation that Kosova’s condition does not. Given the ways in which Kosova’s fate remains subject to forces well beyond its polity’s boundaries, Kosova’s public is on the extreme end of the disjuncture between systemic tendencies and emergent subjectivities characterizing our times.98

Scholars need not be complicit in this disjuncture between policy work and public effect and recognition. There are transformations afoot in the policy world that invite that kind of vernacular scholarship comparative, historical, and ethnographic sociology can bring. One need only figure the way into the policy discussion, by discussing how publics

97 (2015) “We Are Seeing You: Protesting Violent Democracies in Kosova”, Michael D. Kennedy and Linda Gusia. Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 11 December https://opendemocracy.net/michael-d-kennedy-linda-gusia/we-are-seeing-you-protesting-violent-democracies-in-kosova98 See chapter 8 of Michael D. Kennedy, Globalizing Knowledge. Stanford: Stanford U Press, 2015.

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matter in figuring the efficacy, and symbolic effect, of policy work. We discussed how the pervasive public sense of injustice in Kosova diminishes trust in all authorities, and we have identified particular mechanisms by which those who might seek justice through practice and policy are sidelined. It seems that if we were able to name this problem in compelling ways, and figure ways to extend its public recognition and policy acknowledgement in powerful venues, we might find a way to see more clearly how our forms of scholarship might not only talk to one another but find their effects.

Can we analyze degrees and forms of policy engagement and analysis that enhance the power of the veil in reproducing injustice, and those that pierce it?

This does not answer why we shouldn’t put all our efforts into climate change and poverty scholarship, Monica Prasad’s “big” questions. But perhaps we ought develop another adjective for our work. Questions whose address might be consequential are not always the biggest, but sometimes the most invisible. Perhaps the key to finding a vernacular social science’s consequence in world historic transformations is to articulate the obvious question that’s buried.

When Gocek reflects on why she wrote her book about the denial of collective violence against Armenians (and others) by Turks, she concludes, “collective violence infused into Turkish republic corrupted and undermined public ethics. While Turks still abide by moral standards in their personal lives, all complain about the lack of trust and respect in public life. Unless Turkish state and society come to terms with the collective violence embedded in their past, they will not be able to recover such trust and respect in their own state and society… Only when we understand and come to terms with such collective violence embedded in all of our pasts can we create a better future for our descendents” (p. 477). In that light, we can conclude with this question.

Why is justice not at the heart of our policy discussions, and what can we do about it?

POLITICAL IMAGINARIES AND UNIVERSITY POSSIBILITIES IN THE WORLD SYSTEM AND AMONG PROXIMATE PUBLICS

Michael D. Kennedy Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs

Brown University

Notes Anticipating and Following a Keynote Address for the conference entitledThe University and Social Development in a World of Global Challenges

June 14, 2016University Library, Warsaw99

99 http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Program-14-VI-2016a.pdf

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Abstract:

What political imaginary enables greater university possibilities for public consequence? To answer that requires that we recognize the character of our challenges, on the one hand, and on the other, the means at university disposal.

We live in a world of increasing uncertainty and growing complexity. The range of challenges to the world system grows, with each issue cultivating its own field of deep expertise, and creating space for more knowledge institutional development, whether in universities or think tanks. However, the articulation of those issues is increasingly without more general intellectual mooring. We leave the articulation of issues to those who manifest strong wills, on the one hand, or managerial competence, on the other. We could be more knowledgeable, and universities, in partnership with other actors, need step up, especially if we care about our proximate publics. In what follows, I figure the intellectual, social, and administrative conditions that allow for the elevation of proximate publics in university missions, and the political imaginary that ultimately allows that to take place. I draw on my associations and learning about Warsaw University and Brown University in particular.

POLITICAL IMAGINARIES AND UNIVERSITY POSSIBILITIES IN THE WORLD SYSTEM AND AMONG PROXIMATE PUBLICS

What political imaginary enables greater university possibilities for public consequence? To answer that requires that we recognize the character of our challenges, on the one hand, and on the other, the means at university disposal.

In this paper, I consider briefly the ways in which we typically consider universities – as expressions of enduring and accumulating wisdom, on the one hand, and on the other, as sites of innovation that allow those associated to provide for future needs. Increasingly, that future orientation has become linked to various transnational systems assessing quality. That role in accumulating wisdom tends to be more localized, and defensive; indeed, the humanities and some social sciences seem to be at risk in many universities if only because they don’t play so well in the rankings game.

This contest over university mission misses, however, one of the great opportunities for refiguring the place of universities in the world. Both of those missions easily lose sight of the public mission of the university itself, and its obligations, and responsibilities, before various publics to which it might be considered beholden.

In what follows, I consider two processes at Brown University that reflect different cultures of critical discourse around these allocations of knowledge capital investment: a university wide process to figure how to allocate resources in the pursuit of global excellence, on the one hand, and on the other, a series of engagements to become

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the diverse and inclusive community presumed to rest at the foundation of global excellence. In the former, proximate publics are hardly evident, while in the latter, the relationship to those publics hovers and promises to transform the ways in which we think about knowledge institutional responsibilities. I consider these in light of what Warsaw University itself might envision in its own refiguring of the engaged university.

I propose that universities are on the cusp of redefining what academic excellence means. We can rely on disciplinary conventions and ratings games for that, and that will remain; increasingly, however, we are talking about interdisciplinary knowledge for recognizing institutional excellence. But it’s only one knowledgeable step away to think about how we engage publics if we are open to the interdisciplinary. It’s my goal to today to explore that step. And I do it in these paces:

a) How are universities positioned as knowledge leaders in the world? b) What social processes generate those outcomes? c) Where do publics typically figure into those axes of excellence? d) Why do contests over diversity and inclusion lead to increased public

recognition? e) How might knowledge activism and administrative leadership reconfigure the

place of publics in our university work?

The University as Global Form and the Place of Publics in It

Universities are extraordinary organizations – on the one hand, besides religious institutions they are the most enduring form of modernity. I need not say that in Poland given the enduring strengths of, and abiding care for, higher education since the 14th century in this country. On the other hand, universities have also become expressions of the world that is becoming.

To the extent we believe in what many call the “knowledge society”, we know that to be on the cutting edge means having outstanding research universities. Indeed, to move up in the world system means, in part, to develop ever more prestigious universities capable of producing research of global recognition and consequence. As Salvatore Babones recommends, Warsaw might consolidate its great universities into one in order to do better in that ratings game.100 As much if not more than any other upwardly mobile society in the world system, Singapore exemplifies this investment, something I have discussed previously, and from which Warsaw might learn if it wishes to become more of a knowledge hub.101

Why does the university occupy such privileged status in this discussion? Former Columbia University Provost and sociologist Jonathan Cole proposes that “we depend increasingly on knowledge as the source of social and economic advance…” (Cole 2009:202) and he goes on to list the ideals that define the university (Kennedy, 2015:83) and the discoveries that are of huge economic and social consequence, from research on

100 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWrkRw62-xk 101 http://www.smu.edu.sg/sites/default/files/socsc/pdf/Michael_Kennedy_-_Globalizing_Knowledge_Meets_in_Singapore.pdf

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and with DNA and supercolliders to computer technology itself. It’s not just the exceptional discovery that is critical, however.

Universities also provide the scripts with which we can recognize the future. Those associated with “world society” approaches see universities as the settings in which the agendas for global transformation are made. “Universities come to map reality and in turn help to constitute it by increasingly privileging a certain constitution with a global over local edge” (Kennedy, 2015:81, with reference to Frank and Gabler). As Meyer and his colleagues regularly demonstrate, one can trace back to universities many of the leading terms of our global society – human rights, climate change, and so on – back to university communities.

This imaginary, so extensively documented by the scholars associated with the World Society vision, depends on a political imaginary of a world that is increasingly integrated, isomorphic, and convergent. They document the mechanisms that produce this coordination too – the organization of prestige in the world and its consequent emulation. The increasingly global training and labor market, where scholars and students travel across the world in pursuit of their own academic recognition, helps to produce this very effect.

This global process and its accompanying political imaginary works best for those parts of a university that are relatively unmoored from place. Engineering, computer science, life sciences and many other disciplines appear to exist within epistemic cultures that are beyond context, without any publics other than similarly trained colleagues and those who might invest in the products that these scholars produce (see Chapter 3 of Kennedy 2015).102 University excellence depends on climbing that reputational ladder, something Salvatore Babones described in his own paper for this conference. Universities as communities of critical discourse might, however, figure ways to decide how to rearticulate that global recognition, and how it might reflect more immediate priorities and proximate publics. But in order to do that, we need better ways to frame public engagements.

In Globalizing Knowledge, I discussed the relationship between universities and publics in general, considering the different ways of conceiving universities’ public engagements. I will introduce the table I from that volume (p. 151) here because of its help in figuring how we might conceive relationships among publics and universities better.

Table #1: UNIVERSITY PUBLICS, PROXIMITY, AND ARTICULATIONS

ACADEMIC VALUES PUBLIC AS CONTEXT PUBLIC AS PARTNER

102 Friend & colleague Alan Harlam has, however, encouraged me to learn about Northwestern University’s introductory engineering course. It is engaged – much in the spirit of Brown’s culture of community problem solving. Also – Engineers Without Borders (www.ewb-usa.org) actively promotes this type of applied learning.

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PROXIMATE AND OBVIOUS

1. CORE PUBLICS AMONG 2. UNIVERSITY AS 3. SERVICE LEARNING, CAMPUS FACULTY, EMPLOYER, INVESTOR SCHOLARSHIP IN STUDENTS, STAFF, AND CULTURE PROVIDER CIVIC ENGAGEMENTALUMNI CONTRACTOR

DISTANT REQUIRING JUSTIFICATION

4. GLOBAL EXCELLENCE 5. GLOBAL PROBLEMS 6. PARTNERSHIPS W/GLOBAL RANKINGS & POLICY MAKING PUBLICS OF CHOICE

Public #1 is the most obvious for universities, but for universities seeking to move up in the rankings of higher education, #4 is critical as well. Universities typically do much with #2 and #5 given that these also help to legitimate the university as such. It’s not obvious how or why publics become partners, whether they are proximate or distant. But that is what I focus on now. But first a Polish digression.

Polish Roots of Globalizing Knowledge

I might as well come out in this talk to identify where my theories of globalizing knowledge and elevating proximate publics come from. Poland is my inspiration here. Of course you can see in my book that I reference Poland a great deal in my globalizing knowledge argument, implicitly evoking that great 19th century expression, Za naszą i waszą wolność; in this case, however, I would see for your knowledge and ours. But the model for recognizing significant publics also comes from Poland.

When Wlodzimierz Wesolowski invited me to present at the 12th All Poland Sociology Congress in Poznan, I thought I would try to explain the conditions under which Poland became prominent in the American sociological imagination. I used the following diagrams to explain American sociological ethnocentrism and American sociological Polocentrism.103

Diagram 1: THE IMPETUS BEHIND AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ETHNOCENTRISM

103 That presentation is available in (2004) “Poland in the American Sociological Imagination” Polish Sociological Review 4(148) ’04 361-83 and in Wlodzimierz Wesolowski and Jan Wlodarek (eds.) Polska, Europa, Swiat (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe SCHOLAR)

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Diagram 2: THE IMPETUS BEHIND AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL POLOCENTRISM

AmericanSociological

Ethnocentrism

Power, Privilege and Diversity of American Society

Immigration of Foreign Faculty and

Graduate Students

REFLECT,CONNECT,FOCUS IN THEORY & POLITICS

Mono-lingual Capacities and

PublicationPrestige and

Surplus

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In retrospect, this approach is useful for imagining the conditions under which proximate publics come to the fore in global universities. I revise it in order to capture this general sense: proximate publics are typically not engaged because of the ways in which power and privilege shape university priorities, unless intellectual argument and public mobilization, ideally combined, redirect attention, and administration can rearticulate it into an institutionally feasible project. At least that is how it is kickstarted And then, if the intellectual arguments are sufficiently compelling, and university leaders are sufficiently visionary, we can reformulate the value of universities for publics beyond their core.

American Sociological

Polocentrism, 1913-2001

Reflection: The Familiar

Systemic Other

Theoretical Centrality –

The Key Periphery

Connections:The Polish Peasant and Sociology Diaspora

Political Centrality –Solidarnosc

and the Fall of Communism

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Diagram 3: The Conditions of Proximate Publics’ Academic Prominence

The stories I share subsequently are organized around these relationships. Briefly, proximate publics become prominent in academic life only when they are powerful and privileged. However, power and privilege can change by successful mobilizations by those without traditional access to university goods. That, however, is unlikely to influence university priorities without having a substantial knowledgeable foundation, a mobilization of knowledge that makes those protests academically justified and respectable. But that knowledge base is unlikely to bear fruit unless those with administrative capital within the university translate that value into institutionally legible forms. This general account is based on recent Brown University history. 104

Brown University’s Integrative Themes for Global Consumption

104 In this moment I am deliberately evocative; yes, given Brown’s Ivy League status it could be a site for emulation; however, what I am about to describe does not invite emulation, but rearticulation (Kennedy 2015:268, 284-85).

Power and Privilege of Proximate

Publics

Knowledge Activism around

Proximate Publics

Institutional Rearticulation of Proximate

Publics Academic

Value

Public Mobilization of

Proximate Publics

Scholarly Elevation of Proximate

Publics

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In 2013, and with a new president at the helm, Brown University embarked on a mission to rethink the purpose of the university in general, and in particular, with this question to start: “What is the role of the 21st century university? Where is our place in tomorrow’s world? How can our unique strengths be channeled to address local, national, and global opportunities and challenges?”.105 It was reported that our academic community engaged in “deep introspection and dialogue” about what those emphases might be. Seven themes emerged:

Using Science and Technology to Improve Lives“Scientific and technological boundaries are dissolving, as new applications and common tools are used to solve diverse problems. Brown’s scientists, engineers and computers scientists feel right at home” (p. 17).

Understanding the Human Brain“How can we explore the mysterious, uncharted territory of the brain to discover new therapies, new insights, and new understanding of the intrinsic properties of the human mind?” (p. 29)

Deciphering Disease and Improving Population Health“How are hundreds of committed medical students and residents, physicans, researchers, public health experts and others using Brown’s research to improve the health status and well-being of people and groups worldwide?” (p. 45).

Sustaining Life on Earth“How can integrated teams of geologists, sociologists, biologist, and researchers in other disciplines focus their passion and expertise on the new properties of our changing planet and the responsibilities of humans to steward its resources?” (p. 54)

Cultivating Creative Expression “How shall we examine and express and share the poignant, paradoxical, whimsical, tragic, bewildering, surprising, transcendent, common and unique experience of being human?” (p. 5).

Creating Peaceful, Just, and Prosperous Societies“How can we contribute to the stability and well-being of local and global communities by understanding and addressing the intellectual and visceral experiences of human dignity, economic inequality, and more?” (p. 37)

Exploring Human Experience“How shall we harness the power of the Humanities to parse the political, social, and philosophical constructs that influence our lives, inform our discourse, bind us together, and drive us apart?” (p. 21)

In nearly every instance, these integrative themes were organized around one or a few university interdisciplinary centers, featuring those institute leaders or prominent

105 https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/strategic-planning/2013-report

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scholars associated with the endeavors. These efforts, in turn, built on the previous president’s wish to turn a university best known for its undergraduate curriculum into a research university. Thus, one might argue, both presidents put Brown on a track for increasing world recognition, which in turn might also make it a more attractive site to study, a place that can more readily recruit world-class faculty, and a place that could inspire additional support by the university’s graduates, parents, and promoters. This was truly a worldly endeavor, even while there were moments that proximate publics came to the fore.

This is most evident in the health sciences where researchers mingle with those providing health care itself. It’s even more prominent among those working on the environment, whether in developing a sustainability mission for those in the eco-region of which Brown University is a part, or in working on more specific issues that are proximate to Brown, as in the study of toxic chemicals buried deep in the soils surrounding Brown’s old industrial plants (p. 59).106

It’s occasionally evident in the arts and humanities. For example, the scholar and producer of theater Erik Ehn “takes his own practice to downtown Providence where his Tenderloin Opera Company brings opportunity for creative expression to homeless people… Under the auspices of the Brown/Trinity MFA Program, they work in close collaboration with the resident artists of Trinity Repertory Company…” (p. 7). But it’s especially evident, potentially at least, in two areas where the public is potentially, and perhaps even necessarily, proximate. Seeking a more just, peaceful, and prosperous world would seem to necessitate engaging publics, even if not proximate.

The Watson Institute for International Studies, at the time of the document’s composition, was focused on developments beyond Providence environs, and therefore had hardly any mention of proximate publics in its mission (though its supporters often sought greater collaboration with policy makers in Washington DC and other transnational organizations). The other centers in that section were much more proximate to public issues.

A new Center for Race and Ethnicity in America focused on the articulation of diversity and justice.107 Its new director, Tricia Rose, became one of the leading faculty on Brown’s campus that led in exploring how the racism that rocked American publics could inform the ways in which we could figure diversity’s place on campus; in recognition of that role and in anticipation of a campus to be remade, she was recently appointed as Associate Dean with special responsibilities to “implement strategies designed to recruit, retain and support faculty from historically underrepresented groups (HUG) in the social sciences and humanities”.108 This kind of initiative is especially important given Brown’s founding. 106 One might also in this context consider the http://www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/ which is oriented more toward global publics; it was not, however, mentioned in this document. It has also enjoyed substantial collaborations not only with its home environmental studies network but also engaged learning at the Swearer Center and international affairs at the Watson Institute. 107 https://www.brown.edu/academics/race-ethnicity/about108 I was delighted to discover how much interest there is among administration, faculty, and students to engage diversity and inclusion more effectively at Warsaw University.

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Brown University was founded with money made out of the slave trade. The first African American female president of an Ivy League institution, Ruth Simmons, made the founding of a center to come to terms with those origins one of her top priorities. By the time her tenure ended, the center was established as the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice alongside the naming of its director, Tony Bogues. It has been obliged both to recognize the ways in which past injustices and current struggles over human rights, justice, and freedom might be connected. It mobilizes scholars who see that connection and therefore might reach out proximate publics.109

If I were to leave it there, it could appear that only faculty of color were concerned with the articulation of publics in our work. I shall consider that further in a following section, but in that context it’s also important to note that Brown recruited notable political theorist Bonnie Honig to its ranks; her own work focuses on “the objects and places that encourage democratic behaviors, writ large and small” (p. 25). In that expression, organized under the theme of “exploring human experience”, we could see publics coming into view.

There are plenty of spaces around Providence that might inspire theory, and practice, around that question, but most typically, real engagements with those publics are typically left off the table. And when they are on the table, that engagement is typically led by the Swearer Center for Public Service. But before we take up their practice, we ought to mark their place when it comes to the prominence of publics in Brown University’s 2013 vision of the future.

In theory they were evident, but in concrete practice, especially in terms of partnerships with particular actors without power and privilege, they were not prominent in the university’s articulation. That was, however, before the struggle over diversity and inclusion returned to be such a prominent and explicit theme in academic contest.

Diversity’s Extension and Public Engagement

Although my 2015 book was about globalizing knowledge, it also asked us to consider our justifications for engaging particular places and publics. Indeed, in discussing this book at Brown University, one of my interlocutors, Lina Fruzzetti, took off on my discussion of the Ray Kelly Affair at Brown University (Kennedy 2015:141-42) (she was herself a member of the committee whose report on that event I considered to be an exemplar of intellectual responsibility (http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/president/Events-of-Oct292014Committee.pdf ) to ask why I don’t talk about localizing knowledge, especially among marginalized communities, as much as I talk about globalizing knowledge.110 She was right to ask this question, and this section is in partial answer to her query.

109 https://www.brown.edu/initiatives/slavery-and-justice/110 For her commentary, and the broader discussion see http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/globalizing-knowledge-intellectuals-universities-and-publics-transformation

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In short, proximate publics are typically not engaged unless they are powerful and privileged. Brown University, for example, in order to climb the ladder of worldly recognition focuses on powerful and privileged actors in the world system, along with their associated publics. This is evident, of course, in terms of who composes the members of the university’s corporation and its units’ overseers, as well as where meetings, when taking place beyond Brown University itself, occur. For example, I learned about places like the Links Club111 in New York City thanks to this kind of elite public engagement; Brown enjoys a mutually beneficial relationship with the Hope Club too, a place once of exclusive and elite Providence publics.112 In 2011, Brown was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global University Leader’s Forum.113 This reflex can be challenged, however, when racism is marked.

Like the rest of the USA, Brown has been engulfed in a series of contests over White privilege in the University, as have other universities.114 I should provide to you all a good history of this series of protests, but this late November 2015 statement suffices for now.115 I was delighted to learn about the range of student engagement during the conference and meetings following at Warsaw University. Those forms of student activism range from direct protest under the label of the “Engaged University” (http://politicalcritique.org/cee/poland/2015/engaged-university/) to student expert research on how to create public space. In fact, these Warsaw University students among other students are going to Northampton University shortly to meet with other engaged learners (http://ashokau.org/programs/changemaker-campus/the-university-of-northhampton/#overview) . Sometimes, however, I wonder if university administrators might also need transnational meetings to figure how better to engage student protest and engagement. I have, for instance, seen terrific learning among Brown’s administrators over the last year.

The administration moved deftly in response to student protest over the past year, with new Provost Rick Locke figuring a way to engage the protest: to figure data-driven methods to draw in protest to the university’s vision of its future in diversity.116 That was especially important given the role of protest in institutional transformation. As Brown’s President Chris Paxson indicated, student movements have transformed university priorities,117 but they could do so only because of the translational work the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan rendered.

The administration rearticulated protest into institutional transformation, one so promising that one of the faculty most associated with the struggle for diversity and 111 https://valuablebook.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/the-most-powerful-club-in-the-world-the-links/ 112 http://www.hopeclub.com/ 113 I discuss this association in Kennedy 2015:245-47; Brown is not on the list in 2015, however. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GULF_Members_2015.pdf 114 http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/campus-protest-roundup/417570/115 http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/11/16/graduate-solidarity-statement-and-demands/ Here is a video accounting of the protests at Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tojq1RRO3eQ For an accounting of struggles and demands across the USA, see http://www.thedemands.org/ 116 Brown University developed the most comprehensive and responsive Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan I have seen, in response to student mobilizations https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-diversity/pathways/feedback117 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-paxson/constructive-irreverence-in-action_b_9143474.html

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inclusion, Tricia Rose, could label it  “bold and audacious… a great model both in the way it was developed, with the inclusion of a wide range of community input, and in its multifaceted implementation vision”.118 To my mind, Tricia’s applause is well placed, especially given the extent to which it set into prominent virtual public space a means for assuring accountability, and assessing progress on action steps.119 That method of assessment is also useful for thinking about how the plan articulates publics, especially in its address of “community” (https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-diversity/pathways/community).

That accounting mechanism demonstrates the university’s abiding focus on its core publics. Of the eleven action items set up, only two relate to proximate publics under these charges: “promote the University’s positive impact on Providence and the surrounding region” and “convene a working group to evaluate and report on Brown’s contributions to Providence and Rhode Island”, with the former being a matter of communicating more effectively what is going on, and the latter more a matter of exploration as to what might, and could, happen. But focusing only on this minimizes the possibilities, and even actualities, of the relationship.120 This is especially evident when it comes to Native Americans.

To extend diversity with regard to Native Americans and Indigenous peoples, Brown needs refigure its relationship to proximate publics. As the university has increased support for Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown,121 the university also connects with proximate publics too, especially among Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.122 Elizabeth Hoover, an anthropologist and herself of Micmac and Mohawk ancestry, has been critical, supporting Native American students at Brown. But the most demonstrable public event signals a new, desired relationship. Their annual powwow has

improved the relationship between Brown and the local Native community.” Before, she explains, Brown was perceived by many local Native Americans as “an elitist, snobby institution sitting on Native land, not wanting anything to do with us.” While the majority of Native American undergrads at Brown are from

118 http://diverseeducation.com/article/84691/ 119 Of course the plan is difficult to implement when there is such uneven understanding of what diversity and inclusion mean, and when there are so many other grievances and priorities that compete with diversity’s importance -- an early signpost of one of those objections concerned the relative significance of free speech http://www.browndailyherald.com/2015/10/15/cheit-josephson-loury-miller-70-p02-spoehr-free-expression-matters/ But there are challenges beyond the easily anticipated ideological contest of diversity and free speech, a recurring theme not only at Brown (note the contest around the “Ray Kelley Incident” – I discuss that in chapter 4 of Globalizing Knowledge) but at other universities too. 120 It’s not surprising that the Swearer Center would note that limitation. See https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/news/2016-01/response-swearer-center-pathways-diversity-and-inclusion121 That racism is evident in this study: http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20151025/NEWS/151029773 122 A note from August 26, 2017: The relationship between Brown University and Native Americans and Indigenous communities has become much more publicly contentious and complex. Follow Steve Ahlquist’s reporting for representations of many views. The latest as of this update: http://www.rifuture.org/po-metacom-responds/

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tribes in the Southwest, Hoover and the other organizers make sure to include the traditional dances of local New England tribes. As a result, the powwow has become a popular regional event.123

Elizabeth has also been associated with the Swearer Center for Public Service and especially its engaged scholars program.124 Indeed, her work on food has led her to partner with a wide range of community organizations like Farm Fresh Rhode Island and the Environmental Justice League of RI dedicated to healthy and local food.

Elizabeth has also facilitated ties between indigenous communities and Brown’s research on environmental health along with other Brown University colleagues, including sociologist Scott Frickel.125

The Community Engagement Core (CEC) advances social science of environmental health and justice through a deliberative and participatory process of research, education, and advocacy in the state of Rhode Island. Combining academic and community-based approaches builds mutual trust and promotes understanding of complex socio-environmental problems to reduce environmental exposures, improve public health and inform public health and environmental policy.

The relationship of Brown University to its proximate publics has not always been so positive and mutually beneficial, however.

In 2012, various authorities associated with Providence challenged whether the university contributed sufficiently to the city. The university responded in detail by listing its contributions to the economy and developing human capital, which, for the most part, were mainly “derivative” from what the university did anyway (Kennedy 2015:146). Other universities had been much more aggressive in making their environs more than a context for their work, and much more of a partners. I focused on the examples of Syracuse University and the University of Pennsylvania in those days, and their conceptions of themselves as “Anchor Institutions” (Kennedy 2015:146-49). But Brown is itself working to change that relationship.

It was evident in that 2013 plan, not only with references to faculty work, but with recurring mentions of the work of the Swearer Center for Public Service. The document mentioned one of its student projects, The Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE) Summer Camp: it pairs Brown students with local high school students from Providence’s refugee community to be counselors for children ages 7-14 for academic enrichment (p. 44).126 Another of that Center’s initiatives, the “TRI-lab”, was also identified as a place where “research and problem-solving around a critical 123 http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/content/view/4184/32/124 http://swearersparks.org/stories/learning-and-doing-anthropologist-liz-hoover 125 https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/superfund/cores/core-e126 Another student, this time in public health, highlighted another way in which Brown engages local publics, this time when John Nguyen works with the Center for Southeast Asians in Providence to improve the address of health needs among that population as well as among those in the Adult Correctional Institute especially in Hepatitis C (p. 50).

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complex social issue” could be explored (p. 51). That particular initiative, however, has become something central to the university’s mission itself: “Engaged Scholarship”. She presented it this way in her major 2013 statement of Brown’s priorities:

Connecting to the world | Consistent with our mission to serve “the community, the nation, and the world,” learning that connects academic and real-world experiences is central to the undergraduate experience at Brown. As an established leader in this area, Brown is in a position to define the “second wave” of integrative approaches to engaged learning.127

Of course it’s not simple to say what that means, and what that does not mean. In terms of Table 1, publics could be beneficiaries of our work, regardless of their proximity to the university. We could be redesigning plazas to make lighting better, or we might be figuring out how to treat diseases that affect the most marginalized among us.128 Some students at Brown have been critical of Brown’s engagement in these terms, however.

In this light, students have seen Brown take advantage of, rather than partner with marginalized communities in its most proximate city.129 Rather than facilitate civil society, one critic sees it as dominating the city’s life, where civil society’s organizations depend on funds that come from beyond the communities themselves, rely on skills, like grant writing, that depend on a certain kind of professional education that diminishes those with different kinds of human capital, and provide help in a way that reproduces how power works. The author puts it bluntly, echoing critiques of white savior industrial complexes130 elsewhere:

Strongly resembling neocolonial missionary work, the University lauds nonprofit work as a career path in which students can specialize and develop their skills and expertise in. True to its mission, the University dedicates whole centers and programs – such as the Swearer Center for Public Service – to connecting students to community organizations throughout the city and state along with other mechanisms (Teach for America, Americorps VISTA, etc.) that act as feeder-tubes into buffer zone occupations.A significant number of grassroots, community, labor, and youth development orgs active in the city today have been started by Brown students in their activist phases and since then have been administered by the same ilk. Those not directly founded by Brown alumni, were founded by alumni of other Ivy League schools and maintain close institutional relationships with those from Brown. One only need to dig into historical archives to find that numerous influential nonprofit organizations have consistently been initiated, led, or administered by Ivy League students and alumni: Providence Student Union, the Institute for the Study and

127 p. 5 in http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/BuildingOnDistinctionOct262013.pdf128 This first example comes from the work of Elise Mortensen (2016) and her sociological analysis of the Rhode Island School of Design and its articulations of diversity and publics. ““Confronting Critical Making: Capital, Whiteness, and Engagement at The Rhode Island School of Design”, Honor’s Thesis, Brown University Department of Sociology. 129 e.g. https://scholarpunkzero.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/neocolonial-providence-nonprofits-brown-and-the-company-town/ and  http://www.nowherethis.org/story/mpcs-x-nht-brown-privilege/130 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/

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Practice of Nonviolence, Rhode Island Communities for Justice, Rhode Island Urban Debate League – and still the list continues.Even left-oriented radical “social justice” grassroots organizations aren’t immune from this trend: Direct Action for Rights and Equality, Providence Youth Student Movement, Olneyville Neighborhood Association, and Rhode Island Jobs with Justice have all been founded by Brown students.131

This question deserves more engagement to be sure, for as the author presents it, there are too many assumptions built into the study and not enough critical sociological research and analysis.132 However, the racial question does loom large.

In an era when diversity is understood critically in terms of representation, the staff of the Swearer Center for Service is mostly white,133 and that can loom large in the center’s critique. It is important to note, however, that Brown is itself overwhelmingly white as well. Indeed, the Sociology department of which I am part has only one faculty member considered by the university to be a member of a historically underrepresented group, and as such, the department has been the object of extensive critique by students as well. Both Sociology and the Swearer Center are changing on a number of dimensions that is worth considering in these terms. I focus only on the Swearer Center here, given its centrality to the question of public engagement. But before we examine its institutional rearticulation, we ought consider some of the knowledge activism developing around its work and of other centers like it.

Knowledge Activism around Public Engagement

Mayer Zald once argued that sociology split off from social work at the start of the last century in order to engage an upward mobility project. If social work’s partners were powerful and privileged clients, that association may not have been so bad; but because social work’s clients were generally less powerful, sociology found it was better off to distance itself from any publics at all and become more ivory tower academic.134 A decade later Michael Burawoy made this question of extra-academic audience central in his own manifesto for public sociology.135 In short, we need to recognize that debates within academic disciplines create the space for extra-academic audiences to be recognized. Burawoy’s public sociology, and its kin across other disciplines, are critical in this regard. But if we are leading with public engagement, we can’t only consider what’s happening within disciplines. In fact, we ought specify more clearly what public engagement references even beyond the terms I specified in my book.

131 https://scholarpunkzero.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/neocolonial-providence-nonprofits-brown-and-the-company-town/132 It would be good to read this work alongside Gianpaolo Baiocchi et al, Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life. 2013.

133 The Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan is having its effects here too, where the proportion of Swearer employees who are people of color is increased to approximately 1/3. 134 http://www.jstor.org/stable/27698580?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents 135 http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Public%20Sociology,%20Live/Burawoy.pdf

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Public engagement can simply reference having academic work engage those beyond the university. Here, business schools might be perceived as being the most “public” in their scholarship given that their clientele are typically motivated by making their businesses better; health science researchers might also be seen in these terms, especially to the extent that their discoveries helps those with sufficient insurance to extend their lives even further. Public might also refer to those economists who work with governments to figure how privatizing prisons might be more efficient in the allocation of resources.

Public, however, implies something more than that, however; it typically suggests working with or for those of lesser means. It might mean, as in Brown’s case, working within prisons to extend the voice and education of those incarcerated (https://www.facebook.com/prison.op.ed.project/timeline?ref=page_internal); it might mean a focus on infectious diseases before cardiovascular ones, for example; and it might focus more on an entrepreneurialism devoted to public value before private good. The Swearer Center presents its own accent this way:

“Engaged scholarship” refers to community-based inquiry by students and faculty in partnership with community members outside of the academy. Its goal is to create high-impact learning experiences and collaborative educational partnerships that address major social challenges and produce tangible public benefits.Engaged scholarship is premised on the idea that reciprocal exchanges between academic and non-academic partners - in the classroom, on campus, in the community - create rich opportunities for learning, knowledge-creation, and problem-solving that will help to create a more just and equitable society.136

As they indicate, there is a substantial body of work that lies behind it,137 but that work is unlikely to compel the disciplinarily focused. There are no flagship journals of the dominant disciplines in their list of scholarly references. Indeed, when our sociology department was presented with the possibility of joining this as partnership, we did, but some among our number resented the idea that others could tell us what it means to be engaged. All of sociology is engaged, I was told.138 After all, sociology frequently addresses social problems. But public engagement can also be conflated with the address of social problems.

Dan Little identifies the variety of social problems in a powerful way, from those that are “wicked problems” (interconnected and contentious in ways that defy their simple resolution) to those that are fairly specific and need only determined and abiding focus on that problem, like a city’s impending bankruptcy; for the latter, experts in league with political authorities may be enough; for the former, cultural transformations are

136 https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/engaged-scholarship137 http://compact.org/initiatives/trucen/research-university-engaged-scholarship-toolkit/section-a-what-is-engaged-scholarship/what-is-engaged-scholarship/ Ashoka also debates the meanings of these aligned terms; see for example http://ashokau.org/blog/the-reality-of-terminology-beyond-definitions/ 138 In this, because sociology may have public consequence, if the right people read it, makes it all engaged; of course this argument appeals much more to those who focus only on core publics, and not proximate much less distant ones, and much less even further in terms of partnership.

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critical, and require shifts not just in the levers of power but in broader public sensibilities.139 In this, expertise is not enough; social movements are critical to changing the foundations on which the adequate address of social problems can be developed.

Social movements are not only about contesting power, however. Indeed, one can see social movements organized around how to address problems, and here, Ashoka is at the forefront in developing a new approach to addressing social problems, one that is especially relevant to universities looking for ways to extend public engagement.

Ashoka is a knowledge network organized around social entrepreneurship, with some 3000 Fellows in 70 countries. The organization provides start up funds, professional support services, and networks to facilitate change across the world. They focus on “entrepreneurial talent and new ideas to solve social problems” (https://www.ashoka.org/about)

Ashoka also has a university commitment and has created an explicitly knowledge-based network. By creating such a network, it also creates the intellectual alliances and forms of status that might lead universities to organize change around this work. Consider, for example, now neatly it figures into a World Society framework of change by creating a process by which one might join an elite network of universities; “The Changemaker Campus designation, through a rigorous 1-2 year selection process, recognizes colleges and universities globally that have embedded social innovation as a core value” http://ashokau.org/ And with three Ivy League Plus universities as members (Brown, Cornell, and Duke) it helps to associate the vision with elite university practice. When Brown University hosted that Ashoka conference in 2014, they featured the gathering as one dedicated to envisioning the “new scholar”.140

I appreciated very much how Wray Irvin from Northampton University extended my own sense of the Changemaker Campus with his own presentation to the conference, especially around the articulation of the 6 principles expressing that mission in his own university. Their principles include being responsible, resourceful, and innovative, engaging networks, recognizing values, and being empathetic. 141

Even within the elite universities, however, the practice of social entrepreneurship does not enjoy as much academic appreciation as it might. “Social entrepreneurship”, is often seen as insufficiently academic, mostly professional, and mostly an extension of business school training itself. Most courses in US universities dedicated to social entrepreneurship are offered in business schools.142 Its journals, too, are not so academic as much as they are professional.143 Their textbooks are mostly “how to” volumes, encouraging their students to figure how to translate business sense into social goods, by

139 http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2016/06/making-change-happen.html 140 http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/02/24/social-venture-ideas-spotlighted-ashoka-u-exchange/141 http://www.northampton.ac.uk/news/wray-irwin-appointed-as-new-social-entrepreneur-in-residence/142 personal communication, Alan Harlam 143 So I have been told, for example, about even the http://ssir.org/

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measuring social value, figuring the distinction of business plans in this sector, and how to think about the relationship between organizational success and addressing social need.144 One of my friends and colleagues, Jyoti Sharma, the first “Social Entrepreneur in Residence” at Brown University, put it this way: one needs to make a problem visible, have the heart to do good, but then also the business mindset to address the problem effectively.145 In fact, she is also an Ashoka Fellow.146

Ashoka itself emphasizes the qualities of the individual who might become the exemplary social entrepreneur:

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change…. Social entrepreneurs present user-friendly, understandable, and ethical ideas that engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of citizens that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement it. Leading social entrepreneurs are mass recruiters of local changemakers – role models proving that citizens who channel their ideas into action can do almost anything.147

In this, we need to recognize something critical for universities who wish to engage publics: this is an excellent approach to training students, for it fuses learning associated with the accumulation of wealth with a concern for public good. Indeed, the slogans of those who advance social enterprise fix on that very notion. One of the most dynamic such organizations I know, Social Enterprise Greenhouse, describes its work as supporting “organizations that strive to do well and do good”.148 The Ashoka ambition, to make everyone a changemaker, is itself predicated on the notion of infinite capacity. It attends relativley little to the challenge of the system itself, much less its wicked problems.

Of course this is not the only approach animating public engagements among US universities. Civic engagement, social innovation, and social entrepreneurship are the conventional distinctions my colleagues in the Swearer Center draw. We can draw on the work of my former University of Michigan colleague David Scobey149 to see the commonalities and distinctions of the first two.

144 See for example Social Entrepreneurship: A Modern Approach to Social Value Creation145 This comes from a session in which we discussed her and Jonathan Chang’s work from Singapore Entrepreneurship and International Development at Brown University, organized by FEAST, on February 15, 2016; but see her interview too at http://swearersparks.org/stories/conversation-jyoti-sharma-social-entrepreneur-residence 146 http://singapore.ashoka.org/fellow/jyoti-sharma 147 https://www.ashoka.org/social_entrepreneur148 http://segreenhouse.org/about149 SOCIAL INNOVATION AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: SIBLING RIVALS OR KISSING COUSINS? Think Tank on Social Innovation and Civic Engagement Washington University, October, 2015

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Scobey simplifies to make it clear: both “have developed paradigms of project-based work and interdisciplinary, active, collaborative learning as strategies for taking on wicked problems… challenge the boundary between the curriculum and the co-curriculum, between term-time and off-term, and of course between the campus and the larger world… for social benefit” (p. 3). However, civic engagement emerges out of community organizing and political movements in different generations, while the social innovation has its roots in a more professional expression, and the “third way” politics of the post-Reagan/Thatcher era.

As part of the knowledge activism around engaging publics, we should be encouraging debate around these approaches, clarifying what each can do, and what each does not does well. One of the most useful is a recent essay by Remko Berkhout.150 I draw on his article, and other pieces, to fashion this heuristic to facilitate discussion.

Diagram 4: The Cultural Logic of Social Innovation

Entrepreneur Collaboration Apolitical Scale Up Solutionism Talent Immediate--------|--------------|-----------------|-------------|--------------|---------------|------------|--Community Contestation Political In Site Prefiguring Dedication Future

One can see that along the top line, we see how a critic might view Ashoka et al practice. It is focused on the changemaker as entrepreneur, assumes or seeks to generate collaboration as a model of change, is apolitical rather than political in its self-presentation, it seeks to solve problems with great talent fairly quickly, and then move on or scale up its impact. Not all problems can be addressed like that, of course. At the same time, we should also view under what circumstances this approach is ideal; for example, where political contest is difficult, or toxic to an organization like the university, this might be the best kind of “public engagement” to develop.

At the same time as one might contrast these forms of social change, and the place of academic public engagement, one should also figure how they relate to one another, how they might flow into one another as Katie Cohen has suggested in her model of “resource-intervention chain”. 151 How are shorter term approaches related to wicked problems that may be more political? That is where knowledge activism comes in, by not only figuring how to make more effective and professional the delivery of the Ashoka et al mission, but also how to figure out its potentials and limits in terms of public engagement and the address of social problems. My colleagues from Warsaw University, Aleksandra Goldys, Maria Rogaczewska, and Maria Szymborska, have been critical for me to imagine these configurations, especially around their notion of “solidary

150 https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/remko-berkhout/irresistibly-biased-blind-spots-of-social-innovation# and in this light, see too https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/amy-schiller/case-for-hard-why-social-transformation-demands-lots-of-social-friction and https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/david-lane-filippo-addarii/social-innovation-and-challenge-of-democracy-in-europe 151 Here I think about the example Kathryn Cohen offers in her “resource intervention chain” https://www.academia.edu/3368849/Transformation_from_the_Hollows_The_Resource-Intervention_Chain_and_its_Implications_for_Collective_Action_and_Social_Transformation

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knowledge”.152 After one figures out the parameters of this knowledge activism, however, one needs to figure how to bring that into institutional rearticulation. The Institute for Social Studies has been a powerful supporter at Warsaw University for this knowledge ativism and rearticulation.153 At Brown University, that combination is happening around the Swearer Center.

Institutional Rearticulation of Brown University’s Public Engagement

I have begun to work with colleagues Alan Harlam, Mathew Johnson, Allen Hance, Jori Ketten, Lizzie Pollock, Erin Cohee and others at Brown, and with colleagues here in Warsaw and in Singapore to think about what the sociology of this vision of engaged scholarship might look like. Of course as a knowledge cultural sociologist, I mostly learn from the work of others, in particular what our colleagues at Swearer have just generated in their strategic plan.

First, the Swearer Center is discussing a change of its very name and brand.

Since the Swearer Center was founded, the Center and our field of community-engaged higher education have both evolved. The work was originally framed as “public service,” a concept that is now perceived by many as paternalistic, non-academic, and insufficiently reciprocal. As Brown animates and institutionalizes the vision of engaged scholarship articulated in Building on Distinction, the Swearer Center will play a pivotal role. Our name and identity should reflect this important position and our sophisticated and rigorous approach to our educational mission, reciprocal partnerships, and community impact. Consistent with the values, commitments, and strategies outlined in this plan and reflecting Brown’s and the Center’s ambitions, we propose a new name for the Swearer Center: the Howard R. Swearer Center for Community Engaged Scholarship and Action.154

Second, diversity is much more apparent, if not among its staff, certainly among the students who are its fellows. Although it varies from year to year, in 2015 those receiving social innovation fellowships were mainly innovating within the communities of which they are part; the sole white student to receive a fellowship worked on reducing sexual violence in the on-line community.155 This, in turn, followed an articulation that reflected learning from the challenge of the white savior complex: “deep and robust understanding of the problem from the perspective of the people who experience it”.156

152 http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/between-criticism-and-co-action-meeting-need-new-kind-relationship-between-policy-makers http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/osrodki-badan/centrum-wyzwan-spolecznych/ 153 http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/154 Pp. 28-29 in https://drive.google.com/a/brown.edu/file/d/0B686oS-fCV9bVjBjVXBwQzI5UG8/view 155 https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/social-innovation-initiative/cv-starr-social-entrepreneurship-fellowship/current-starr-fellows/class-2015156 http://swearersparks.org/stories/so%C2%B7cial-in%C2%B7no%C2%B7va%C2%B7tion-n-part-2

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Finally, Social Innovation itself anticipates a pivot away from the notion of university privilege in the relationship: in the coming year, the Social Innovation Initiative is figuring ways to bring community innovation and fellows from Brown’s proximate public into the academic life of the center itself.157

These particular changes are embedded in a larger transformation of how they envision the learning they are to provide. First,158 they identify four layers of competence that each student learning what they call “community-engaged education” must offer.

• Project management: ability to manage (design, build, assess, and adapt) community projects (effective action, professionalism)• Systems analysis: capacity to analyze systemically the root causes and consequences of poverty and other forms of social inequity and marginality (systems thinking)• Power dynamics: ability to describe and analyze critically the role power plays in preserving the status quo and might play in moving towards a more just system (sense of justice, analytic capacity)• Intercultural competence: capacity to adjust and transform one’s own attitudes and beliefs by working with and learning from individuals and communities different from oneself (intercultural competency)

In the first layer, we see clear skills that develop in being an effective professional, and member of a team. At the same time, the system’s analysis part is also critical; one need train students, and ourselves, to be clear about what it is we are addressing, and what we are not.

When it comes to power dynamics and intercultural competence, we are going well beyond what any particular program can offer. Here, universities as a whole must articulate the vision, and develop a mission.

Here, one might say, we turn to those much broader themes that animated Brown’s vision of integrative scholarship. Indeed, to focus on power and difference we are drawn to those scholars who might figure how to address peace, justice, and prosperity, on the one hand, and on the other, what makes peaceful, just and prosperous societies, (“How can we contribute to the stability and well-being of local and global communities by understanding and addressing the intellectual and visceral experiences of human dignity, economic inequality, and more?” (p. 37)) and how we might “parse the political, social, and philosophical constructs that influence our lives, inform our discourse, bind us together, and drive us apart?” (p. 21) In this, we cannot escape the normative, the ethical.

We are in the process at Brown of creating a new kind of public policy program, one that puts justice at the heart of its mission. We have even developed a track focused on social change that uses the distance between the way things are, and the way things ought to be, as its guide to figuring policy and public interventions. But we are not alone.

157 Alan Harlam, June 10, 2016, personal communication. 158 https://drive.google.com/a/brown.edu/file/d/0B686oS-fCV9bVjBjVXBwQzI5UG8/view , p. 11.

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Indeed, this becomes very clear in the Swearer Center own elevation of “community partnership”:

Our community partnership work will be guided by two essential principles: community agency and reciprocity.We believe that the programs that seek to make change in communities are best designed, delivered, and led by members of those communities and/or community-based organizations closest to the work. This is community agency, where power and decision-making authority exists at the individual and organizational level closest to-- and most informed about-- the community’s challenges and assets. We will reimagine our role as preparing students, and partnering with communities and community organizations, to develop opportunities that are owned by, or in full partnership with, those community members and/or organizations.159

In this, universities are not missionaries. They are, rather in the words I learned from colleagues at Warsaw University, the facilitators of developing “solidary knowledge”, or "active “co-action” with local actors and policy makers in making change." 

A Political Imaginary of University Public Consequence

One can’t trust that excellent scholarship will move universities to public engagement. It’s also critical that a larger political imaginary be constituted that puts academic public engagement at the heart of what universities do, not on the sidelines of what might happen. The USA has been fortunate that we have experienced so much challenge in order to make public engagement real.

Within the USA, this is happening, again, because of student social movements. The struggle over diversity and inclusion does have its principal focus on the community within the university, but there is also a significant spillover of mobilization into the proximate community itself. My students of color from first generation status are among the most politically aware and academically gifted I know. They don’t just talk about whether they bring the cultural capital to recognize valuable networks and the importance of professor’s office hours; they rather mark the ways in which the university is not set up to recognize and validate their social networks, and the kinds of ambitions they have for their lives and careers.160

Students with this background can think about proximate publics in very different ways. In short, their political imaginary is not based on a world of assumed privilege, or even aspiring privilege; it’s a world of intellectual and political responsibility toward the communities from which they came, whose networks enabled their entry into Brown, and

159 P. 20 in https://drive.google.com/a/brown.edu/file/d/0B686oS-fCV9bVjBjVXBwQzI5UG8/view 160 I have learned a great deal from Manuel Contreras https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuel-contreras-33493653 and Merone Tadesse (see her presentation here: https://www.brown.edu/academics/sociology/news/2016-04/innovation-inequalities-and-identity-politics-and-social-change-university-city-event) in particular.

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other forms of higher education, themselves. They don’t take for granted that the university is there for them; they would rather ask what the university owes to those who don’t take university learning for granted.

Although this contest is painful at times, its product is a revaluation of what universities do. People struggle over what ought to be taught, who ought be the beneficiaries of learning, and above all debate what universities owe the communities of which they are a part. Yes, we have our core publics, and that is evident in all that I have shared. But because we have contested for whom this learning takes place, and for what futures we seek to learn, we are revaluing knowledge itself.

It’s not obvious, however, that contest breeds the political imaginary that revalues universities and higher education. That takes administrators of vision, of courage, but also of caution. We have reason to fear the world that is becoming.

We face a world that is increasingly polarized; I have seen universities in various parts of the world become the captive of political forces, and lose their autonomy. That is a nightmare for intellectual responsibility. On the other hand, I would hope to see universities, as corporate agents, enter the political fray not as partisan, and not as arbiter, but as engaged scholar who poses new ways of viewing both immediate and wicked problems, and modeling the kind of transformative practice we might see citizens themselves take up. Indeed, if universities are better partners, I wonder if civil societies might not produce better politicians, ones than find in dialogue and transformative vision the kinds of communities we need generate if we are to thrive, and maybe even survive. Universities’ public engagement is central to that future.

Notes Following Conversations at Oxford University and University College London on Critical Social Science, Globalization, Interdisciplinarity and Area Studies 2/29-3/5/16

On my way to London, one of my knowledge network colleagues asked me to elaborate what I understood by “critical social science” in order to develop more clearly that network’s priority. Ever since I wrote m first book (subtitled “A Critical Sociology of Soviet-type Society”161 and even before, when Craig Calhoun and I, while I was still a graduate student, had envisioned such a revision of critical sociology and Marxism in light of communist rule, a conversation that continues to develop and expand through this day), I have been working to elaborate that sense. Given the conversations I had in England, and continue to have in most discussions of Globalizing Knowledge, I thought it worthwhile to share here.

What is Critical Social Science?

161 http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/sociology/organisational-sociology/professionals-power-and-solidarity-poland-critical-sociology-soviet-type-society

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Critical social science refers to a field blending knowledge and practice that draws on a combination of normative and social theory and empirical research among people and their biophysical environments to enhance public reason and action.

As a field of scholarship, critical social science draws upon various notions of the good society.  Over time, its reliance on utopian inspirations has diminished in favor of more reflexive inquiries into the most just and sustainable articulation of competing goods.  Human rights, equality, democracy and the rule of law, pluralism, and environmental responsibility are among the pillars of that articulation.

There are no social theoretical contributions that are intrinsically alien to the field, but theories become more central to the extent they address the conditions and possibilities of these normative goods being realized and extended. Theories that identify the ways in which goods are denied and oppression is reproduced are the most common foundation, but theories of practice that identify how goods can be realized are also central. 

There are no empirical methods that are intrinsically alien to the field, but there are affinities.  Ethnographic accounts that elevate human potentials for survival, resistance, and the transformation of destructive and unjust social arrangements are obviously in this tradition. Other methods are also appropriate. For instance, quantitative and systematic measures associating the timing, location, and form of human rights abuses and the distribution of military forces can be used effectively in courts of law as evidence in trials over responsibility for genocide.162

There are no substantive foci that are intrinsically alien to this field, but a concern for those most at risk, most marginal, and most oppressed are obvious in this tradition. Others are also appropriate. To study the powerful and privileged in any society and across the world, and how they variably contribute to alternative futures, is critical; to study the institutions and systems that magnify degradation, inequality, hate, and ignorance, as well as to study the pathways beyond these destructive forces is critical. 

There are no audiences that are intrinsically alien to this field, but critical social science is ultimately concerned with the public effect of its knowledge work. Those intellectuals who mobilize all the scholarship above to influence public debate and political action are obviously within the field, but they also depend on the basic research that informs ever more adequate accounts of the conditions of oppression and transformation. Unlike more traditional notions of social science that assume publication and teaching fulfill professional responsibility, the field of critical social science demands attention to the translation of critical social science into public knowledge and/or policy practice. 

This normative, theoretical, empirical, substantive and translation work combine distinctively in critical social science not only to document the patterns of social life, but to identify the conditions and pathways for how the world might otherwise be, for the worse, and, with sufficient critical social science in play, for the better. 

162 Patrick Ball’s work exemplifies here. See how Tina Rosenberg characterizes this for a Foreign Policy audience: https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-282822283/the-body-counter-meet-patrick-ball-a-statistician

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Globalizing Area Studies

I enjoyed the opportunity to meet a variety of colleagues and students of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Oxford University (http://www.area-studies.ox.ac.uk/) over the course of 2/29-3/1. Composed of centers and experts devoted to Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies, Russian and East European Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and Middle East Studies, the School facilitates linkages across area studies projects, exemplified recently in its comparative coalitional presidentialism project (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~spet0783/CPP_website/About_CPP.html). The School also offers both MPhil and MSc degrees in area studies (http://www.area-studies.ox.ac.uk/prospective-students) taught by distinguished and accomplished area studies colleagues in politics and international relations, political economy and international development, history, sociology, geography, anthropology and other disciplines. Each center offers its own degree, but most of the centers also offer a common course in social science methods. Beyond the school’s faculty, the School’s students also have the possibility of learning from additional faculty associated with area studies in Oxford’s departments and colleges, most notably St. Antony’s. I had not been in Oxford since I was a college student, so the return was a joy. But the terms of my visit don’t allow me to reflect much on the School as such in this setting. But it did remind me of more general issues.

As I discuss in Chapter 3 of Globalizing Knowledge, there is a relatively common trajectory of area studies centers across universities to be placed within a larger configuration like the International Institute at the University of Michigan. Center faculty almost inevitably worry about a loss of autonomy, influence and staff, as services come to be shared and additional layers of bureaucratic academic authority are typically introduced. In some places, these levels of coordination were introduced at a time of optimism – with the globalizing university being one of the narratives animating such hope. They also have also been introduced in times of greater austerity, as a method for controlling costs, and coping with the loss of funding opportunities, especially as in the 1990s foundations moved away from area studies in preference for global and comparative studies, and alternative conceptions of area studies (of course to the relief of many of my colleagues, foundations are moving back into a new kind of area studies in the last couple years). Area studies can also be subsumed within public policy schools in ways that limit the interdisciplinary conversation’s focus to more policy oriented conversations. For example, Brown University is developing several area studies initiatives, and when associated with its Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, they develop in articulation with the Institute’s triple focus on security, development, and governance. That association enables more focus than area studies typically bring. In Chapter 3 of Globalizing Knowledge, I discuss at length the intellectual and institutional transformations accompanying University of Michigan’s own transformation of area studies on less policy and more area studies foundations.

The University of Michigan’s International Institute was formed at the time (1993-95) that I was director of a program that would be included in II – the Program for the Comparative Study of Social Transformations. The II grew while I was director of the

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Center for Russian and East European Studies (1995-99). And I became that Institute’s director between 1999 and 2004, at which time I served as the University’s first Vice Provost for International Affairs. I have a stake in the narrative therefore, and thus it would behoove us all to have a wider array of accounts on the ways in which institutional change shaped knowledge work. To my mind, the II enhanced area studies intellectuality, and did not in any way diminish their projects.

Then again, Michigan was different; its CSST program had developed an alternative knowledge infrastructure around global transformations. While the II had been imagined as an organization devoted to global and transnational processes, the power and prominence of CSST scholars aware of the significance of grounding and translation in articulating global processes made the II something different than what those more focused on policy would seek. It became a vessel for globalizing the area studies imagination, where a methodology for thinking about area studies developed, and a multi-sited reflexivity in any pronouncements about global trajectories was mobilized. Indeed, in my last year at Michigan, we conceived a conference partially tongue in cheek but with serious purpose: instead of commemorating 1989 yet again, we decided to commemorate all the great transformations in the world that occurred in the last year of a decade. Unusual juxtapositions sometimes shattered the hegemonies in accounting for world history; Farina Mir, for example, diminished that East European accent on 1989’s celebration of democracy by reminding us what happened in Kashmir in that same year.163

At Michigan, we named through the Ford Foundation Rethinking Area Studies project our expertise to revolve around grounding, translation and expertise, in turn calling area studies a kind of contextual expertise. That’s why I was especially pleased to see area studies centers at Oxford coming together to figure what it means to have area studies methodological expertise.

It is difficult, however, to identify that methodology in common across area studies. We might agree on the headings, but to go beyond the trinity above and the need to provincialize “general” accounts in the human sciences is difficult. That is, in part, because each place, each region, has a different way of articulating the general narratives that hold us together.

Our own regions are constituted in very different ways, even around those things that putatively hold us together, like the importance of knowing the language of the region about which one declares expertise. In Japan, that language is obvious; in India, it is not. Nevertheless, I would draw on my book (pp. 93-94) here to suggest one pathway forward in thinking about what such methodology involves, which means being very clear about what area studies means.

Area studies was more of a folk concept during the Cold War, understood but underdeveloped in theory. In the decades since the Cold War’s end, however, much has been done. Tansman (2004, 184) illustrates the common sense

163 http://www.ii.umich.edu/UMICH/wced/Home/Events%20&%20Programs/Documents/Nines%20Conference%20documents/9sConferenceSchedule.pdf

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understanding with which we began, as “an enterprise seeking to know, analyze, and interpret foreign cultures through a multi-disciplinary lens”. Walder (1984) took it much further in knowledge theoretical terms by emphasizing that translational capacity as variable. Not every area studies expert is fluent across languages, knows relevant histories, understands contemporary and historical institutional arrays in the region, and, especially when there is national variety in that region, knows its full diversity.

One might also, following Dirks (2004), move beyond questions of translation to historicity. One could inquire into the degrees by which a knowledge culture comes to be aware of its historical formation and resists the ignorance of former (and ongoing) biases. Dirks promotes a post-foundationalist history, “in which attempts to grapple with the fundamental historicity of modernity in South Asia would necessarily be combined with critical attention to the historical formation of basic categories for the representation of South Asia” (Dirks 1984, 363). It’s not only a matter of translation, one could say, but also reflexivity. That’s why we were especially concerned to elevate is theoretical elaboration within the International Institute with an emphasis on contextual expertise (Kennedy 2000a).

We put it this way in 1999:

The International Institute comprises one of the nation's broadest assemblies of interdisciplinary centers and programs organized around area studies. By advancing contextual expertise—expertise in the languages, cultures, histories, and institutions of particular nations and world regions—these centers and programs enhance the capacity of the faculty, students, and staff to engage the world's diverse vernaculars and institutions and the movement of peoples and practices across the world. At the same time, the Institute refines the epistemological foundations and research competencies associated with contextual expertise and its relationship to other kinds of scholarship.

It is evident, here, that area studies is not defined by other kinds of expertise like security or governance, but at the same time, it also suggests that there is much work to be done with regard to how to develop that methodology and even self-consciousness of area studies in general. We are much better at thinking, even if area studies scholars, in terms of our own region’s area study, or our own discipline. But we would all be better if we could think in general terms. This became especially clear to me when I visited University College London.

I had never been in an interdisciplinary and international institutional setting where East Europeans and contextual expertise on that region was so prominent. Our workshop on globalization and area studies (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/ssees-events-publication/globalizing-knowledge-michael-kennedy also a longstanding theme of the School https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/ssees-events-publication/areastudiesworkshop), certainly had that prominence with Jan Kubik,

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Alena Ledeneva, Wendy Bracewell, Ruth Mandel and Michal Murawski present. But it is not only their cumulative and individual distinction.

The School of Slavonic and East European Studies (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/) is a powerhouse. Established in 1915, an independent school in 1932, and entered whole into UCL in 1999, SSEES is one of the most well developed and intellectually renowned parts of the university and among the most institutionally developed area studies programs in the world of Russian and East European studies. It has realized a kind of deep interdisciplinarity that is each area studies’ ambition but is not so easy to realize, and has developed a new kind of creativity that promises area studies’ theoretical innovation. This is especially evident in the program around the “Fringe” (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/fringe-centre).

On their website, they describe it this way:

The FRINGE Centre explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, FRINGE examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Our interest lies in the hidden complexity of all embedded practices, taken-for-granted and otherwise invisible subjects. Illuminating the 'fringe' thus puts the 'centre' in a new light

But you should not take my word for it. Go to the website, for it allows one to appreciate the creativity electronic media offer for extending this kind of innovation scholarship. FRINGE itself is an acronym; its textual, and electronic, elaboration is just, so, smart. For example, read what Alena Ledeneva writes about informality, or Michal Murawski about Fluidity on that page.

Although my discussion was, numerically, dominated by those working in East Europe, the value of having scholars from beyond the region was notable by the ways in which even such a broad sensibility of east Europe as our UCL colleagues has can be challenged by those without such grounding.

Critical Interdisciplinarity

Tamar Garb https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/people/tamar-garb, the director of the 2015 founded institute https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/about-us in which we had our conversation, shifted effectively our gaze on what enables the interdisciplinary by moving beyond region. What happens, for example to intellectuality, when we organize our engagement around a common visual object rather than an assumption about grounding and what is commonly known.

Interdisciplinarity is such a commonly used term, but in that use, it is so easily evacuated of real meaning. For example, area studies is certainly interdisciplinary, but so is environmental studies. That’s especially obvious when we figure how environmental

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studies assembles social and natural sciences in assessing planetary futures as the Institute at Brown University for Environmental Studies https://www.brown.edu/academics/institute-environment-society/about-institute manages. I’m myself especially intrigued by how so many neuroscientists finds work with Buddhism’s scholars and meditation’s practitioners to be the cutting interdisciplinary edge (exemplified here: http://www.philosophyforlife.org/how-contemplation-is-transforming-academia/); I get to see that up close also at Brown by learning from Cathy Kerr http://mindinbodylab.org/. But do these all have the same kinds of effects on the point of the university?

Much interdisciplinary work can become the domain of rather particular forms of expertise, but not all. I would put forward a more general proposition: to the extent interdisciplinarity excludes the humanities from the conversation, we tend to generate more exclusive forms of knowledge production. To the extent the arts and humanities can be central, we are more likely to generate university wide discussions. I offer examples in my book, most notably around my departed colleague Glenda Dickerson’s work. Her play, “Kitchen Prayers”, was the kind of artistic intervention that made us rethink the underlying narratives around global connections, and global loss. Indeed, in that work we could even see the problem of identifying oppression within nations, and oppression across them.

At the University of Michigan, there was no simple relationship in these scores, but thanks to the mentorship of Lester Monts in particular, we moved ahead. http://www.music.umich.edu/faculty_staff/bio.php?u=lmonts. I described a little bit of that work in my book by talking about how the University of Michigan’s vision of the “university of the world” cannot only be outward looking. Amy Stillman was the most powerful proponent of that point. She said of her ancestors who came to Hawaii:

My ancestors were voyagers who used the stars, winds and waves to navigate across thousands of miles of open ocean. Surrounded by water, they were never limited by it. Land locked people without maritime traditions experience the ocean as a barrier. They move across land with great ease but stop at the water‘s edge. Islanders, in contrast see the water as a highway and move across it with ease. Pacific traditions of navigation involve reading of all the signs, the directions of winds, waves and currents, the colors of the water and clouds, the variety of birds and marine life. From the deck of a canoe a horizon is never finite and moving through the world is as fluid as the winds and the waves. To be a university of the world, I suggest, is to fully engage with the infinite horizons of our diverse humanity on a scale that is truly and inclusively global (Stillman 2003).

This is not, however, just a matter of perspective. Power is laced with that diversity. In a not so subtle challenge to the celebration of internationalism, Stillman (2003) said,

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Area studies courses examine overseas populations. Should we not also be studying those communities now resident in the United States whose ancestry traces to those lands both distant and foreign? …If we can recognize how the horizons of knowledge might be limited by not fully engaging with otherness in all of its facets then we can also see the important opportunity of this moment to affirm our commitment to understanding diversity globally by beginning right here at home.

Indeed, the challenging articulation of multiculturalism and its tensions with power are hard to miss. As we consider globalizing knowledge across the university, this question of representation and respect for difference and authority in the world’s study is powerful, especially when international studies overlaps with particular ethnic/racial dynamics within a nation.

A theoretically informed area studies and most ethnic/racial studies projects should find common ground in the kinds of cultural politics of knowledge they address, even if their conclusions may not be the same. But then they typically don’t define the main currents of globalizing knowledge in universities because that challenge of difference they emphasize is not only difficult. Recognizing diversity’s many dimensions typically does not align with how more powerful actors articulate the terms of the world (pp. 113-14).

More typically, however, challenges around diversity and challenges of globalizing knowledge can live in different worlds, and they can look very different between Brown University and University College London. At the least, we can begin with the different ways in which inequalities borne in empire and those born in slavery, genocide and the contiguous lands make for different articulations of difference within and beyond nations. However, there is one powerful point of commonality: #StandWithJNU.

Globalizing Solidarity

Shortly before traveling to England, my colleagues in South Asian studies at Brown University together with colleagues from the Rhode Island School of Design, and the many graduates of Jawaharlal Nehru University now living in our region, developed one of the finest teach-ins I have attended, in order precisely to extend extend solidarity with those who# StandWithJNU . For background to this event, see http://watson.brown.edu/…/brownrisd-teach-university-and-di… but note the critical global articulation:

On February 9th 2016, the Delhi Police stormed Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India's most prestigious universities, on the pretext of “anti national” slogans being raised by students during a Kashmir-related event on campus. The elected president of the student union, Kanhaiya Kumar, was arrested on charges of sedition, sparking one of the most polarising and explosive debates in recent times on dissent and the university, nationalism, democracy, and state violence in India. This raises critical questions for us as members of a university but also as citizens. What do these events mean for the university as a

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space for critical thought and political action? What are the boundaries between freedom of expression, dissent and hate speech? In the charged context of the politics of hate, how does nationalism come to be defined from positions of dominance and marginality? When is the intervention of the state through direct and indirect forms of violence justified? How does this political moment resonate with struggles in South Africa, Turkey, Chile and right here in the United States, particularly with #BlackLivesMatter?

This expression is a direct attempt to identify points of commonality across the world, but it also suggests the ways in which our attention is, necessarily, tracked. Most of the solidarity work here is among nations in what some have called the Global South in association with peoples of color in the United States. But under what conditions do the struggles in Poland, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka come into view when the Global South frames our discussion? That’s when I’m relieved to have critical geographers around.

I was very pleased to meet Tariq Jazeel http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/people/academic-staff/tariq-jazeel in this context. It’s so important to have geographers in area studies conversations (something the USA is so much worse at than the UK), but especially those who are able to engage the postcolonial and the spatial simultaneously as Tariq offers in his work (e.g. http://epd.sagepub.com/content/31/1/61 ). I also especially appreciate how he elaborates that geography/area studies connection here around the “geographies of geography” in that knowledge production (http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/22/0309132515609713.full.pdf+html). Indeed, I can only imagine the power of the conversation when Tariq and Jan spell it out.

Jan Kubik is not only director of the SSEES, but is among the most able to elaborate the area studies problematic and especially its epistemology and methodology. His volume on the engagement of anthropology and political science http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=AronoffAnthropology can take you in that direction, but I am especially taken with his individual contribution to a volume he co-edited supported by the Social Science Research Council (to which Alena Ledeneva also contributed http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bernhard/whitherpapers/Kubik%20Contextual%20Holism.pdf ). In that volume’s afterward, I wrote this about the approach he calls “contextual holism”:

Kubik’s contextual holism inspires, as does his interest in the range of institutional conditions shaping problem formulation. But what I especially admire in his approach is its cultural political edge: “Researchers need to investigate whether ‘problems’ are identified as such by the actors themselves, how they are articulated within (locally) available interpretive frameworks (ideologies), and whether and how they are used as foci of mobilization.” By making vernacular knowledge the foundation for theory, evidence, and practice, Kubik and his colleagues elevate vernacular knowledge in scholarship. No longer is it to be understood in terms of its distance from any proper interpretative framework (based on marxism, modernization, neoliberalism or any other generalizing theory). It is, rather, the foundation for understanding theory, evidence, and practice

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Refining and making explicit area studies methodology is, clearly, one area in need of development, and thus I was especially pleased to be in this company in England. If there is any place poised to refine it, it should be at Oxford and UCL (and other places too of course!). I also think it could be quite useful to rethink how critical social science inflects that project.

Notes in Anticipation and Following a lecture on November 11, 2016 sponsored by the Buffett Institute at Northwestern University to a Working Group led by Jackie Stevens, Jennifer Winegar and Stephen Eisenman

What’s Critical In Globalizing Knowledge? Power, Networks and Norms in Transforming Universities

February 12, 2016

Michael D. Kennedy

I arrived at Northwestern University at quite a challenging time in the university’s cultural politics,164 but my presentation had already been organized. I did, however, refashion my remarks so that it could inform a university facing a complex discussion about who ought be recruited, and how one recruits people, to lead one of the most resourced global institutes in the country. My book is also relevant.

My abiding question over my career, and apparent in my book, is this: How do intellectuals mobilize their institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion? As I prepared for this talk and reflected on past discussions, I realized that I can make this question more sociologically familiar by emphasizing that this is an approach focused on conditions of possibility more than the structuring of choice. Others, like Craig Calhoun and Gianpaolo Baiocchi before, noted how much “agency” there was in my book;165 I would rather think of it as possibility.

I also discovered in preparation for, and especially through, the discussion at Northwestern that Jackie Stevens has made an exceptional case for a new model of social science. Hers focused much less on “objectivity” and much more on what she calls “critical intelligence” or the “iterative scholarship that affects government through its questions, attracts new information in the wake of publicizing research, and learns from its mistakes”.166 I recognize a great affinity in Jackie’s approach, but I hope my work not only affects governments. Certainly that broader reference is Jackie’s too, especially in her work with Jessica, Stephen and others on rethinking the global university.

164 http://dailynorthwestern.com/2016/02/11/campus/more-than-40-northwestern-faculty-call-for-withdrawal-of-karl-eikenberrys-appointment-as-buffett-institute-executive-director/165 https://vimeo.com/129003932 166 P. 725 in Jacqueline Stevens, ““Forensic Intelligence and the Deportation Research Clinic: Toward a New Paradigm” Perspectives on Politics 13:3 (2015):722-38.

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In order to make the presentation manageable I focused on only two questions that are embedded in my book: a) how do the rules and resources organizing university life shape the ways in which we can imagine the global institutional responsibilities of universities? And b) How can those rules and resources be restructured so that knowledge networks can be designed to realize greater global responsibilities? I have thought about those issues before, but based on what I learned on arrival at Northwestern, I realized that I needed to introduce a caveat.

Global universities, even while they are located in space, have a complex relationship to the “national interest”. We can see that clearly when authoritarian governments suppress academic freedom in the name of national security. But for some scholars, this also occurs when questions about the world are framed from the point of view of American foreign policy. And that is a clear distinction that universities ought pursue more vigorously.

There are schools where the training of students for a career in the US State Department, military, and other extensions of US national identity and interest are offered. Indeed, there are schools of global affairs that are run by diplomats chosen in a familiar academic fashion. Indiana University and University of Colorado Boulder have chosen deans who were former ambassadors (and ambassadors to Poland no less, so I can take special delight in that kind of appointment).

Global or international studies institutes are different from schools of foreign service, because to assume one’s own nation as the point of departure for understanding the world is intellectually problematic. One could see this very clearly, for instance, in a recent discussion about Bosnia at Brown University, where former diplomats could not, without denigrating their own past professional practice, look so critically at the Dayton Accords. Perhaps they were right to be so vigorous in its defense, but it was also hard not to see that defense as only academically justified and not also self-defensive.

At the same time, to exclude those with diplomatic and military experience from scholarly engagements around international affairs is also problematic. Craig Calhoun has written thoughtfully about this.167 World historical circumstances have moved me in that direction too, as when I began to engage the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, especially around Kosova.168 I see it most clearly today too, as my brother and I work to figure what the proper response to Russian aggression in Ukraine can be.169 But it’s critical to think about what the terms of discussion are, and what kind of international institute one seeks to create.

167 Craig Calhoun, “Social Science Research and Military Agendas: Safe Distance or Bridging a Troubling Divide” Perspectives on Politics 8/4(2010):1101-06.168 On October 9, 1999 I was part of a symposium entitled, “What After NATO’s Battle for Kosovo/a”? at the University of Michigan. http://www.ii.umich.edu/crees/aboutus/regionalprograms/southeasteuropeanstudies169 (March 5, 2014) “The West Should Stop Squirming and Put Sanctions on Russia” Michael D. Kennedy and Floyd D. Kennedy, Jr. The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/us-should-put-sanctions-on-russia

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International affairs needs be very thoughtful, and deliberatively intellectual, about the frames with which it develops its international mission. It is entirely sensible to develop such mission with an eye toward training those who would become diplomats and military officers; however, it is also important to be sure that those who do not share that national assumption find respectful place. In other words, one must be sure that the national intelligence paradigm Jackie describes170 does not occupy an unseen but hegemonic place in a global university’s international mission. If it is to be there, it ought be acknowledged and explicit.

Another matter that ought be explicitly acknowledged is that the “ratings game” is not a good guide for realizing intellectual and institutional distinction in the knowledgeable world. Of course it’s there – national and global rankings of universities, schools and departments, and intellectuals are often celebrated when suitable even if, as a matter of intellectual convention, we need look skeptically at such rankings.171 But when your Business School hits #1 (as Kellogg did in 2004), it deserves a photograph of Business School students celebrating (I showed that great photo in the lecture). When a school seeks impact beyond academic reputation, one also needs to think about different indices of scholarly impact. One might even move beyond rankings per se, and think more positively, and with projection, about what global institutional responsibility might look like.

We ought think about how to theorize172 the global university. Based on my book, I would propose that begins by recognizing the articulation of knowledge cultures within a university, and the conditions of transformation from beyond its faculty. Although quite rough, and a more rigorous empirical accounting is deserved, I picture US universities in the following way.

170 P. 725 in Jacqueline Stevens, “..” Perspectives on Politics 13:3171 Northwestern is fortunate to have Wendy Espeland on its faculty; her expertise on how rankings affect various knowledge cultures and practices could be useful in rethinking the global university. 172 Here I deliberately evoke Richard Swedberg’s recent lecture and discussion that was so inviting – we ought develop a movement to “theorize” global universities much as he discusses bringing theorizing to social sciences http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2015/10/20151015t1830vSZT.aspx

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Although I did not present this diagram in my book so, the Y axis is elaborated there. The X axis, about the kind of institutional power each unit enjoys, is only implicit. My working definition of power here is shaped by the centrality of the school to the university’s overall mission and the relative wealth and autonomy of a school in that research university. This is important because any globalizing effort must attend to the relative powers of these different branches of a university, for their articulation to a central initiative like the definition of a global university is critical.

Of course each unit above is differentiated. For instance, one could break up the liberal arts as below.

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This array varies across institutions, but if one looks at the units from which administrators are chosen, the number of undergraduates being trained, the size of salaries, and many other indicators, I think this seems about right to speak in general terms about universities. And when it comes to globalizing knowledge, it matters.

When global knowledge capital becomes an asset (as when a donation is made to establish a major center so devoted), those with institutional power are likely to assume that they should be its beneficiaries. Indeed, when Michigan first conceived its international institute under Jim Duderstadt’s presidency, economists, legal scholars, and public policy experts, especially around trade and global regulations, presumed it would be their project given that they were the ones who did theory (prized of course) and were the most global, especially in comparison to the area studies types who were argued to be provincial and atheoretical.

The problem, however, was that such an ascription was simply not so at Michigan, and was demonstrably untrue because of the ways in which those contextual scholars were organized through the Program for the Comparative Study of Social Transformations. The intellectual work of that program is apparent in a number of places; the work of its founder, Bill Sewell, illustrates it most succinctly, however, but one can also see it in an edited collection that reshaped the human sciences.173 A number of CSST people also sat

173 William Sewell, The Logic of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago, 2005. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry Ortner (eds.) Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. These were the three themes organizing the first three years of CSST.

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on the committee that recruited our first II director, David William Cohen, who was certainly in the CSST style far more than the public policy/global trade disposition.

I tell that story at Northwestern not only because DWC came from there, but also because it shows that the theoretical and practical coordination of interpretative and contextually savvy human sciences can lead the definition of international affairs at a university. But that definition is not typically vaunted by those with other kinds of capital.

Indeed, when donations are made by philanthropists to develop international affairs, they often have in mind developing projects more akin to those that would inform American foreign policy. Jackie’s article invokes the power elite, a framework of C. Wright Mills that moved my own initial attraction to sociology as a way of life. Mills’ framework combined military, political, and economic elites. It could be a good framework to analyze foreign policy schools, and consider the degrees to which they are as intellectually responsible and reflexive as those units led by those with more contextual grounding beyond the USA itself. Indeed, it would be fascinating and extremely ambitious project to compare the global responsibility of these two very different ways of approaching international affairs.

I pose that really as an empirical, and not ideological or theoretical question. There are enough variations within the US power elite that one can find incredibly rigorous debate about the trajectories of the world and the proper place of American power in it. But it is an empirical question too to see what kinds of questions those with grounding beyond America are likely to ask, and those questions that an American power elite cannot contemplate as a serious intellectual, fundable and legitimate question. But here again, one should not be presumptuous about what is feasible .

When the University of Michigan won support from philanthropists Ron and Eileen Weiser to set up an center dedicated both to the support of Europe and Eurasia, and to the question of emerging democracies, I found a responsive partner in this Republic Party activist to various questions. In particular, we both evolved on how to think about the place of freedom in the definition of the Center’s mission, concluding that we had to think about multiple freedoms if we were to agree on what emerging democracies are about.

When I think about intellectual projects we developed at II, I also see things that those guided by American security interests might like. For example, not only they but Pope John Paul II appreciated our conference on the Polish Round Table Negotiations of 1989. But we needed the elevation of academic autonomy from state interests to continue our support for the Turkish – Armenian dialogues that led to the publications by Ron Suny, Muge Gocek, and others on the question of genocide at the end of the Ottoman Empire. 174

174 Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek, and Norman Naimark (eds.) A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-question-of-genocide-9780195393743?cc=us&lang=en& Fatma Muge Gocek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Violence-Collective-Armenians-1789-2009/dp/019933420X

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I wrote about the issues above in Globalizing Knowledge, but in my lecture I also reflected on the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University for its strong lessons for Northwestern .

Like the new Buffett Institute, the Watson Institute is a significantly endowed endeavor. Watson’s initial years were, in the aura of golden age recollections, quite remarkable. But in the middle of this century’s first decade, it began to lose its way in the midst of a number of contradictory interests and pressures that a series of 6 directors in less than a decade could not resolve. One of those directors was me. I’m still trying to figure out what I could have done differently, but the point of the story is not what I did wrong, but what Rick Locke did right.

That still deserves more thoughtful analysis, but Rick came in 2013, and with a new president at the helm of Brown, aligned Watson around three basic messages of security, development, and governance, incorporated public policy into the mix, and recruited a good number of new faculty, especially in his own home department of political science to Watson. All of this brought a new ballast and balance to the endowed center. The uneasy balance across epistemologies and knowledge cultures that formerly characterized Watson was also restructured with a more conventional but still innovative policy-minded mission in place. However, what is critical to note is that this process of organizational and institutional transformation never lost its academic rigor or integrity of process. Indeed, there was never a question about whether this was becoming less academic; instead, Watson became even more integrated into the fabric of the university itself, culminating in Rick’s becoming Provost after just 2 years as Watson director.

His skills as a leader who understands academic process, cannot be overestimated. While there is plenty of room for the kinds of academic disputes that characterize places where the stakes are too small, they have not happened. And that deserves careful study. And those skills were evident too in a recent transformation of Brown itself.

Like the rest of the country, Brown has been engulfed in a series of contests over white privilege in the University. Indeed, on coming to Brown I was myself astonished by the measure to which the kind of racial awareness I took for granted at the University of Michigan, given the power of struggles and relative responsiveness of administrative leaders,175 was not distributed more broadly across Brown University. However, over the course of the past year, there has been a remarkable transformation, with Rick using some of the very administrative styles that characterized the Watson transformation. But there was an additional element that Rick did not need for Watson, but was crucial for Brown’s quest for diversity and inclusion: figuring methods to draw in protest to the university’s vision of its future in diversity.176

175 University of Michigan has been a leader in moving institutional diversity for some time https://record.umich.edu/articles/universitys-diversity-history-recalled-public-panel-event ; 176 Brown University has just developed the most comprehensive and responsive Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan I have seen, in response to student mobilizations https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-diversity/pathways/feedback

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As President Paxson indicated, student movements have transformed university priorities,177 but this is not the first time. Although Brown University students did not succeed in moving Brown University (yet?) from divesting from the coal industry, as Stanford has done, it did move the university to make more explicit, and substantial, its investment in engaging environmental transformations. That, of course, is a major opportunity for thinking about global knowledge networks. But in thinking about these examples, we can raise a curiously absent issue in most globalizing knowledge discussions: the whiteness of international affairs.

Even at the University of Michigan, discussions of diversity and discussion of international affairs were often undertaken in different rooms despite the fact that Lester Monts was a leader in both and one of my mentors.178 Nancy Cantor, as a provost, was also dedicated to figuring the public good in various measures of proximity, and supported me, and Lester, substantially in our work in her office. Even in Brown’s recent diversity and inclusion action plan, the international is put to the side.

There are complex reasons for this, and my student, Merone Tadesse, and I are working to figure the articulations of diversity and global affairs in a variety of academic settings.179 What needs be a starting point, however, is why so few scholars of color are prominent in the articulation of international affairs in major research universities. However, there is one place where diversity’s elaboration is central to international affairs.

The post 9/11 Islamophobic explosion in American public culture,180 which seems only to get worse, stands at great odds with commitments both to diversity and to understanding international affairs without American national security interests foregrounded. I was most fortunate in this lecture to be hosted by one of the principal experts on this problem, Jessica Winegar. Her recently published book with Lara Deeb ought be a starting point for these discussions. However, Jessica and Lara begin their book about the ways in which politics shapes Middle East Studies so: “We never could have written this book before tenure”. 181 That statement, so well known by most Middle East scholars, is but a glimpse into a severe problem in the academy that needs address.

Here, then, one of the first things I would review, when I think about how to articulate global studies at a university, is whether we have faculty on hand who can move us beyond the repression of academic freedom that constraint indicates, and whether we are 177 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-paxson/constructive-irreverence-in-action_b_9143474.html178 I tried to develop that articulation in Rhoten & Calhoun http://cup.columbia.edu/book/knowledge-matters/9780231151146 179 Here too, I am indebted to Lester for anticipating this, and for the ways in which he foregrounded this articulation in his work with Amy Stillman in particular whose contributions I outline in Globalizing Knowledge.180 This was my contemporary effort to engage it in 2001 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0009.201/--religion-security-and-violence-in-global-contexts?rgn=main;view=fulltext 181 Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford University Press, 2016.

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creating the broader environment that allows for the nightmare questions a truly global university ought entertain.

In the end, then, when we think about global universities we need as well to think about what universities are best at. They are great at producing professionals in a wide variety of fields, and we need that. But we may need even more those spaces that professionals cannot produce, spaces that encourage a kind of reflexive reasoning that asks not only whether we are doing our job as well as we ought, but whether we are asking the right questions to begin with.

Good professionals know that; but that is a fundamental intellectual responsibility global universities ought cultivate. However, even great universities don’t seem to be able to ask the best questions without challenge by those who are inheriting this world we leave behind. We have seen that in the environmental challenge to universities; we have seen that in the anti-racist challenge to universities. I hope we might also see that challenge in the articulation of the global university.

Camilo Leslie, one of my former students from the University of Michigan, posed a really good question: whether a course on the university as such, in general but specific to one’s own university, ought be part of a rethinking the global university effort. I agreed with him; in fact, my soon to be former student Karida Brown (she is headed to UCLA to join their sociology department) and I once tried to introduce such a course to Brown University in the wake of the Ray Kelly controversy, alas to no avail. But there is still tomorrow. In fact, that tomorrow will be at UCLA in March 2017 when Karida teaches a course entitled, “Race and the University” to 75 students.

I hope those who define the global university (and its obligations to its publics of various proximities) in their various locales are savvy enough to ask what practices enable the kind of reflexivity we need in the global university to develop the kind of cosmopolitan intellectuality and consequential solidarity my book, my life, yearns to find evermore.

Notes in anticipation of and following an introductory lesson in sociology

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for a class with Yang Gao, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University

“Mind Selfie and Society in the Extensions of Globalizing Knowledge”

Michael D. Kennedy @ProfKennedy on Instagram and @Prof_Kennedy on Twitter. #ProfKennedySelfie

These lecture notes were revised in response to comments made by those in Professor Yang Gao’s class, including Katrina Inumerable (@katstify), Crystal Ang Wen Shu (@crystal.ang), Wong Zen Je (@zj.wong) Jason Tan Ha Wei (@lastmemoir), Rachen Ng Chia Yin (@rayjaye), Adelia NG Sining  (@adventuresofadelia), Bowie Chan (@Bowiethehippie) and the other students of “Understanding Society”.

January 6, 2016

I love sociology.

That’s partly because I love living life to the fullest.

And sociology helps me do that, because it helps me understand the life I live, and to discover in that life things that those without the sociological imagination could never recognize.

You will hear about the sociological imagination in this course, and learn that it is associated with a mid-20th century American named C. Wright Mills. His work inspired me to take up sociology, but for now let’s just say that the sociological imagination is about connecting biography to history. In other words, my life is not just about me. It’s about us.

But who are we? That begins the sociological imagination…

Let’s begin.

WHO ARE WE?

If you say, People like me, who do you have in mind?

One student began by mentioning friends and family. Another said people in my profession. Another said people who have the same beliefs, like those in the same religion. And then someone said people in my generation. That’s what I was waiting for.

How do you know, I asked, when people are in your generation? You can tell I am not by the wrinkles on my face. But what else? Another person said, the lingo we used. I said great. And for example?.....

Then the answer was toooooo perfect!

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Hashtags.

Hah! I declared that I also use hashtags! Especially around #ProfKennedySelfie, a trajectory made possible by the way in which sociology has become #SOCool (and for those of you in Professor Gao’s class, I want to give credit where credit is due: my former student Wendy Rogers (on twitter @ gwendolynrogerz  came up with that to describe the Brown University Sociology Undergraduate Program!).

I then asked how many students have themselves done a selfie, who has instagram, or at least seen other people’s selfies.182 Nearly everyone has put up their hand. Clearly, Selfie Culture is a generational thing.

But then, I asked, how many have thought about what a selfie is with a sociological imagination?183 That, not so much.

I’ve just begun doing that, so you can help me, which leads to the first question: why would I, a distinguished elder professor (with ironic tone), think you could help me understand better selfie sociology?

SELFIE SOCIOLOGY

In fact, in one project called SelfieCity http://selfiecity.net/#findings, a comparative study of instagram produced selfies in 5 cities – Bangkok, Berlin, New York, Sao Paulo and Moscow – they found that the media age of selfie-makers is about 23.7 years old. So, since you are all much closer to 24 than I am, you should be know more about it. You have more selfie-common sense. But be careful.

C. Wright Mills once said, “common sense is more often common than sense”. Selfie Common Sense might also be like that.

182 This is a very helpful essay, in which “what selfies are” is discussed. “A selfie, according to Oxford Dictionaries, is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”5 According to Jenna Wortham, technology reporter for The New York Times, “Selfies have become the catchall term for digital self-portraits abetted by the explosion of cellphone cameras and photo-editing and sharing services. Every major social media site is overflowing with millions of them. Everyone from the pope to the Obama girls has been spotted in one.”6 Selfies have been called “a symptom of social media-driven narcissism,”7 a “way to control others’ images of us,”8 a “new way not only of representing ourselves to others, but of communicating with one another through images,”9 “the masturbation of self-image”10 and a “virtual "mini-me," what in ancient biology might have been called a "homunculus" – a tiny pre-formed person that would grow into the big self.”” From The Selfie: Making sense of the “Masturbation of Self-Image” and the “Virtual Mini-Me” Alise Tifentale, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY)http://d25rsf93iwlmgu.cloudfront.net/downloads/Tifentale_Alise_Selfiecity.pdf 183 This kind of selfie sociology proliferates. See for example http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2014/01/a-sociological-snapshot-of-selfies.html ; https://www.academia.edu/10080301/_Sociology_of_the_Selfie_a_powerpoint_presentation_for_Soc_101 http://thesocietypages.org/teaching/2014/07/30/selfies/ ; Taylor Bantle, one of my senior sociology concentrators at Brown University, did an analysis of how instagram makes people instafamous. See https://www.instagram.com/p/1_hMWOGZWB/?taken-by=brunoinstafamous She now works for a startup managing their social media presence (check out her work @inerTRAIN).

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My 26 year old daughter, Emma Kennedy, and I took a selfie right before I flew from the USA here. My first take was straight on, but then she suggested that I should take the picture from higher up. We also thought about what backdrop we should have – we were in a hotel with a bamboo garden behind us, and so we thought it might be fun to have that odd juxtaposition – concrete and fauna. She knew more, had more selfie common sense, than I. But what sociology lies behind this?

One sociologist has proposed this set of questions, with these answers:

1. Why do we selfie?

a) Because technology compels us: “Technological advancement liberated the self-portrait from the art world and gave it to the masses.”b) This digital technology allows us more opportunity for “identity work”: “As photos meant to be shared, selfies are not individual acts; they are social acts. Selfies, and our presence on social media generally, is a part of what sociologists David Snow and Leon Anderson describe as "identity work"--the work that we do on a daily basis to ensure that we are seen by others as we wish to be seen.”c) It's a meme: “In this sense, the selfie is very much a meme. It has become a normative thing that we do that results in a patterned and repetitious way of representing ourselves.” It’s always the same structure, but infused with particular meanings that are distinct to the person, her audience, and the contexts surrounding it.184

2) What’s wrong with the Selfie?

It might be an expression of narcicism, but it’s gender critique is more powerful. When women are more likely to be putting selfies out there, and when men are those who view these pictures, is this not another manifestation of sexual objectification and patriarchy?185

3) What’s right with the Selfie?

Some might argue that, in contrast to many other depictions, this at least is in the relative control of the author, of the digital artist. The selfie is an account that a form of self-expression. Indeed, some hashtags have been used to help this along, including #FeministSelfie.186

But at the same time, the selfie is more than a self-portrait, it is often also as much about the background, or the event surrounding the selfie, as it is about the person in the selfie.

184 http://sociology.about.com/od/Ask-a-Sociologist/fl/Why-We-Selfie.htm185 http://sociology.about.com/od/Ask-a-Sociologist/fl/The-Selfie-Debates-Part-I.htm186 http://sociology.about.com/od/Current-Events-in-Sociological-Context/fl/The-Selfie-Debates-Part-II.htm

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Selfies communicate messages, both intended and unintended; they might be the object of cultural criticism as much as sociological analysis.187

So, this term invented in 2013 may in fact be a misnomer. But it has caught on. In fact, it is part of globalizing knowledge.188

SELFIES IN GLOBLIZING KNOWLEDGE

Selfies have swept the world, and the SelfieCity project is testimony to that. And as they sweep the world, we can imagine all sorts of interesting questions that a sociologist might ask. For instance, sociologists always ask how things vary. What might you ask?

The SelfieCity project asked some interesting questions. For example, they use visualization data analysis to ask how mood varies. Would you be surprised that smiles are more common in Sao Paulo than they are in Moscow?

This means, then, that for all those people interested in “big data”, selfie sociology might be a good substantive focus for methods so associated. So would a sociology of gender.

Would you be surprised that women do more selfies than men? And that their selfies are more evocative? Ah, but how would you measure that? Sociologists often ask about how you measure things in order to evaluate whether statements are true.

The SelfieCity project did it by measuring the angle of the head. One might also do this by figuring a way to imagine poses as more and less provocative. But let’s not explore that together. Instead, let’s briefly consider why we do this selfie stuff.

Some say that it is a reflection of our era’s narcissism. To be honest, I am anxious about that. However, sociology helps us put that in place: we are always presenting ourselves as if we are on stage. Indeed, if you want to read more about that, read Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life where he talks about how we are sometimes

187 As I was preparing this talk, I read S. Shankar’s essay http://sshankar.net/2016/01/04/poverty-surveillance-cooptation-three-thoughts-on-mias-extraordinary-music-video-borders/?fb_action_ids=969254196444654&fb_action_types=news.publishes on MIA’s latest video, Borders, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpttHOHEKMo in which he analyzes her presence in various images of migrants escaping their horrors, and under surveillance and facing barriers in places they seek refuge. I especially like how he asks about cooptation in this: “t’s the old problem of cooptation (check out the Che tee shirt). Have MIA and her video been coopted? “Your privilege (what’s up with that?)” MIA asks her viewer in another line from the song, rightly suggesting the implication of we who browse the Internet on our laptops. Of course that question is even more resonant when aimed at a celebrity like MIA. Is MIA already aware of this issue? Is that why she’s the only woman in a video filled with men? The only one wearing fashionable sunglasses? And the only one picked out by a spotlight in the concluding frames of the video? Or is it rather that she is a self-obsessed celebrity? Round and round cooptation makes us go with its questions. Here’s the real question: what are we going to do with this knowledge of the problem of cooptation?”

188 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/14/how-selfies-became-a-global-phenomenon I wished I had addressed selfies in my own book on Globalizing Knowledge http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24607, but it’s never too late to take on the quest!

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backstage and sometimes on stage in that presentation. And then think about the selfie in this. Is there anything “backstage” about the selfie? To be sure. What?

Let’s also think about the Selfie in another way. I playfully entitled these notes Mind, Selfie and Society in order to evoke the George Herbert Mead book Mind Self and Society. In that, he describes stages of socialization, and how we come to identify, eventually, with what he called “the generalized other”. In the Selfie era, the generalized other becomes something much more tangible.

It’s not just what we imagine, it’s what we see. We cannot just imagine, but see connections with one another through the selfie and its # mediated instagram platform in a new way. Indeed, some of our students in Brown University sociology are studying how celebrities, through the selfie medium among other mechanisms, create possibilities for certain identifications and even political projects.189

In fact, we might even extend that project right here, right now. But to be fair, I need to explain how this began.

ORIGINS OF SELFIE SOCIOLOGY IN GLOBALIZING KNOWLEDGE

Following a lecture I gave at the University of New York Tirana last November, a number of people proposed that we have pictures taken together. Finally, at one point I noticed a student, whom I subsequently learned was Enxhi Cerpia, taking a picture of me with her sister. I later learned she put that up on instagram.

189 I am intrigued by how the Brown University MPA student, Allie Curtis, who also happens to be Miss Rhode Island @MissAmericaRI, uses her Instagram to create not only images of herself, but also of Rhode Island; by how the actress and activist Eliza Dushku @ElizaDushku uses her own celebrity to rearticulate the imagination of Albania in the world with the hashtag #DearAlbania. One of the best known, and certainly the most prominent celebrity associated with Brown University (as the students in this Singapore introductory sociology course certainly affirmed), is Emma Watson (@emmawatson on Instagram & @emwatson on twitter) uses social media for the public good, most notably around truecostmovie.com, “A documentary film exploring the impact of the global clothing industry on people and the planet”. One of our Brown University sociology students, Kawther AlKhudairy, investigates celebrity influence in various media on various senses of self.

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I came up to her and then said why don’t we do a proper selfie together. We did, and it was a really nice one too, I think.

I put that up on my Facebook account, and one of my fellow Kung Fu practitioners, Arrow Membrano, joked and said that this ought to be the beginning of a movement around #ProfKennedySelfie. Initially I demurred, thinking this was too self absorbed, but then I realized that this may not only be a way to manage the presentation of self in everyday digital life, but a new way to stimulate new knowledge networks.

People, through me as one node, might find people “like them” across the world, and treat that as a kind of social capital to generate new possibilities in life. It’s not just that you all have met me, but that you all have some measure of interest in sociology. But that’s not all of who I am. And that is the next step I this lecture.

Another of my martial arts friends, Roberta Harrison, said that I ought not just be taking selfies with sociology students across the world, that I ought to do one with my martial arts sisters. And so, at a Christmas party recently, we did just that. I felt awkward, but then came to be proud to be associated with this picture.

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Why?

Of course I enjoy my Kung Fu friends at http://www.waydragon.com/index.html very much; indeed, when you can so easily hurt one another, and you choose not to, you build trust, and community. That is really beautiful. But there is something else I like very much about this group: it is about individual empowerment and self-care, and about having men and women participate in activities not as men and women, but as martial artists, together, strong, coordinated, flexible, and above all aspirational, trying to create a self that is more than what we inherit, and rather what we make through dedicated practice and reflection on the relationship among our mind, body, and spirit individually, and collectively. This picture is about as far from objectification that I can imagine. It is, rather about a celebration of community and about relationships that are made in respect, not in exploitation or inequality.

I wonder if that spirit comes out in this picture. But more, I wonder what kinds of connections selfies like this might inspire across the world. What networks might emerge through a #ProfKennedySelfie that globalizes knowledge?

SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY’S SELFIE SOCIOLOGY

We might begin to discover that by doing our own selfie here and now, and putting it on instagram.

Given that you are all much more able, how might we do that? And in doing that that’s how we conclude, but also begin the selfie sociology of globalizing knowledge.

And so, we assembled a nice picture, but my own selfie picture skills were somewhat limited, and alas, some of the folks in class didn’t make it into the instagram picture! It’s a bit better here:

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And so selfie sociology on instagram grows with this caption:#selfie #sociology with #smusoss #sgsmu students! #profkennedyselfie

And at Singapore Management University word had already gotten around later that day. In a class on critical issues in education, taught by Hiro Saito and Lai Chen Lim, these very sophisticated students of higher education proposed too that we do a selfie there too.

Where this will go, I have no idea. But it certainly is a fascinating extension of globalizing knowledge.

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Reflections on the Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge, November 30, 2015 at the Main Library of the University of Prishtina Discussants include Linda Gusia, Nita Luci, Shemsi Krasniqi, and Vjollca Krasniqi

I begin these notes with a caveat: they draw on my own recollection of this event itself with well over 100 in attendance. I was really moved by that measure of engagement, but it also leads me to miss some of the important comments different people made. These notes will no doubt be made better when I have the opportunity to review the event’s recording.

Following Linda Gusia’s (http://genderstudies.uni-pr.edu/steering-committee/ ) introduction (my sincere gratitude to her for organizing this panel, and to all my colleagues for their enduring collegiality and exceptional solidarity), I offered a few of my own introductory comments emphasizing how much my book is informed by my Kosovar engagements between 2009 and 2012, when I came to work with these colleagues as part of my work with the Academic Fellowship Program of the Open Society Foundations. I was an “International Scholar”, and each of the panelists were “Returning Scholars” in that program. Among the most tangible written products of that association was the second volume of the journal Njohja (available here: https://www.academia.edu/3630827/_2013_Articulations_of_Transformation_Subjectivities_and_Structures_in_Crisis_), but it’s also evident in the individual accomplishments of the scholars associated and the institutional transformations they and like-minded scholars helped to bring about, including in the making of the Programme for Gender Studies and Research which organized this session. We all also were part of a larger OSF/AFP knowledge network that crossed Europe and Eurasia.

For me in particular, I could not have written Globalizing Knowledge without my experience in Kosova.

It’s true that I began to conceive Globalizing Knowledge before I came to Kosova for the first time, but that volume would have been a very different book. So I told Linda’s students in public sociology at the most intellectual and charming café, Dit e Nat https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dit-e-Nat/211809772167948, on the evening preceding this panel. They asked me how so. It took some substantial reflection to get at the deeper elements of that influence, but some accents are obvious: in Chapter 5’s discussion of Kosova and its place in globalizing knowledge about transition; on how much I learned about the ways in which gender studies can cross contexts with productive fusions of global and local expertise; and in my account of social movements, especially around the example of Vetëvendosje (Linda and I drafted a paper that weekend on Vetëvendosje that is now available here: https://opendemocracy.net/michael-d-kennedy-linda-gusia/we-are-seeing-you-protesting-violent-democracies-in-kosova ) . But the influence goes deeper than that too.

I believe that Kosova’s experience with deep contradictions, and the disposition of its sociologists to recognize its many paradoxical qualities (exemplified in Linda’s own

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dissertation on gender, public space, and representations in Kosova) increased my own sensitivity to the paradoxes of institutional life elsewhere. It also has encouraged me to be more attentive to the ways in which dissimulation increasingly defines the world of which we are a part. That combination and learning with my Kosovar colleagues, in turn, helps to explain the disjuncture between critical approaches to institutions and subjectivities, a theme of the final major chapter of Globalizing Knowledge.

Vjollca Krasniqi (http://genderstudies.uni-pr.edu/steering-committee/) began the comments; her background in philosophy and her broad engagement with critical social theory, feminism, and power were fully evident. She asked that I elaborate how I use networks, especially following Manuel Castells, more; how language shapes our own globalizing knowledge, most notably with the hegemony of English; how it was that those from the margins might more effectively engage those global transformations about which I speak, and especially whether a more Foucauldian approach might not inform my concept; and why it was that I did not use globalization as an organizing concept in the book even while I entitled it Globalizing Knowledge.

Shemsi Krasniqi (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shemsi-krasniqi-87328049 ) followed Vjollca, and took up the question of universities most directly. How is it that these universities reflect the broader cultural politics of the times in which they live? Recently co-organizing a conference on 40 years of sociology and philosophy work at Univeristy of Prishtina (evident in that same Njohja volume), he was in an especially good position to figure how his university reflects the times, and the dilemma of being more the object of political parties’ contest for control than an expression of the quest for the independence of academic inquiry. He asked, provocatively, at the end, how globalizing knowledge might transform the world. I would translate that into this question: how might universities might themselves organize more effectively to realize scholarly autonomy, and institutional responsibility.

Nita Luci (http://genderstudies.uni-pr.edu/steering-committee/ ) followed Shemi. She recalled our common time together at the University of Michigan (where she completed her PhD in Anthropology), and noted that it took the AFP program to really bring us together. As we all know, scholars at the same home institution sometime really find their common ground when they meet elsewhere!

Nita also helped me to remember a question I posed to them as they were institution building at University of Prishtina around cultural studies. It struck me at the time, and Nita flipped it back to me. Can we think about the mission of universities, and especially those units devoted to cultural studies, as that which reflects on how cultural systems and practices shape scholarly inquiry, and how through scholarly work, we might recontruct those very systems and practices to be more in tune with the normative good scholarly work helps us to recognize? Nita also asked me to think about how interdisciplinarity works, especially in the sociology/ethnography dialogue and how my emphasis on “cultural formations” works in the kind of cultural analysis I do. I didn’t manage that in this session, but I ought to address it in another circumstance.

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Finally, Linda Gusia noted how much the volume expressed a sense of agency, of responsibility, for one’s own choices. That, she said, is not so typical (a theme echoed in others’ commentaries on the book), but it is also something that her students in discussing the book found compelling. She invited me to elaborate on that, and on why I chose “Globalizing Knowledge” as the lead title when it was obvious that I didn’t so much like the term.

And my colleagues said more that was incredibly rewarding, which justifies watching the video when it becomes available. I delivered my impromptu response along these lines.

This was the first time that I declared in public that I hated the term “globalizing knowledge” and asked whether anyone else ever entitled their cultural product with a term they dislike. But there is no substitute for this term that, whether used explicitly or not, undergirds so much institutional work in higher education. Indeed, I hope to see one of the products of my book in the search for a better concept with which to recognize the field in which we all work when we think about intellectual and institutional responsibility in practice beyond our immediate intellectual and social environs.

Second, there is agency in this book. It is evident in my emphasis on intellectual responsibility above all. But this is not just a term relevant for professors and public intellectuals. This is also critical for students; for students should not just passively accept what their seniors tell them they ought learn. Students ought work hard to figure what kind of knowledge can be consequential for them. There is agency above all in the choice of how to learn.

There is method to my emphasis on agency. It’s useful to think about knowledge networks as a kind of method for that knowledge production and dissemination. Indeed, that is why one must think carefully and extensively about who one’s partners are in learning. For this reason, I’m especially delighted to have met so many students at University of Prishtina interested in public sociology, and the quest to figure out who one’s partners are in research, and how that research might enhance public goods.

Indeed it’s worth recalling that this very emphasis on public sociology was one of the major products of the AFP network in which we all participated, along with Michael Burawoy from the University of California Berkeley who helped stimulate this framework in both the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association. And it’s incredibly gratifying to see its development in Prishtina.

The students themselves had many projects, but Lirika’s intended work with brides who go to their husbands’ homes to live is most intriguing. Indeed, to consider how they are themselves potentially organized across households, perhaps through coffeehouses, and how they might translate that conversation into a greater awareness of their own common life circumstances and challenges was among the most intriguing project I have heard in some time.

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Partnerships of course take time. The last thing public sociology ought be is a kind of hit and run social engagement, an issue those invested in the social entrepreneurship and community engagement wings of universities’ public engagement in the USA address. I have learned much in that domain already, but also see it in international circumstances. I doubt I could have learned so much from my colleagues in Kosova, even on this trip, had it not been based on the relationships previously built. Indeed, I met Lirika Demiri three years ago and was already amazed at the time of her own commitment to the sociological public good: she was at work in translating C. Wright Mills into Albanian as a sociology student just begun her university work.

Shemi’s emphasis on university dynamics and cultural politics was especially rich for me, and was a theme other commentators from the audience picked up. Of course I cannot comment on the cultural politics of others’ universities, most especially without research. However, I used my experience and research at the University of Michigan and at Brown University to think about the different ways in which partners might be chosen, freedom of speech articulated, and the challenge of difference recognized and valued in university work.

I drew on issues apparent in my book, notably the controversy at Brown University around the so-called “Ray Kelly” incident and its continuing reverberations at the university. I also invited the audience to think about the ways in which Double Consciousness, in the spirit of WEB DuBois and its more recent extensions in the work, for example, of Jose Itzigsohn and Karida Brown https://www.academia.edu/16911048/Sociology_and_the_Theory_of_Double_Consciousness, might enhance our sense of how Kosovar democracy works – with a discourse that favors the international community, and a discourse that resonates with lives in Albanian everyday life. It’s especially good too that Gender Studies has developed at University of Prishtina, for that does allow for this kind of critical take on public life that other disciplines are sometimes hesitate to develop.

I could have gone on given the rich commentary, but we turned it over to the audience for their own comments and questions. I was so glad we did, for they had really rich angles to offer.

One of the UP professors asked about what kind of epistemology and ontology I use, what definition of knowledge I use, and what methodology I use – am I elaborating Burawoy’s extended case method, for instance? I drew on my book’s discussion of knowledge as refined and credentialed understanding, and marked my points of agreement and disagreement with Andreas Glaeser. I noted how much I liked Burawoy’s work, but that I could not find much comfort in defining public sociology from the standpoint of civil society. We need more to figure out which partners with whom we work and why.

Another student pushed on the latter, and asked me to consider the tensions between activism and scholarly reflection. In fact, one of Linda’s students, Jeta Rexha, asked that the preceding evening. And this is a familiar issue, but the inspiration of these students produced an approach I did not develop in the book. I rather thought, for the first time,

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that my work might be identified as a kind of “knowledge activism”, one that recognizes the difference of activism and reflexivity, but works to put them into a virtuous circle where research of activist practice might yield new questions, but in a way that might make that activism more aware of its conditions, consequences and possibilities. Certainly this is how I see Alain Touraine’s work, (in GK I characterize it so: “sociological interventionism” as Alain Touraine, looking to “increase the capacity for action of individuals in the intervention groups looking for the movement through the group” (Dubet and Wieviorka 1996:59 in https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0750705523) but I never before thought whether this notion of knowledge activism might characterize both his and my work.

Another student raised a familiar question across these discussions of Globalizing Knowledge: isn’t this project I describe only reinforcing the hegemony of already powerful institutions? That goes powerfully too, of course, with Vjollca’s comments about the dominance of English in “global scholarship”.

I proposed that the various international rankings of universities, the clearest evidence of an emergent hegemony in the definition of scholarship, can certainly be described as a kind of globalizing knowledge. But it is not the only kind of globalizing knowledge I see as possible, especially if intellectual responsibility, and not institutional isomorphism, characterizes this globalizing project. Indeed, this is why networking across various more locally inscribed networks can be so important. And that is why we might figure how to develop a knowledge activism that engages proximate publics, but also figures how to scale up and cross contexts in productive fashion the most appropriate successor to the knowledge network that led me, at least, to Kosova, and to my collaborations with Kosovar scholars in meetings across the world. I only hope to find more opportunities for this in the years to come, and that others in my networks not yet in touch with Kosova find their way here.

WHAT WAS 20TH CENTURY TRANSITION CULTURE AND WHAT COMES NEXT?

FROM CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY TO REFLEXIVITY AND SOLIDARITY190

Michael D. Kennedy Brown University

November 3, 2015

190 Prepared for presentation at the conference entitled “Transition in Retrospect: 25 Years after the Fall of Communism”, University of New York Tirana, Tirana, Albania, November 27-28, 2015. Thanks above all to Fatos Tarifa for the invitation to this conference, and the inspiration to rethink 21st century transition culture. And thanks to Linda Gusia for her most helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Of course all limitations remain my own, even while it’s my friends and colleagues rearticulating transition culture who are my abiding inspirations, and teachers.

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Abstract

Can we recognize a culture animating global transformations in the 21st century similar to that which shaped transition in the 20th? After outlining my understanding of transition culture as a mobilizing culture around structural oppositions between plan/market and dictatorship/democracy, I mark three conditions of transition culture’s viability, each of which have collapsed in the 21st century. The first, Western military hegemony, gradually eroded following NATO’s intervention in Serbia’s 1998/1999 assault on Kosovar Albanians, and virtually collapsed with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. The second condition, public truthfulness, has been substantially eroded by that second conflict’s elevation of information warfare. It has also become increasingly characteristic of crisis democracies themselves, with Kosova’s example leading. The third condition of transition culture was a solidarity of sovereigns, something the refugee crisis in Europe destroys. One might be reconciled to a world defined by nationalism, realism and power, but in the end I propose we might find the spirit of if not program of transition culture by recovering its soul in reflexivity and human solidarity.

-------Can we recognize a culture animating global transformations in the 21st century

similar to that which shaped transition in the 20th? Globalizing Knowledge191 invites that question, but ends primarily with a dilemma: critical accounts of our world today tend to focus either on the systemic crisis in which we now live or on the crisis of subjectivity that only sometimes moves with that crisis, and with increasing power, also independently of it.192

I proposed there that the explicit governance of global, regional, and national systems is increasingly at odds with its legitimations and everyday practice. That, in turn, leads a growing number of actors to reject those everyday terms of governance and embrace new subjectivities based on their alienation from the system they see as oppressing them. Anarchist sensibilities are one expression of this and social entrepreneurship a second, but so too are nationalist formations.193

Transition culture, by contrast, linked theories and practices of subjectivity and systemic transformation, and nationalism with liberalism, but its surface prescriptions hardly suffice in the 21st century. Its deeper cultural dispositions around solidarity and reflexivity, however, could move a new critical sociology appropriate to the 21st century.

After outlining my understanding of transition culture as a mobilizing culture around structural oppositions between plan/market and dictatorship/democracy, I mark three conditions of transition culture’s viability, each of which have collapsed in the 21st century. The first, Western military hegemony, gradually eroded following NATO’s

191 (2015) Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation (Stanford University Press)192 “Framing: Cosmopolitan Intellectuality and Consequential Solidarity” in Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.193 I develop these notions here: "Ivan Szelenyi, Solidarity and the Intellectualities of the 21st Century", in a conference “Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Themes from Ivan Szelenyi” University of Pécs

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intervention in Serbia’s 1998/1999 assault on Kosovar Albanians, and virtually collapsed with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. The second condition, public truthfulness, has been substantially eroded by that second conflict’s elevation of information warfare. It has also become increasingly characteristic of crisis democracies themselves, with Kosova’s example leading. The third condition of transition culture was a solidarity of sovereigns, something the refugee crisis in Europe destroys. In the end I propose we might find the spirit of if not program of transition culture by recovering its soul in reflexivity and human solidarity.

Transition and Culture

My paper title evokes Katherine Verdery’s well-known volume, “What Was Socialism and What Comes Next”.194 She emphasized how things like “privatization”, “markets” and “civil society” are concepts saturated with ideological significance whose taken-for-granted qualities were part and parcel of the transition itself. She argued too that we need to understand socialism as something other than an ideological construct enabling transition, and rather we need to appreciate how it actually worked. For example, understanding how power was allocated and contests articulated under socialism helps one to understand how property and conflicts in socialism’s sequel develop. Today, Verdery’s argument seems obvious, but it was not when she made it.

In the first years after communism’s collapse, most English-language studies of transition to markets and democracy were carried out by those who did not know enough of socialism’s backstage to move beyond the scripts of transition’s account of communist rule’s history. Even more, distinctions among communist ruled societies were hardly highlighted, with Albania’s distinction from other communist ruled societies least appreciated.195 After all, Soviet-type societies enjoyed significantly varying levels of, and types of, legitimacy.196

History and culture were not important to much of that transition debate. The hunger for the “normal” was so powerful that its cultural formation also could be overlooked as transition proceeded apace.197 Ethnographies of transition were more likely to put into question the guiding concepts of transition, especially by noting the hermeneutic gap between transition’s key concepts and their everyday meaning.198 That is one reason why transition culture is so critical to study over and above transition’s players, mechanisms, and institutions.

That is why I did not entitle this essay, “What was Transition and What Comes Next?”. While transition is certainly a political economic formation, just as communist-194 Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton University Press, 1996.195 For elaboration, see Fatos Tarifa, “Albania’s Road from Communism: Political and Social Change , 1990-1993’ Development and Change 26(1995):133-62. 196 Fatos Tarifa, “The Quest for Legitimacy and the Withering Away of Utopia” Social Forces 76:2(1997):437-74.197 Eglitis, Daina Stukuls. 2002. Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity and Revolution in Latvia. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press. 198 Burawoy, Michael and Katherine Verdery (eds.) Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

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ruled socialism was, it was also a cultural formation. Indeed, one might argue that it is even more a cultural formation than a political economic one because it was based more on identifications and projections than on an interest-based politics shaping economic policies and distributions of resources. Transition was based on an imagined future articulated with a series of rules and distribution of resources based on socialism’s past that could be hidden within the system’s manifest declarations.

Of course accounts of political economy in more entrenched capitalist systems have also taken a cultural turn, looking, for example, at how austerity is based on certain intellectual rationales.199 Even while I think more can be done in developing a cultural political approach to core capitalism’s political economy, such a view can be more readily developed around transition’s political contest and economic resources. But one also needs be careful about how the cultural qualifies. Bill Sewell’s approach to culture helps.200

Aided by Sewell’s transformational sociology, in Cultural Formations of Postcommunism, I don’t emphasize culture’s distinction from other spheres of life. I’m not asking us to think about the literature and art of transition, for example, even if I am interested. Nor am I thinking about how we can use transition to distinguish certain nations from others, as the discourse of national identity invites, although superior and inferior nations in transition culture is critical to its function. I do think it useful to think about how transition creates a kind of language that shapes social, political, and economic life. But I am especially intrigued by how that language is itself an expression of a style of reasoning and mode of power that shapes how we recognize problems and opportunities in social change.201 That lies behind my second book and its organization around the concept of “transition culture”. I described it this way.202

Transition culture is a mobilizing culture organized around certain logical and normative oppositions, valuations of expertise, and interpretations of history that provides a basic framework through which actors undertake strategic action to realize their needs and wishes. That mobilizing structure, in turn, structures transition. Transition culture emphasizes the fundamental opposition of socialism and capitalism, and the exhaustion of the former and normative superiority of the latter. It values broad generalizing expertise around the workings of market economies and democratic polities. Culture and history are not especially difficult to understand in transition culture, and transition culture certainly does not privilege those who are expert in reading complicated and contested histories and cultures. Instead, culture is treated like a hunk of clay that can be reshaped, and history as a path that should inform postcommunist institutional design. Most certainly, culture and history are not recognized to be things that envelop the work

199 Mark Blythe, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.200 William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation Chicago: University of Chicago 2005.201 Michael D. Kennedy (2015)“Eastern European Studies: Culture” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, second edition. Volume 6. Oxford: Elsevier (pp. 805-809).202 Michael D. Kennedy, Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation and War Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 9.

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of transition itself. Transition culture assumes that publics emerge from communist rule damaged, and need to be educated in the values of capitalism and democracy, even while those publics must choose the leadership to educate them. Elite agency and institutional design are the principal subjects of transition culture, while popular culture and history are engaged only to the extent they inform elites and design. Globalization is given, and it is only a matter of debate about what course it might take, and who will benefit most from it.

I could diagram it this way:

Figure 1: The Knowledge Structure of Transition Culture

Plan Dictatorship Russia Past Particularistic Bureaucrat Dependency Ukraine

--------- ~ --------------- ~ --------- ~ -------- ~ --------------- ~ ------------------- ~ ---------------- ~ -----------

Market Democracy West Future Comparative Entrepreneur Opportunity Estonia

In that volume, I use the concept to rethink the artifacts produced by the World Bank and others to map transition, the negotiated revolutions of 1989, business practice, and interpretations of freedom, nationalism, environmental problems, civility and loss in the first decade of postcommunist life. I focus especially on Poland, Hungary, Estonia, and Ukraine, with the penultimate in that list becoming transition culture’s exemplar, and the last, its exemplary warning, as the diagram above suggests.

In a subsequent publication, I extend that work on transition culture to explore the cultural formations of the European Union.203 In it, I identify the European Union’s enlargement program as one of transition culture’s strongest institutional foundations; it was also, however, one of the best mechanisms for reinforcing European identity in the European Union.

Following the declarations by Polish, Hungarian and Czech liberal elites of their wish to join the European Union shortly after 1989, the European Union responded with its so-called “Copenhagen criteria”, criteria that made manifest what the EU stood for:

stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities; the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union; the ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic & monetary union.204

203 (2012) “Cultural Formations of the European Union: Integration, Enlargement, Nation and Crisis” pp. 17-50 in Rebecca Friedman and Markus Thiel (eds.) European Identity and Culture: Narratives of Transnational Belonging Aldershot: Ashgate.204 European Commission Enlargement (online) Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/enlargement_process/accession_process/criteria/index_en.htm) [Accessed July 17, 2011]

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Milada Vachudova points out how Polish, Hungarian, and Czech authorities moved so efficiently on these goals that the EU could not easily deny their eventual admission, which in turn enabled other nations to continue the process.205 At the same time, European Commission leaders also believed in this mission. Romano Prodi views this enlargement as one of the greatest accomplishments of his commission (1999-2004). In fact, he did it quite well: he was charged with bringing five countries into the European Union within 10 years, and he managed 10 countries in five.206

Building on my approach to transition culture, I elaborated the cultural logic of enlargement in the following fashion:

Figure 2: The Manifest Cultural System of the Enlarged European Union

Enlarged Greater Extended Extended More MoreEU Dignity Justice Solidarity Freedom Peace Prosperity------------ ~ ------------- ~ ----------- ~ -------------- ~ --------------- ~ ----------- ~ ------Limiting Disrespect Injustice Egoism Constraint Violence PovertyEU for other made by of rich -a divided akin to Yugo and

Europeans Yalta nations Europe spreads lost market

Continued enlargement remains one of the most powerful ideological attractions for those who have not yet acceded, most obviously and especially in the Western Balkans. But that process in the Western Balkans introduces challenges for which transition culture was not well equipped to deal. Above all, transition culture cannot function well when basic principles are at war.

Transition Culture and War

In Cultural Formations of Postcommunism, I argued that the focus on transition’s goals in markets, democracy and national independence,207 overlooked one of the most important qualities of communism’s end – its peaceful nature in the communist world’s northern European rim. The Polish Round Table negotiations of 1989, for example, should be studied not only in terms of who won and who lost, but also how they structured radical but peaceful change.208

While this argument improperly masked the development of a more violent culture on the Polish streets, outside politics per se,209 it did highlight the

205 Milada Vachudova, 2005. Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism. New York: Oxford. 206 Romano Prodi, April 7, 2011. Interview with Michael D. Kennedy207 What Claus Offe called the “triple transition” in Varieties of Transition:The East European and East German Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.208 For attempts by the University of Michigan to assess this significance, see http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/PolishRoundTable/.209 I made this argument first in (2004) “What Have We Learned from the Study of Social Change in Poland?” (Michael D. Kennedy and Lucyna Kirwil) in International Journal of Sociology 34:3:3-14. With

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unacknowledged assumption enabling transition culture as such: the assumption of broad geopolitical peace under Western military hegemony. I previously proposed the following as transition culture’s foundation, but it was something that became readily evident only after Putin’s rise to power:

First, the Soviet Union had to be “willing” to allow the transformations within Eastern Europe. Second, domestic actors with control over the means of violence within these countries had to eschew violence, or be prevented from using it. Finally, those who wished to launch transition had themselves not only to resist temptations to use violence, but also to be wary of provocations that would justify state violence. Transition depended on peaceful change, and the perception that this peace was in the interests of all nations. With this vision, it could avoid the cycles of violence likely to be found with the exercise of force.

Of course there were some regions in the 1990s that were embedded in violence. Both the Caucasus and the Balkans had violent contest built into their transformations, and thus never simply fit into the story of transition. The passions, loyalties, and legal contests of wartime and post-war postcommunist social change can’t be addressed adequately within the framework favored by transition culture, one that minimizes attention to the cultural politics of power and change. But these war stories were critical for the cultural politics of transition itself.

War was a “danger” that might be identified for those, especially in ethnically mixed areas, who didn’t take the path of transition, and instead, took the path of nationalism. War could be treated as an anomaly, something that normal Western societies did not undertake. It was contrary to the trend toward integrated and peaceful globalized economy. But when the West became directly involved in military action against Serbia, that presumption could be challenged. The West erased the possibility of constructing itself as an integrated and simply transcendent party in the unfolding of global change. Regardless of whether one believed that intervention to be the first war launched in the name of human rights or not, the use of force to establish change fundamentally changed the conditions of transition culture. The cultural contest over the exercise of force came to the fore, first of all with naming the quality of power associated with the military power of the United States. Transition culture now, instead of dealing with the decentered power relations of globalization, had to contend with questions of American militarism and imperialism.210

an increase in Poland’s total number of crimes, and a dramatic increase in violent crime generally and juvenile and female violent crime in particular, it was wrong of me to say that transition, especially after 1989, was peaceful. The violence averted in negotiated revolution was instead found in the violence of civil society itself, where citizens prey on other citizens at unprecedented levels. For elaboration, see Lucyna Kirwil, “Changes in the Structure of Crime during the Transition Period in Poland” International Journal of Sociology 34:3:48-82.210 (2008) “From Transition to Hegemony: Extending the Cultural Politics of Military Alliances and Energy Security” pp. 188-212 in Mitchell Orenstein, Steven Bloom, and Nicole Lindstrom (eds.) Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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I developed that argument long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s also easy to exaggerate the difference between geopolitics in the 1990s and those of the 21st century. Tolstrup offers an important corrective with his comparison between domestic developments and external influence by Russia and by the EU (and US occasionally) on democratization in Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine across the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.211

Russia and the EU tended to play the same roles over those nearly 20 years. The EU is inconsistent. It generally supports democratization, except when visions of Realpolitik and stability take over. In this sense, its foreign policy rests on a blend of transition culture and Realpolitik. Russia almost always favors authoritarian rule, but will sometimes support democratic tendencies when gatekeepers defy Russian interests. Belarus’s Lukashenka occasionally earned their ire, and moved the Kremlin to support his opposition. But Russia’s practice over the last 20 years, and especially in 2014, assured it the role of transition culture’s antagonist.

Tolstrup’s work helps us understand the contemporary Ukrainian crisis. It is only an acceleration of what we have seen already. And second, Russia’s modes of influence – from using energy supplies as weapon to blatant information war and political technology – have been refined over these last decades. This means, in turn, that transition culture cannot be engaged without a much better approach to geopolitics, and a more savvy culture of diplomacy before Russian opposition.

The West has been pretty good at preventing more severe political repression in these states over the last 20 years. It’s generally good in crisis, keeping the bad from getting awful. At least it was before 2014. Diplomacy’s role has certainly diminished in these times. The geopolitical contest that has flared in 2014 is qualitatively different than the already accelerated tensions of the last decade Tolstrup describes. Putin is changing the rules of the game, the terms of the world order. Charles Krauthammer, for example, marks Obama’s strategy accurately I believe:

When Obama says Putin has placed himself on the wrong side of history in Ukraine, he actually believes it. He disdains realpolitik because he believes that, in the end, such primitive 19th-century notions as conquest are self-defeating. History sees to their defeat.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" is one of Obama's favorite sayings. Ultimately, injustice and aggression don't pay. The Soviets saw their 20th-century empire dissolve.

Remember when, at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, Obama tried to construct for Putin "an offramp" from Crimea? Absurd as this idea was, I think Obama was sincere. He actually imagined that he'd be saving Putin from himself, that Crimea could only redound against Russia in the long run.

211 The following draws on notes prepared in June 2014 inspired by Russia vs. the EU: The Competition for Influence in Post-Soviet States. By Jakob Tolstrup. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2014. I reviewed the volume in Perspectives on Politics 13:1(105-06) drawing on these same notes.

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If you really believe this, then there is no need for forceful, potentially risky U.S. counteractions. Which explains everything since: Obama's pinprick sanctions; his failure to rally a craven Europe; his refusal to supply Ukraine with the weapons it has been begging for.

The shooting down of a civilian airliner seemed to validate Obama's passivity. "Violence and conflict inevitably lead to unforeseen consequences," explained Obama. See. You play with fire, it will blow up in your face. Just as I warned. Now world opinion will turn against Putin.212

While Krauthammer uses this to slam Obama’s policies (and while I have been similarly critical of the West’s weak response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine213) I think the more intellectual point resides in Krauthammer’s insightful assignment of Obama’s faith, even if unnamed, in transition culture. Transition culture cannot survive in its 20th century form if Putin’s Russia wants to disturb the rules of the transition game. But then again, transition culture changed through its own emancipatory practice too.

The revolutionary spirit of 2011-13 has changed our sense of the world.214 The Maidan was different from the color revolutions that preceded it not least for which was the willingness of youth to meet violence in lesser kind, and with the more general awareness that circulations of elites, while necessary, are not sufficient for the transformation of societies, especially when corruption tarnishes all elites. Transition culture, before that time, tended to put much faith in elections. That faith, both in Ukraine and in other transitioned societies, is gone.

Transition culture, with Maidan and the war that has followed, has become much deeper and far more profound to the extent that it survives. It promises a more radical transformation if we can extend its lessons beyond the contest between the West and Russia. It becomes an invitation to consider how elites become implicated in one another’s worlds and how publics judge those associations. Since the Maidan occupation, Ukraine’s struggles have not just about geopolitical contest, important as that is. They are also about public responsibility and empowerment and how states respect

212 Charles Krauthammer, “Obama Waits on History as Putin Marches On” July 24, 2014 http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-op-krauthammer-obama-waits-on-history-putin-mar-20140724,0,2820821.column213 (March 7, 2014) “Solidarity with Ukraine against Putin’s Reality” Public Seminar http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/03/solidarity-with-ukraine-against-putins-reality/#.Uxo5G17TM7B (March 5, 2014) “The West Should Stop Squirming and Put Sanctions on Russia” Michael D. Kennedy and Floyd D. Kennedy, Jr. The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/us-should-put-sanctions-on-russia(March 5, 2014) “If the West Stands Up to Putin, Russian Economy Will Pay Heavy Cost” Floyd D. Kennedy and Michael D. Kennedy Global Post http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/commentary/if-west-stands-putin-russian-economy-will-pay-heavy-cost 214 To see how 2011 is different from 1989 (if more like 1968), see my (2011) “Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and Historical Frames: 2011, 1989, 1968” Jadaliyya http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2853/arab-spring-occupy-wall-street-and-historical-fram

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and manipulate those terms of democracy. And that demands that we put truthfulness far more to the core of the 21st century sequel to transition culture.

Truthfulness and Transition Culture

20th century transition culture treated western approaches to elections, information and media as far from perfect, but more than adequate, in dealing with the cultural infrastructure of democratic governance. That assumption already appeared inadequate in the last decade as Russia no longer accepted American hegemony. But in the last couple years, that inadequacy becomes catastrophe in the face of Ukraine’s war-ravaged transition.

In Globalizing Knowledge, I presented the Ukrainian struggle on the Maidan as another instance of transition culture’s expression, albeit in a much more geopolitically contested time. Whether their voices were secular or religious, the West seemed to recognize the emancipatory praxis of civil society on the Maidan, I especially appreciated the following expression by a Russian Orthodox priest:

The Maidan is giving or has given birth to a community which represents a classic instance of the civil society, almost its pure substance. This community identifies itself on the basis of shared values, including dignity, honesty, non-violence, solidarity, and readiness for self-sacrifice. Civil society in the form currently present at the Maidan can hardly be found even in Europe, where for the most part people nowadays are united on the basis of common interests, but not common values. I cannot personally imagine any contemporary European country where people would be freezing and risk being beaten or even killed for 24 hours a day for weeks, for the sake of values that seem quite abstract. The Ukrainian Maidan that gathered ‘for the sake of Europe’, has become more European than Europe and its politicians. The Ukrainians see how the European politicians betray the European Maidan, but they do not betray the European values they stand for. The Ukrainian Maidan actually brings back to many Europeans confidence about Europe; it cures what can be called ‘the European fatigue.215

For many on that square and in Europe, Maidan represented a quest for truthfulness that reinvigorated the meaning of transition and of Europe itself. There was vigorous debate about how much the far right wing animated that public square, but that was a meaningful expression of democratic culture. However, when Russia invaded Crimea, and with its support for the so called People’s Republics in Luhansk and Donetsk, and with its increasingly bellicose nuclear saber rattling216 that more or less intellectual debate has been changed into a clash of world systemic epistemologies.

215 Archmandrite Kirill (Govorun) “The Theology of Maidan” http://www.pravmir.com/the-theology-of-the-maidan/ December 14, 2013216 Paul Sonne, “As Tensions with West Rise, Russia Increasingly Rattles Nuclear Saber” the Wall Street Journal April 5, 2015 http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-tensions-with-west-rise-russia-increasingly-rattles-nuclear-saber-1428249620

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Every war has information and propaganda alongside it, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has a measure of propaganda and disinformation that astonishes. In this sense, it is not a matter of selective information; it is a matter of filling airwaves and social media with active disinformation. Information Warfare informs this crisis, where Russia has made substantial investments in trying to get its viewpoint across.217 But this is not just a viewpoint. Russian strategy deliberately distorts information and misrepresents in order to advance a political position so as to create a political reaction.

What if, as according to Leonid Reshetnikov, what is happening in Ukraine is not between Ukrainians and Russians but a war of world systems? This is part of the backstory being whipped up in order to justify why Russia cannot back down. Ukraine’s sovereignty, and territorial integrity, must be sacrificed for Russian security. That is the truth that serves Reshetnikov’s larger truth, which to my mind is based on a systemic distortion so great that this is, fundamentally, a lie that denies reality.218

However, when Europeans say in response that the battle for Ukraine is a battle for Europe, they also fuel the imagination that this is a battle of world systems, where one simply has to decide whether Europe is better than Russia, or vice versa. Ideology infects and supplants transition culture’s arc toward truthfulness as cultural disposition. Framing transition culture as a battle of world systems even distorts our capacity to have meaningful debate within the West.

The most egregious example of that distortion is evident with how much disinformation has gone into the question of whether the loss of Crimea, and the establishment of Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, were the results of Ukrainian Russians, or by Russian volunteers, or by Russian regular soldiers. Few who have access to reliable information doubt extensive Russian involvement.219 We might develop more nuance here, but the pattern is clear. There is systematic misrepresentation of Russia’s role in providing weapons and soldiers so as to destabilize Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine, and to make Ukraine relatively invisible in much Western debate by replacing the question of Ukrainian wishes with world peace among contending world powers. Consider, for example, how the American journal, Foreign Affairs, framed the debate:

“The West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Russia’s near abroad by expanding NATO and the EU after the Cold War. How much do you agree? How confident are you?”220

217 As Gareth Harding, “Russia: half-hearted EU propaganda no match for robust policies” EU Observer March 23, 2015 https://euobserver.com/opinion/128101 illustrates.218 Paul Goble, “Novorossiya Will Never Be Part of Ukraine Again, Kremlin Advisor Says” Window On Eurasia Series April 4, 2015 http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/04/novorossiya-will-never-be-part-of.html?spref=tw.219 Alec Luhn, “Russian Soldiers Have given Up Pretending They Are Not Fighting in Ukraine” Vice News March 31, 2015 https://news.vice.com/article/russian-soldiers-have-given-up-pretending-they-are-not-fighting-in-ukraine?utm_source=vicenewsfb220 “Who Is at Fault in Ukraine? Foreign Affairs’ Brain Trust Weighs In” November 9, 2014 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142345/who-is-at-fault-in-ukraine

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It’s worth reviewing the whole issue, but consider just a couple responses. For example Masha Gessen replies:

I am taken aback by the question, which uses Kremlin terminology. What the hell is ‘near abroad’? Ukraine is a sovereign country as separate from Russia as, say, Finland. Incidentally, if Finland chose to join NATO I bet we would be talking about it in terms of Finland’s choice, and not NATO’s expansionism. And we have the 45 million people of the sovereign state of Ukraine who sought the support and protection of Western powers, which have failed to protect them from Russian aggression.

Whether or not you agree with Gessen’s position, you must see this as the one that takes the question and power of information warfare most seriously. By contrast, those who agree with the statement consider information warfare incidental and irrelevant, and in a way elevate any Russian viewpoint to a reasonable one. John Mearsheimer, a leading voice of Realist persuasion, has had the greatest say on this:

Russian leaders and elites made it clear from the mid 1990s forward that they viewed NATO expansion as a serious threat and a violation of a tacit bargain made at the end of the Cold War. Putin and other Russian leaders were especially exercised when NATO announce din April 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join NATO; they warned it would lead to a crisis. Indeed, it helped cause the Russia-Georgia War in August 0087. Yet Western leaders foolishly continued to pursue NATO and EU expansion, and that eventually led to the present crisis.

Foreign Affairs presents this as a simple debate, with reasonable positions distributed. But that’s a big step away from what transition culture represented in theory if not always in practice. It’s a big step toward a measure of dissimulation undergirding the global culture that appears to be transition culture’s successor. Regrettably, one need not find Putin behind every such dissimulating instance.

Dissimulation is not new to the 21st century or Putin, of course. For example, Mertz notes how apartheid in South Africa displaced an obvious racism with simple assertions of progress and backwardness, as here:

The Government of the RSA (Republic of South Africa) is intensely aware of the special problems that are created by an historical heritage that has place the White nation in a position of trusteeship over various underdeveloped Bantu people. In an artificially integrated unified state, the Bantu would, as a result of their enormous backlog in comparison with the Whites, be doomed to become a backward proletariat… However, by creating for each Bantu people the opportunity to grow into an independent nation in a geopolitically acknowledged sphere of influence.. the possibility that the divergent interests of the groups

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concerned will lead to a continual political struggle is obviated (Mertz, 1988:670).221

There was a certain fashion in early transition culture to compare the political transformations issuing forth from South African apartheid and communist rule in Europe and Eurasia, but my point is not to restore that mode of inquiry. Rather, I think it’s quite useful to question whether transition culture itself produces similar forms of dissimulation above and beyond the information war accompanying the struggle in Ukraine.

One might identify dissimulation anywhere, of course, but I think it’s perhaps easier to see in societies not only transitioning from communism, but also from war. At least, dissimulation is evident in Kosova, as transition itself began with a lie. 222

Transition culture in general is premised on the notion that communist rule destroyed civil society, but Kosova’s civil society was anything but pulverized.223 An All-Albanian movement developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s associated with Ibrahim Rugova, with non-violent resistance the hallmark of his party’s leadership,224 not unlike the relatively vibrant civil society Poland enjoyed in the last decade of communism’s rule.225 Indeed, the commitment to non-violence and delay of war was, in the eyes of some, evidence of Kosovar civil society’s power.226 But instead of recognizing that parallel state, postwar international authorities denied Kosova’s civil society.

there was no recognition whatsoever that the war in Kosovo was not a consequence of absence of civil society, but rather a result of its failure. Instead of trying to revive the previous civic spirit – of which Kosovans were still proud –

221 Elizabeth Mertz, 1988. “The ULses of History: Langauge, Ideology, and Law in the United States and South Africa” Law and Society Review 22(4)(1988):661-85; cited in Patricia Ewick, “Consciousness and Ideology” in Austin Sarat, The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society Wiley: 2004, p. 88.222 for the following five paragraphs, I draw upon sections from Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 223 Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo. London: Pluto Press, 2000. See also Shkëlzen Maliqi “Why Peaceful Resistance Movement in Kosova Failed” http://shkelzenmaliqi.wordpress.com/2000/03/22/why-peaceful-resistance-movement-in-kosova-failed/ for an insider’s account 224 Although external causes are most commonly used to explain the ultimate failure of the non-violent movement, some fault the quality of Rugova’s leadership itself. Maliqi for example argues that his commitments were less elaborated than they ought to have been, and were more pragmatic than philosophical and thus more easily eroded. See Shkëlzen Maliqi “Why Peaceful Resistance Movement in Kosova Failed” http://shkelzenmaliqi.wordpress.com/2000/03/22/why-peaceful-resistance-movement-in-kosova-failed/. He also writes: “In strengthening his position as a leader, it was not his personal capacities, the depth and power of his thought, nor his leadership and political skills. Of the greatest significance for Rugova’s political position and authority among the masses was the support that he gained – from the very moment he stepped into political scene – from international factors, primarily from the US and from European powers.”225 I await the systematic comparative study of Poland’s Solidarity and the parallel society made in Kosova with their own samizdat publications, and parallel functioning systems of education, health services, and taxation organized beyond the official state structures controlled by Serbs.226 Mentor Agani, “Civil Society by Proxy: The Development of Civil Society in a Protectorate” pp. 13-32, p. 26.

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the international mission started with tremendous efforts to create an altogether new one. It was pitiful to see how the same civic activists who under the horrific conditions of Milosevic’s dictatorship achieved to organize the entire social and political life in Kosovo through civic engagement, quite often risking their lives in the process, had to undergo a “civil society for dummies” type of education provided by international bureaucrats who had decided that it was civil society that Kosovo was lacking.227

And with that condition, Agani argues, civil society was faced with impossible contradictions. If it were to counterbalance the state, it had to limit the arbitrariness of the very international protectorate, dominant over the existing state, that feeds it while at the same time recognizing that state cares little about democracy in contrast to its mission around “security”.228 And with that changed focus, civil society’s organizations themselves became increasingly donor-oriented rather than expressions of civil society itself.229

Ironically, or perhaps consequentially, the movement that has opposed that international administration and not received its support has also been the most vigorous.230 As a movement, Vetëvendosje is exceptionally active and innovative. Some analysts trace its roots to the late 1990s when non-violent resistance moved from its relatively passive to its more active stage, most notably through the Kosova Action Network with its support for families whose members were lost during the war of 1998-1999. Vetëvendosje came later, especially in the wake of the rise of the Kosova Liberation Army and and the escalation of student protest, and the eclipse of Rugova’s non-violent approach to change.

Vetëvendosje means “self-determination” in Albanian, which for some captures the leading edge of the movement in its nationalist expression. Whether the movement is mainly nationalist or not is a matter of intense debate and cultural politics in Kosova itself. It does in fact seek clear independence for Kosova, but its exponents also argue that its politics are organized around equality and justice within and across nations. What is clear, however, is that within the Kosovar parliament and in civil society, Vetëvendosje is among the most innovative in its repertoire of movement techniques and political

227 Mentor Agani, “Civil Society by Proxy: The Development of Civil Society in a Protectorate” pp. 13-32 in Mentor Agani (ed.) Civil Society in Kosovo since 1999. Pristina: Center for Political Courage, 2012, p. 15. 228 pp. 17-19 in Mentor Agani, “Civil Society by Proxy: The Development of Civil Society in a Protectorate” pp. 13-32 in Mentor Agani (ed.) Civil Society in Kosovo since 1999. Pristina: Center for Political Courage, 2012229 Thanks in particular to Linda Gusia for this reading of the transformations. 230 As Pellumb Kelmendi observes in “Civil Society and Contentious Politics in Post-Conflict Kosovo” pp. 33-57 in Mentor Agani (ed.) Civil Society in Kosovo since 1999. Pristina: Center for Political Courage, 2012.

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maneuvers.231 It is also the most active. By 2012, it had organized by far the most protests since 2002 in Kosova, even though it was only founded in 2005.232

Perhaps its most powerful force lies in its self-positioning as a force for “truth” against what it says is the “institutional lie” of the international protectorate in which Kosova’s move toward sovereignty is embedded.233 In this, one might argue that Vetëvendosje is the most powerful expression across all postcommunist societies in protest against the dissimulation of transition itself.

This positioning is especially apparent in struggles over the last two years, in the time since I completed my last book and since my last visit to Kosova. In the summer of 2015, Vetëvendosje issued “A Report on Republic of Kosova: The Resistance against a Semi-Authoritarian Regime”.234 While it is clearly “interested” it was nonetheless documented in legal/social scientific fashion, invoking claims to truthfulness if not also invoking other narrative elements, most notably martyrological ones, to enhance the rhetorical power of their claims.

Their story begins after the June 8 2014 parliamentary election, in which the Democratic Party of Kosova (PDK), headed by the former prime minister Hashim Thaçi, won the most votes. But the four succeeding parties, Vetëvendosje and the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK), Alliance for the Future of Kosova, and the Initiative for Kosova, signed a coalition agreement to establish different mechanisms and priorities for their country’s governance. PDK blocked the ascent of that coalition with dubious methods that were, itself, called into doubt by Kosova’s Ombudsman’s Office. That was overlooked, especially when The US Embassy and the President of Kosova, Atifete Jahjaga, facilitated the ascent of a new coalition government between the PDK and LDK.

Although there were allegations that the US Embassy moved the new agreement, Ambassador Tracy Jacobson protested such charges, declaring not only that she and her staff were merely observers, but that the new government was formed in a completely constitutional fashion. She said,

I’m pleased that the parties in the current negotiations have both committed themselves to the strategic priorities that we share, such as the establishment of the special court, continuation of the dialogue with Serbia, economic

231 For an excellent account of this distinction, see Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, “Democratisation through Defiance: The Albanian Civil Organization “Self-Determination” and International Supervision in Kosovo” pp. 95-116 in Civil Society and Transitions in the Western Balkans Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. For a more contemporary discussion, see S. Adam Cardais, “Kosovo: Vetevendosje’s Determination” Transitions OnLine January 12, 2012 http://eastofcenter.tol.org/2012/01/kosovo-vetevendosjes-determination/ 232 Pellumb Kelmendi observes in “Civil Society and Contentious Politics in Post-Conflict Kosovo” pp. 33-57 in Mentor Agani (ed.) Civil Society in Kosovo since 1999. Pristina: Center for Political Courage, 2012, p. 47.233 For elaboration, see Albin Kurti’s talk http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TedxVienna-Albin-Kurti-Internat TedX Vienna. 234 http://www.vetevendosje.org/en/news_post/report-on-republic-of-kosova-the-resistance-against-a-semi-authoritarian-regime-2/

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development, rule of law, including fighting corruption, establishing a foreign terrorist fighters law – all these are important things for Kosovo’s future, which the leaders of the PDK and LDK agree. But, I just want to be clear that this coalition that they’re building now is their own coalition, it is the work of Kosovo’s politicians, not the work of the embassy or the international community. I’m grateful and impressed by the role that the President has played in facilitating the dialogue, and of course at her invitation I’m happy any time to be an observer. But really this is a Kosovo political process…. Our role has been to promote a process that rolls out in accordance with Kosovo’s laws and constitution, which is fully in accordance with decisions of the Constitutional Court that were issued over the summer, and that moves toward building a government that includes minorities and that can work on all these important issues. So, we’ve been focused on the process and on the principles and not on the parties and on any particular individual political leader.235

The Ambassador’s assurance of Embassy distance from political agreement is,

itself, an indicator of the measure of distrust within the Kosovar public sphere toward the international community’s role. This is only magnified in light of the contemporary corruption scandal associated with the European Union’s EULEX board itself.236

Such investigations and needs for denial reinforce the very point that Vetëvendosje has made about the ways in which the international protectorate limits the rule of law within Kosova itself. Vetëvendosje charged that this arrangement for a coalition government celebrated by the US Ambassador was made on criminal foundations, where charges of corruption by the PDK and LDK leaderships were overlooked in exchange for moving ahead the priorities of the international community. Those priorities became clearly evident at the end of the 2015 summer.

The European Union’s High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini declared an agreement reached between Serbian and Kosovar leaderships to be a critical step forward in the transition process. She said,

Today's outcome represents landmark achievements in the normalisation process. Solutions such as those found today bring concrete benefits to the people and at the same time enable the two sides to advance on their European path.237

One critical part of that agreement was to be found in the so called “Association of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo” proposal, something written with such ambiguity as to allow the Serb leadership to say that theses communities now have executive powers, and

235 Transcript of Interview of Ambassador Jacobson with Voice of America. November 20, 2014 http://pristina.usembassy.gov/interview_to_voa_shqip_20_nov_2014.html236 Julian Borger, “EU Accused over its Kosovo Mission: ‘Corruption has grown exponentially’ The Guardian November 6, 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/eu-accused-over-kosovo-mission-failings237 “Statement by High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini following the meeting of the EU-facilitated dialogue” European Union External Action August 25, 2015 http://eeas.europa.eu/statements-eeas/2015/150825_02_en.htm

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Kosovar authorities to declare that these associations only have the status of NGOs.238 Many Kosovars are clearly concerned that this agreement could lead the way to the instability apparent in Bosnia and Hercegovina, where they see Republika Srpska as derailing the development of an integrated and democratic, and “normal”, state.

Regardless of the document’s ambiguity, Vetëvendosje declares that this agreement was made without democratic accountability, and agreed to by a coalition government whose leadership itself rests on legally dubious grounds. Vetëvendosje now mobilizes forcefully around the claim that this agreement was made without any parliamentary review and debate.239 It has undertaken what some consider extreme tactics, most notably the release of tear gas canisters within the parliament itself, in order to disrupt normal legislative process.

That tactic may have halted the legitimation process, but it has also now allowed those who support the agreement to redirect attention to such methods of disruption. The US Ambassador, for example, has declared that he has “a tough time seeing how throwing eggs, or throwing anything other than words, on the floor of the Assembly, strengthens Kosovo’s democracy or contributes to its broader goals.”240 That charge, in turn, redirects attention from the doubts about the legality of the LDK/PDK government and the ways in which the Association agreement was signed.

By introducing this problem, I am not declaring truthfulness on any particular side, but I do wish to note the ways in which appearances of dissimulation fuel increasingly disruptive protest, and how that protest generates even more aggressive denunciations by authorities. That in turn, moves conflict into ever more intense modes. That, in turn, leaves a public increasingly alienated from all in power. That in turn undermines the possibility of transition itself, to the extent it should be something based on public engagement and not something designed by those above and without the public itself.

Those more expert than I should analyze this contest between Vetëvendosje and its own government, and the measure of constitutionality involved in these conflicts. Vetëvendosje’s report itself invited readers to consider Freedom House’s “Nations in Transit” report and the 2014-2015 Transparency International Reports on Kosova. Vetëvendosje’s report, however, is enough evidence of a systemic problem for which transition culture is poorly prepared.

238 “Association is neither a new Republika Srpska, nor an NGO" originally published in Koha Ditore on August 28, 2015, and reprinted here http://www.democratizationpolicy.org/the-association-of-serb-municipalities-in-kosovo---it-s-neither-a-republika-srpska-nor-an-ngo--but-r239 There are other issues animating Vetëvendosje’s opposition. Public protest halted the liquidation of the largest mine complex in Mitrovica. It also forced the dismissal of Alexandar Jablanovic, a minister in LDK/PDK government, for his racist remarks about protesters. Vetëvendosje also charged police brutality in the handling of these protests and other oppositional activities. At the time of the report’s writing, none of these charges had been brought to court. 240 “Ambassador Delawie’s Interview with Koha Ditore”, October 2, 2015 http://pristina.usembassy.gov/interview_kd_2015.html

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Transition presumes that the problems of corruption and systemic deceit derive from the legacy of communist rule. It cannot abide the notion that the very forms of international organization purporting to define global truth are themselves responsible for the alienation of subjects from that rule of law. Transition culture cannot survive the notion that it violates the very premise of dignity and decency that is supposed to define transition’s destination. Thus, when the proponents of transition culture find themselves in such trap, they must demonize those who would challenge their legal rational authority.

To only isolate and therefore diminish Kosovar protests helps to preserve the notion that transition is, still, intact. A critical sociology that embraces similar accounting, however, misses an opportunity to recognize this as part of the new cultural politics of transformation. Indeed, I would welcome the opportunity to learn whether what Vetëvendosje proposes here is truthful in any meaningful way: “It believes the EU and US are willing to sacrifice Kosovo’s territorial integrity for the sake of better ties with Serbia in order to reduce Russia’s influence in the Western Balkans. It also says Western powers give Kosovo leaders, such as deputy PM Hashim Thaci, carte blanche on corruption in return for compliance on their agenda”.241

Engaging such claims is critical to transition culture’s further development; the EU investigation of Eulex’s criminality and corruption is a step in the right direction, but even there, it remains a rather localized problem, an exception to transition culture’s rule. Indeed, we ought to consider whether the challenge Vetëvendosje offers is part of a broader problem of truthfulness in public affairs, and the prioritization of solidarity among sovereigns rather than human solidarity itself.

Transition Culture, Solidarity and the Refugee Crisis

Solidarity was not manifestly part of transition culture, although one might rearticulate its implication. Of course the Polish Solidarity movement of 1980-81 is, arguably, the foundation for communism’s end and transition culture’s birth. But solidarity is also evident in transition culture itself. Because the West could see itself in the mirror of east European aspirations, and because there were many within east European nations who could articulate transition cultural values from within the nation, solidarity could be expressed transnationally, especially in opposition to a Soviet/Russian (and partially Serbian) empire from which most of those in transition culture sought emancipation. This was, however, mostly a solidarity of sovereigns, of nations with their political authorities expressing commitments to one another. Even this solidarity, however, is now at risk, for the telos that once organized transition culture is gone.

As I argued above, so long as transition culture was about a contest between past and future, not between the West and Russia, it could develop relatively peacefully. When transition culture came to be about a struggle between Serbia and the rest of Yugoslavia, as the Wars of Yugoslav Succession could be understood, transition culture found complications, not least of which we see in the abiding conflict over the place of Kosova and Serbia in transnational transition culture.

241 Andrew Rettman, “Kosovo Clashes Highlight Balkans’ Fragility” EU Observer, October 13, 2015.

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Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine has further wrecked transition culture’s relatively peaceful expression. Now, more than ever, the difference between transition culture’s promise and Russia’s disregard for the international rules of the game with its invasion of a sovereign nation is clear. But the refugee crisis within Europe complicates transition culture’s coherence even more because the enemy is not beyond transition culture itself.

Transition culture was an extraordinary cultural formation, one that not only offered prescriptions in policy and practice for the good society but also one that was common sensible in its articulation of the nation. Even globalization, that global formation promising to remake the nation as such, found transition culture to be a good home given the embrace of both for the free movement of capital and ideas across sovereign states. The free movement of people was far more complicated, and is especially transformative in light of the “refugee crisis” facing Europe.242

I have only just begun to study the refugee crisis more intensively, and therefore cannot offer substantial accounting of its empirical dimensions. However, we should all know enough so as to recognize the problem that it presents for thinking about what comes next after transition culture. The refugee crisis cannot be contained by transition culture’s current articulation. Indeed, it promises to destroy the solidarity of sovereigns on which transition was built.

We should begin by recognizing the courage, and desperation, of so many in seeking refuge so distant from their homes. We find more journalists than scholars, however, offering accounts that help to humanize the experience of these refugees,243 although some scholars have contributed to the effort.244 We also ought acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of many in civil society to welcome refugees and express solidarity with those who risk so much to escape from deadly situations.245

242 Kenneth Roth, “The Refugee Crisis That Isn’t” Huffington Post September 3, 2015 https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/03/refugee-crisis-isnt is a critical reminder that this is not a crisis in demographic terms, but one in political terms. Indeed, the number of refugees entering Europe dwarfs that which Syria’s neighbors now absorb. 243 Magdy Samaan, “This is What It Feels Like to be a Refugee on the Move” The Telegraph October 16, 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/11934678/This-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-a-refugee-on-the-move.html244 See Bela Greskovits, “Refugees in Budapest” Voice In Journal September 4, 2015 http://www.voiceinjournal.com/20150904-bela-greskovits-refugees/245 Epaminondas Farmakis, “An Effort to Assist Refugees Arriving on Greece’s Islands” Open Society Foundations Voices https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/effort-assist-refugees-arriving-greece-s-islands. Scholars can be among those who extend those efforts. For example, Hungarian sociologist Antal Orkeny has been the head of an NGO in Hungary that has long worked to support the social integration of migrants, and the support of Hungarians and others going abroad http://menedek.hu/en/projects; his and others’ work in their support have not yet been translated into scholarly research and English translation, but that absence should not prevent their recognition. Too, The Hungarian Academy of Sciences completed a major report on refugees and migrants coming through Hungary, giving comprehensive empirical data on the age, national and regional origins, gender, and other qualities of migrants. http://mta.hu/data/cikk/13/70/8/cikk_137008/_europabairanyulo.pdf

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We should also recognize the return of the critical intellectual in this moment, critical as that figure was to the end to communism and the initial formation of transition culture. Although they never disappeared entirely, this crisis enables them new reception, and intellectuals a new kind of moral authority. Dissident voices from the communist period in particular have new grounds on which to exercise their moral indignation, indicting not only authorities but also those who were once their comrades in opposition. GM Tamas, for example, wrote recently,

Ever since 1989, interpreted as the definitive end of the Enlightenment project, it is deemed impossible to deploy a moral criticism of politics, such criticism held in our anti-philosophical, romantic-reactionary cultures to be horribly Kantian and Marxist. The assertion of crude self-interest is sufficient to justify the evil legislation (making immigration a crime) and the state of exception(Notstand, état d’urgence) declared by the Hungarian government. (This is ably described by Kim Lane Scheppele in Politico.) Denying the human rights of refugees – this contravenes Hungarian and international law, but no matter – , fencing off the Serbian and Romanian (and possibly the Croatian) border, corrupting the court system by forcing it to issue automatic rejection writs of asylum requests on a conveyor belt, denying explicitly the right of the petitioners to have these decisions translated in any language from the Hungarian has elicited some protests, chiefly from liberal lawyers and a handful of social scientists, but the bulk of public opinion is silent. There is some commiseration for the poor refugees and their small children, but almost nobody is prepared to welcome any of them amongst us.

The justified and reasonable indignation of the Serbian and Romanian governments – far more tolerant and democratic than the richer Central Europeans, the so-called Visegrád countries – is ridiculed or, at best, ignored. World-famous luminaries such as Imre Kertész and György Konrád are more or less cautiously supporting the fake anti-Islamic hysteria whipped up by the Right. So do other respected pillars of society. The anti-Semitic and the philo-Semitic Right will finally be able to announce solemnly a merger.The moral atmosphere is irremediably polluted.246

We should also recognize that international bodies of experts weigh in on the human rights violations facing the refugees. For example, experts on the 1951 Refugee Convention and other dimensions of refugee law recently indicted a range of EU authorities for such violations with a declaration of principles that call on governments to “develop refugee determination processes that are timely, fair, and treat every claimant with dignity, to refrain from violent policies and practices that aim to ‘deter’ people from crossing their borders, to proactively seek out creative solutions, such as temporary documents, to facilitate transnational family sponsorship and family reunification;” and so on.247

246 GM Tamas, “The Meaning of the Refugee Crisis” Open Democracy September 21, 2015 https://opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/g-m-tamás/meaning-of-refugee-crisis247 “Open Letter from the International Research Community, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University, http://crs.info.yorku.ca/open-letter

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We can see some governments acting on those very principles; indeed, some of the principal exponents of transition culture now wield authority in their national governments, and work to figure ways to continue that spirit in the face of the crisis. For example, Vesna Pusic, co-founder and director of the Erasmus Guild, a transition culture think tank, has been lauded for her humanitarian articulation of a foreign minister’s role.248

Of course we should also recognize that not only Hungarians and other post-communist nations promote policies that earn refugee experts’ ire. Those who justify Orban’s policies point out that he is not so unusual. Look, they tell me, what your own presidential candidate, Donald Trump, says, or look at the policies of the Australian government. We need to prioritize solidarity with our own, not with those who should stay in their own country. Taking inspiration from the former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott’s speech, in which he declared, “Implicitly or explicitly, the imperative to love your neighbour as you love yourself is at the heart of every Western polity … but right now this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error,”249 these critics can declare the moral triumph of nationalism, and the end to transition culture, in the name of realism.

For some, such policies as that of Viktor Orbán, “subordinates the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants to the security of borders, threatens to divide and destroy the EU by renouncing the values on which it was built and violating the laws that are supposed to govern it.”250 George Soros said that, giving expression to the very spirit of solidarity that animated transition culture at its deepest level in the 20th century, and might still in the 21st.

George Soros is no realist, but neither is he an idealist. He, more than any other individual, embodies the spirit of transition culture, and its need to evolve and face nightmare questions, not only those addressed simply with mantras of markets and democracy. Indeed, he has proposed a comprehensive plan for the EU in addressing the refugee crisis around six points a) accepting at last a million asylum seekers annually, supporting their destination of choice; b) supporting refugees and the nations that host them closest to the war that moves their exit; c) develop an EU wide agency and border guard to address asylum and migration; d) establish safe channels for asylum seekers, e) with that procedure being an exemplar for global standards; and f) to mobilize the private sector, including businesses, NGOs and churches, to sponsor refugees.251

248 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/world/europe/hungary-croatia-refugees-migrants.html?_r=1249 Gabrielle Chan, “Tony Abbott urges Europe to adopt Australian policies in refugee crisis” The Guardian October 27, 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/28/tony-abbott-urges-europe-to-adopt-australian-border-policies250 George Soros, “Rebuilding the Asylum System” Project Syndicate Setpember 26, 2015 http://www.georgesoros.com/essays/rebuilding-the-asylum-system/251 George Soros, “Rebuilding the Asylum System” Project Syndicate Setpember 26, 2015 http://www.georgesoros.com/essays/rebuilding-the-asylum-system/

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This plan is not only based on the cool headed billionaire strategist, but on the experience of the refugee himself. Although it does not feature Aylan’s image,252 Soros and the Open Society Foundations remind us of how many refugees were saved by places whose examples inspire transition culture’s telos.253 Without that salvation, the moral authority of transition culture is lost.

The refugee crisis illustrates the hopes that transition culture embedded, and the narrowness that it also fueled. Transition culture was based not only on the principles of open society, but on a kind of nationalism that declared one’s own nation unjustly repressed by an abnormal system moved by utopia-generated dystopic practices.

It’s easy to see that internal tension dissolved in the face of the refugee crisis, made manifest in Viktor Orban’s indictment of George Soros; Orban argues that Soros’s support of activists who provide support for refugees weakens nation states and undermines European values.254 Some in Orban’s government have even expressed their worry that Roma will learn from refugees terrorist tactics. 255 Racism finds ample expression in the mobilization against refugees and the sanctification of national borders. It has become, along with Russian militarism, the principal logical and practical opposition to the emancipatory sense of transition culture today. But to focus only on those ideological opponents inoculates transition culture from its greater challenge.

There are no scripts for a world after transition culture. There are no obvious destinations, no discourses of “normality” to which to appeal. There is no hegemon that can declare what, in international terms, is legitimate or not. Critical sociology needs a new vehicle beyond transition culture.

Reflexivity, Solidarity and What Comes Next?

Grażyna Skąpska has convinced me that I ought to consider constitutionalism as a means to theorize society from within society.256 That potential is all the more important in postcommunist societies wrestling with a number of ambiguities, not least of which is the impossibility of applying the rule of law to a social process and context that defies a simple translation of positive law from the West. Indeed, the inconsistencies and contradictions of postcommunist change demand a measure of reflexivity in the

252 Justin Wm Moyer, “Aylan’s Story” Washington Post, September 3, 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/03/a-desperate-refugee-family-a-capsized-boat-and-3-year-old-dead-on-a-beach-in-turkey/253 George Soros, “Europe’s Refugees Deserve Better” Open Society Foundations, October 27, 2015 https://medium.com/open-society-foundations/europe-s-refugees-deserve-better-fd1693b0326b#.aic3nkc2p254 Andras Gergely, “Orban Accuses Soros of Stoking Refugee Wave to Weaken Europe” Bloomberg News, October 30, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-30/orban-accuses-soros-of-stoking-refugee-wave-to-weaken-europe255 We see this already where Hungarian authorities merge abiding racism against Roma to mobilizing fear about refugees https://euobserver.com/justice/130740256 The following draws on notes prepared in November 2013 inspired by From ‘Civil Society’ to ‘Europe’: A Sociological Study on Constitutionalism after Communism, by Grażyna Skąpska. Leiden Boston: Brill 2011. I reviewed her book in Contemporary Sociology 43:5:738-39.

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articulation of legality and justice that should make postcommunist citizens the greatest social theorists of our time.

Drawing on Sajo,257 Skąpska argued that postcommunist constitutions are “fear creatures”, preventing a return to hell more than articulating a promise of heaven. Even so, the concepts animating constitutions run the risk of deviating so far from reality that they could become, in Skąpska’s words, a “fictitious constitutional consensus”, mirroring, but defined in opposition to, Stalinism’s own distance between claims about, and lives lived, in actually existing socialism. Thus, rather than defining truth from above or without, postcommunism’s documents need stimulate processes in which the “right to truth” becomes a new civic right. Indeed, this becomes the foundation on which the spirit of transition culture might find its expression in the 21st century.

Although truthfulness will not determine the course of the war in Ukraine, the extraordinary lies Putin’s regime tells about what happened in the country, what happens to Russian soldiers who die in Ukraine, and how parts of a sovereign Ukraine happen to separate need to be marked if only not to draw the West into the truth-shading that implicate their own regimes in the more systemic deceit Putin’s managed democracy offers.

While there is a politics to Vetëvendosje’s cultural politics, to build a peace between Serbia and Kosova on foundations mired in corruption, while denying any such compromise to be the least bad of all possible options, is to sacrifice a truthfulness in transition that promises to rot the institutions and practices born in the transformation.

Both of these cases may, Realists could argue, be part of the game, the crude interests and distribution of power in international relations which transition culture never quite acknowledged with its more idealistic overtones. Indeed, that very denial of transition’s promise is what realist theories of international relations articulate when they turn those with very different commitments to truthfulness into equivalent players in a game without morality.

The refugee crisis in Europe is, however, something different.

The refugee crisis invites a categorical distinction that may be hard to realize in practice. To distinguish between economic migrants and refugees is something that is critical in both international law and humanitarian practice, but in the current context it sets up a conflict among the most vulnerable. Germany already began preparations last winter to return Kosovars, Albanians, and Macedonians with the declaration that they enjoy “safe countries of origin”.258 More recently, the German authorities have indicated their agreement with the authorities in Afghanistan that they would deny refugee status

257 Andras Sajo, Limiting Government: An Introduction to Constitutionalism. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999.258 Dario Sarmadi, “German Government Plans to Accelerate Deportation of Kosovar Refugees” Euractive February 12, 2015 http://www.euractiv.com/sections/justice-home-affairs/german-government-plans-accelerate-deportation-kosovar-refugees-312036

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for those from that country because “they should remain and help build the country up"259 despite the fact that the security crisis in Afghanistan has worsened in the months since Germany recognized asylum status for nearly 2/3 of Afghan applicants. 260 Experts worry that there is a certain measure of “backsliding” when it comes to the rights of refugees, even in Germany. Hugh Williamson from Human Rights Watch writes,

German chancellor Angela Merkel says her government remains committed to providing protection to all asylum seekers who reach the country, and Berlin has acted commendably in committing billions of euros and thousands more staff to deal with the huge influx of people – even if, in many places, conditions for the new arrivals remain, at best, makeshift. Thousands of citizens are giving everyday support to the refugees.

Yet the mood is changing. A package of laws adopted by Ms Merkel’s cabinet to equip the government, regional states and local authorities to handle the sharp increase in refugee numbers largely focusses on abolishing apparent “incentives” for refugees and migrants to come to Germany, and on accelerated procedures for removing failed asylum seekers. The package has, rightly, drawn criticism – Germany’s Migration Council, an expert body, labelled the proposals “highly problematic”. Proposals, for instance, for asylum seekers to remain for six months or more in reception centres would “prolong the extremely difficult social and psychological situation” of many of those effected, the Council says.261

The challenge within Germany pales before the challenge en route. It is commendable that the European Union and transit countries have developed a plan that at least acknowledges the challenge, and, according to Human Rights Watch, develops critical capacity in creating reception centers along the transit route. But it also creates more barriers on Europe’s borders, which in turn increases risk substantially. States could deny access to refugees simply because they don’t register for asylum in the preceding country, which in turn could stress even more the capacities of the transit countries, leading them to follow Hungary’s example.262 And as refugees are returned to transit countries outside the European Union from Germany, in order to host those refugees fleeing Syria to enter Germany, we have a recipe for solidarity’s antithesis.

In short, the refugee crisis could prompt a wholesale collapse of solidarity not only with the most vulnerable, but also among the nations that are supposed to constitute the European Union, and the sense of superiority it needs to cultivate in order to merit desire for accession, and the systemic stability that comes with it. 259 “Germany to Send Afghan Refugees Back” Deutsche Welle October 28, 2015 http://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-send-afghan-refugees-back/a-18812173260 “EU/Balkans: Contradictory Migration Plan” Human Rights Watch October 25, 2015 https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/27/eu/balkans-contradictory-migration-plan261 Hugh Williamson, “Is Germany Backsliding on Refugee Protection?” Dispatches, Human Rights Watch, October 7, 2015. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/07/dispatches-germany-backsliding-refugee-protection262 “EU/Balkans: Contradictory Migration Plan” Human Rights Watch October 25, 2015 https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/27/eu/balkans-contradictory-migration-plan

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In order to figure the successor culture to transition’s, we may very well embrace the refugee crisis as prompt. Its address is certainly not obvious, but we also know what it cannot be. After all, to deny human rights to the most vulnerable is to deny the very premise of solidarity on which transition culture was founded. To reject the rule of law in which refugees place their hopes is to reject the mode of governance that transition culture’s telos defines as its distinction. To camouflage chauvinism in the language of institutional capacities and national priorities is to embrace a mode of truth that anchors its sense in convenience, not in reflexivity.

Perhaps we should never have assumed that transition culture’s successor could extend its promise. However, critical sociology should never give up. Figuring solidarity with refugees in crisis may be the best way to build that future beyond transition, a project realized best by empowering people who have lived through transition. To go beyond the scripts of transition culture’s past, to cultivate a reflexivity that not only rethinks how nations might be developed but how solidarity among humans might be found, seems like a recipe for recovering transition’s soul, and hope for the 21st century.

POLAND GOES GLOBAL With Piotr Kosicki, Małgorzata Mazurek, Małgorzata Fidelis, Philipp Ther, and Brian Porter-Szucs; Michael D. Kennedy, moderator.

November 21, 2015

I offer the following set of notes written in anticipation, and following, this session at the American Association for the Advancement of East European and Eurasian Studies in Philadelphia, 2015. I look forward to learning more from my colleagues, but let this serve as an invitation to you, my readers, to engage these scholars on how Poland has, and still might, “go global”.

Piotr Kosicki and Małgorzata Mazurek organized this session with the following description:

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The “global turn” in the humanities and social sciences has been long in coming to scholarship on Eastern Europe. Yet, at long last, new and forthcoming work by ASEEES scholars across multiple disciplines – including historian Brian Porter-Szűcs’s Poland in the Modern World (2014) and sociologist Michael Kennedy’s Globalizing Knowledge (2015) – has engaged in innovative and provocative ways the organic links between traditionally regional stories and global vectors of research and analysis. These include economics, religion, intellectual exchange, social protest, and cultural production. The proposed roundtable will define and explore these vectors through the lens of the newest scholarship, bringing together the authors of just-published “global” narratives of Eastern Europe (including both Porter-Szűcs and Kennedy) with younger scholars with forthcoming contributions driven by alternative methodologies. For the sake of coherence, the roundtable will focus specifically on Poland, while explicitly keeping the rest of the region in perspective. Given the topic’s breadth, this session must follow a roundtable, rather than a panel, format, to create the best chance for broad reflections on the state and future of Eastern European studies in a time of “global” knowledge. The roundtable format will also afford the session speakers (and audience members) maximum opportunity to engage each other on the different methodologies and goals driving the globalization of Eastern European studies. Given the roundtable’s broad framing, it is crucial that the audience, too, have time to engage the speakers in a much more extensive manner than the traditional panel format might allow, with sufficient flexibility for real conversation and dialogue.

I began with an abbreviated version of this presentation:

This is “Poland Goes Global” – where scholars of various generations explore the ways in which various scholars have, and still might link, traditionally regional stories and global vectors of research and analysis. Thanks to Piotr Kosicki and Malogosza Mazurek for organizing and conceiving our roundtable in these terms.

I love that it is a group of historians who have helped pose to us that Poland go Global. But that means something different in history, I suspect, than it does in other disciplines. At least I proposed to define the sociology of “globalizing knowledge” in these terms in my book:

Globalizing knowledge refers t the process by which distant regions’ knowledgeabilities are implicated in the particular cultures fusing those understandings. The form of globalizing knowledge will vary given the different historical and institutional contexts that shape such learning. Globalizing knowledge is, therefore, relationally composed. The sociology of globalizing knowledge concerns the conditions, manners, and implications of that fusion.263

I’d like for us to reflect on the disciplinary distinction of their contributions, both for history and for other disciplines. We might begin with our evocative title. Let us think

263 Michael D. Kennedy, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015, p. 9.

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about how each of our colleagues uses the global. What intellectual, theoretical, and cultural traditions does this invocation of an apparently common term invoke? More particularly, is there a way in which we can hear a Polish accent when we think in global terms?

Piotr in discussing this panel with me, himself raised the great question: can we talk about Poland without also thinking about other nations in east central Europe. Why should we? What makes that problematic?

Given that my own internationalizing sense began with Poland, one might imagine that I am simply associated with globalizing Poland for two basic reasons. First, I have no family or intellectual ties with Poland prior to my decision to study Poland in my second year of graduate school (that story is told here: http://aseees.org/membership/michael-d-kennedy). Second, as a sociologist and then as an administrator over most of the rest of my career, I have focused on how to elevate Poland’s significance in global, international and area studies without presuming that Poland matters to those who care about other nations, and especially other world regions.

I won’t bore you with the repertoire that I have acquired in that time. However, there is a social science to why Poland has the place that it does in the international and comparative social sciences. In Globalizing Knowledge (pp. 168-71), I have proposed that its place is shaped by the general theoretical arguments that invoke Poland, the path effects those invocations influence, its place in those generalizing arguments, its eventful associations with world historic change, not least of which was the Solidarity movement of 1980-81, and knowledge networks, in which the Polish diaspora and its kin are especially important. Awareness of those dimensions, and others, might allow us to imagine how Poland might have even greater presence in the global imagination. I expect to have much better sense of how this has been, and how it might be, following this session. We’ll proceed in this order:

Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University (http://www.history.columbia.edu/faculty/Mazurek.html). She specializes in modern history of Poland and East Central Europe, history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption and Polish-Jewish studies. Her 2010 book (in Polish), Waiting in Lines. On Experiences of Scarcity in Postwar Poland (Społeczeństwo kolejki. O doświadczeniach niedoboru 1945-1989, Trio 2010 http://www.wydawnictwotrio.pl/index.php?Tytul010=312&Podstrona=0), is among the most highly regarded volumes in the distinguished series in which it appears. Her new book project deals with the intellectual history of East Central European involvement in the making of the non-Western world between the late 19th century and 1960s.  She is also a member of an international research project dealing with the Cold War Connections between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third World’ 1945-1991.

Although she offered more contributions than this, I really appreciated how she marked the centrality of Central and Eastern Europe in the Marxist sense of development, where

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Polish lands were central to thinking about economic development. She also marked that Poland was also important in the social Darwinist thinking of the late nineteenth and especially early 20th century; Polish nationalists themselves developed their own approach to the nation with a kind of social Darwinist approach, albeit with modified imperial ambitions and great concerns for the migration of Poles across the world. Both forms created a kind of social knowledge that is irreducibly global. Finally, Poland under communist rule also extended a global notion, with its dissemination of its own socialism in competition not just with capitalism, but also with others.

Philipp Ther is professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna http://iog.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/personal/professoren/?no_cache=1 Previously he was a professor of comparative European history at the EUI in Florence. His most recent publication Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent. Eine Geschichte des neoliberalen Europa, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014, was awarded with the non-fiction book prize of the Leipzig book fair and has been contracted by Princeton University Press. Before he has published in English The Dark Side of Nation States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe, New York: Berghahn Press, 2014 (German 2011, Polish 2012); Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in 19th Century Central Europe, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2014 (Czech 2008).

Although he offered more contributions than this, his counsel that we distinguish correlations, comparisons, and interdependence in our approach to this globalizing work was powerful. But so too were his more specific invocations of this approach, from his identification of those Poles in the 1890s, the brothers de Reszke, whose conception and performance could enable the multi-lingual opera of the New York Met to sing in the original languages of the particular opera (as opposed to translating all in German or Italian, for example) to the successful narratives of “shock therapy” that depended on Poland. Finally, his admonition that we recognize how global history privileges overseas connections, and that for a Poland which goes global we could also think about various near abroads and neighborhoods within Europe.

Brian Porter-Szucs is Professor of History at the University of Michigan (http://porterszucs.com/). I remember when we searched for the successor to Roman Szporluk at Michigan, and we couldn’t have been more fortunate than to have recruited Brian to that position. He brings a depth expertise to Poland that each university of distinction ought have, but also a capacity to place Polish history in a broader narrative of modernity that every Polish studies person ought be able to marshal. He has recently published Beyond Martyrdom: Poland in the Modern World (2014) and Faith and Fatherland: Modernity, Catholicism, and Poland (2011).  Currently he is working on a book project that’s tentatively titled Supply Side Socialism: The Origins of Neoliberalism in Communist Poland. 

Although he offered more contributions than this, Brian rightly marked the difficulty historians have with treating the world as object, given the discipline’s disposition to consider time and space as crucial variables, which in turn leads historians to treat language and context more than many social sciences might. He notes how historians tend to move the transnational, then, by focusing on a specific aspect of that world,

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whether in terms of trade, migration, intellectual exchanges or war. But Brian offered a distinctive approach: how we might still focus the language and context of particular historical moments of Poland itself, but with questions inspired by comparisons made. His account of the relative repressiveness of the Polish communist state, and of the nation’s 20th century economic achievements, illuminated his point brilliantly. Małgorzata Fidelis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago (http://hist.uic.edu/history/people/faculty/malgorzata-fidelis) She teaches courses on Poland, Eastern Europe, Modern Europe, gender, comparative communism, and the Global Sixties. Her first book Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. The Polish translation (Kobiety, Komunizm i Industrializacja w Powojennej Polsce, Wydawnictwo WAB) has just come out in June 2015. She is currently completing two projects. One is an undergraduate textbook on Eastern Europe: Peoples, Cultures, and Politics from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, co-authored with Jill Massino. The other is a book manuscript tentatively titled The Sixties behind (I said “beyond” by accident in my introduction) the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland, 1954-1976. The latter explores the interaction between young people in Poland and transnational developments, from popular culture and counterculture to protest movements and anti-colonial revolutions.

Although she offered more contributions than this, I was really taken by how Małgorzata noted that there are some fields that are profoundly globalized, as “global 60’s” with its specific methodology. It moves beyond the transmission of ideas and people, but Małgorzata offers here own elaboration on that distinction with her focus on the transnational imagination of Polish youth from that time. It was certainly more than society vs the state, but it did reflect the Cold War itself with its assumption that the West was the World. Her own reading of that period suggests, however, that Latin America’s 1960s in its own terms and in relation to Polish subjectivities might help us move beyond the east/west and core periphery framework.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. His book Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1939-1956 is under review. Forthcoming are a monograph entitled Katoliccy Rewolucjoniści (with IPN) and an edited volume entitled Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (with Catholic University of America Press). He is presently at work on an intellectual biography of Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

Although he offered more contributions than this, he did begin with an account of his university responsibilities: Piotr is Assistant Professor of History of Poland, Europe and the World (http://history.umd.edu/users/kosicki). It’s his job to figure how Poland goes global, and he therefore appreciates how scholarship around Poland’s global encounter has blossomed. But he also poses the wicked problem: Can we decenter Poland in this global history even while we keep it in focus? I think if anyone can figure this out he might, especially with this panel’s company. Piotr himself moves his own global approach through a rather “connective” history. Certainly we all can see how Poland

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went global in the person of John Paul II, but we might also, as Piotr is developing, to it with less well known Polish figures. Tadeusz Mazowiecki exemplifies, and thus is why I so look forward to his intellectual biography of Poland’s first non-communist prime minister after communist rule, this intellectual who in his early years worked through Pax to figure how we might fuse Christianity and socialism in emancipatory ways. With such work, we can return agency to the story.

A terrific discussion followed the panel, anticipating next year’s conference focus on the global conversation. http://aseees.org/convention/future-aseees-conventions/2016-theme I hope the convention might build on this terrific session, especially in highlighting the different epistemological or knowledge cultural vehicles for thinking the world, and the place of Poland, and other nations of this region, in that project in historical practice, and in academic futures.

11/20/15, Notes toward“PORTABLE PRACTICES OF CRITICAL SOCIAL INQUIRY: TAKING EAST CENTRAL EUROPE GLOBAL”

10:00 AM 11/20

Michael D. Kennedy

“What are ways that doctoral students trained in anthropological and sociological approaches to East Central Europe can apply their regional knowledge to less traditionally academic or non-academic work? The question of careers beyond academic teaching is relevant for all young PhD’s whose scholarship has been informed by area studies. It may benefit from looking beyond research methods and factual knowledge of a region to consider critical social scientific inquiry in a region that is taken at the moment as less geopolitically important on its own than, for instance, countries of Eastern Europe

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and Eurasia. If factual knowledge of East Central Europe is currently of limited appeal to the academy, policy makers, and other institutions, what forms of critical social acumen acquired in the study of this region prove useful in other contexts? This roundtable explores extensions of regional knowledge that appear to be more skilled knowing than skilled doing, more intellectual than practical. The discussion will seek to blur this dichotomy while using panelists’ recent scholarly or other professional engagements with either other parts of the globe or non-academic audiences less interested in East Central Europe per se to generate new insights for the development of the field. Participants seek to encourage discussion between junior practitioners reluctant to forego the intellectual engagement of the academy yet eager to apply their training in new ways, and senior scholars who have themselves been looking to broaden the impact of their mentoring and scholarship.“

That paragraph motivates our roundtable. Below are my notes in anticipation.

David William Cohen, in our Ford Foundation area studies proposal but also in our book on Responsibility in Crisis http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/globalpublics/4726364.0001.001/1:5?rgn=div1;view=toc identified 3 dimensions of area studies expertise – grounding, translation, and expertise. Frankly it’s not simple: what aspects of a time and place do you need in order to be grounded in it? We should develop that expertise. We should also claim an expertise that we all practice: translation, not only as a literary scholar might, but as anyone must in order to render understandable their own place and time to others who couldn’t give a damn. And then we ought think about our expertise, and name it.

I would rather we speak of contextual expertise rather than area studies expertise, because it allows us to find common ground with different areas of scholarship – For example, urban studies and architecture have much in common with our traditions. I talk about that in Chapter 3 of Globalizing Knowledge http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24607 Indeed, I would invite you to go to my academia.edu page on extensions of globalizing knowledge to get the link for Ann Pendleton-Jullian’s recent presentation at the Watson Institute http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/ann-pendleton-jullian-design-agency-and-pragmatic-imagination and see how it connects to your own. And we can also ask then how contextual expertise comes into others’ work, by asking what you need to know about a time, place, and frankly context to do your work.

Frankly, it’s easier to celebrate expertise when it’s joined with others. I’ll never forget the best piece of advice I ever gave a student – MA student Dina Smeltz http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/expert/dina-smeltz whom I told to take a survey methods class rather than another area studies class. She went on to win a job that sought that expertise in EE – she was the only one that had both.

We ought develop ethnography as such a method embraced by students as they have embraced survey methods.

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That tradition continues – One of my Brown University undergraduate students, Hanna Braun, had terrific Polish and German area expertise, but I worked with her in developing an expertise in energy studies, writing an award winning honor’s thesis in a comparison of their energy cultural politics. She now works for an energy firm in Poland. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahhelenbraun

Not everyone needs focus on a world historic issue like energy’s future, of course.

We might also think about the various things that draw us to this region. When Jonathan and I taught the survey on central and eastern Europe at the University of Michigan, I typically celebrated the region for its distinctive experience with radical alternativity on the one hand, and cultural creativity beyond expectations of economic development, on the other. But it is especially powerful in terms of enhancing our sense of critique.

Jonathan Larson’s work inspires me here, and not just because he is our organizer. Rather, it’s because he has shown how developing deep expertise about an issue within Slovakia helps us think about and engage the issue more generally. http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14123 What enterprise does not want to encourage “critical thinking”? But that critical thinking has been put typically into such an ideological frame that it ceases to be critical. Jonathan’s exposition of that, and his turn to work beyond our region, illustrates how critical thinking about critical thinking can travel well.

That’s my example of using contextual expertise in our region to articulate a concept that typically travels beyond our region.

Of course let me also rely on those who are wonderful academics but whose work has less exclusively academic qualities. Think about the ways in which Jan Kubik https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/people/jan-kubik whose work on oversymbolization illustrates. Also consider the work of Genevieve Zubrzycki http://lsa.umich.edu/soc/people/faculty/genez.html – we know her as a wonderful specialist in the study of Poland, and now also of Canada. But her speciality relies frankly on the study of national identity, social movements, symbols and the material objects of those symbols. In my work as a consultant to anyone who seeks to mobilize resources with the right cultural frames at the right time, I recommend they think about what they might learn from the beheading of Jean Baptiste or the placement of crosses outside Auschwitz. Are there any charged symbols in our world that enable change?

That’s taking a method used in the engagement of our region and sharing it with others who need to think about how to make a movement more powerful.

Finally, I take an example of someone beyond our region whose area studies expertise nonetheless shook me of late. But she is of Slovak ancestry so maybe she belongs in our conference. Zartuje. I draw on what I previously wrote here (http://futureswewant.net/michael-kennedy-comparing-alternative-futures/ ) to describe her work.

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Kristin Surak’s Making Tea, Making Japan http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=20929 most evidently concerns the practice of nationalism, but it is also something more. Surak’s analysis of the tea ceremony suggests something new about cultural power.

The tea ceremony has somehow survived radical transformations of Japanese national expression while at the same time ensuring a sense of continuousness that phases of isolation, westernization, imperialism, postwar defeat/recovery, and democratic and peaceful internationalism would seem to deny. There is something about this tea ceremony that is remarkably resilient, on the one hand, and generative, on the other.

It is resilient because it is reproduced over time. Yes, the experts and principal practitioners may shift from upper class men to housewives, and it may articulate very differently with various kinds of power, from militarists to commercial houses. It remains recognizably the same in practice over time, but it is more than resilient. It is generative.

Tea ceremony practitioners are able to use this ceremony to express a kind of power that is not just about the manipulation of force or the distribution of resources. It expresses, in that Durkheimian sense, a kind of collective effervescence that is not only in the moment of ritual, but present in the anticipation of its performance, in the immaterial residues left on its artifacts, in the contemporary aura of its historical endurance.

In a seminar at Brown University, Surak explained that resilience and generativity of practice in terms of the contradictions that the tea ceremony embodies. It is distinctively Japanese, and yet it is universal. It is remarkably dependent on certain concrete settings and material artifacts, and yet it transcends the material world. It is heavily scripted, but it depends on a measure of improvised interaction in which much is unpredictable. It is, in short, a performance dripping in feelings of authenticity and yet unreal given the world in which we live. It is not so obviously anticipating a global future we wish, however. Universities could.

Although I celebrate knowledge networks in Globalizing Knowledge as the most agile and immediate in addressing the futures we want, their nodes necessarily involve universities. They appear to function in ways that appear to be mostly about the reproduction of their status, or the search to climb the ladders of recognition. But I wonder whether we might not recognize in these knowledge institutions contradictions that not only debilitate our higher purpose, but represent the resilience and generativity Surak identifies in the tea ceremony.

In my recent work with Polish colleagues, including most especially Tomek Zarycki, http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/informacje-o-instytucie/zespol/zarycki/ about how universities might become both more resilient and dynamic, I have drawn lessons from the Tea Ceremony. In a sense, I have sought to translate the lessons I learned there into a more

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general approach to making institutions that are more appropriate for the 21st century in which we live.

I conclude then by saying we ought to support our students, and ourselves by recognizing:

A) the distinction of our expertise B) to work to bring another “generalizing” expertise into our midst, like survey

methods or energy affairsC) to develop contextual expertise on a theme whose general resilience is critical,

like Jonathan Larson’s work on critical thinking;D) to think by analogy and apply it to others – what is the equivalent for social

movements of putting crosses outside Auschwitz?E) To think creatively – not only how do we understand a complex process in

context, but how can we take its most distinct features and develop an approach to them outside?

Notes in Anticipation of, and Following a talk entitled

Iván Szelényi, Solidarity, and the Intellectualities of the 21st Century264

Michael D. Kennedy Brown University

Together with his coauthors, Ivan Szelenyi has done as much as anyone to identify the class distinctions of intellectuals, and to identify the systemic and cultural foundations of their coherence through communist rule and its aftermath.  The qualities of intellectuality in the 21st century have, however, shaken the confidence of most analysts.  Instead of class, we find networks and fields organizing our knowledgeable interventions, with no mutually intelligible culture

264 Prepared for presentation at “Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Themes from Szelényi,” in Pécs, Hungary, October 2015. http://szociologia.btk.pte.hu/ivan-szelenyi-intellectuals-inequalities-and-transitions. This paper draws in part on a project together with Alan Harlam, Aleksandra Gołdys, Maria Rogaczewska and Maria Szymborska supported by various units of Brown University, with the Program on Business, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations in the lead.

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of critical or other discourse underlying and thus justifying the class distinction.  Channeling the spirit of Szelenyi, I propose to challenge that turn away from class with a new method for identifying a promising intellectuality in statu nascendi based on principles of innovation, complexity and solidarity in association with intellectual responsibility.  I conclude by considering the implications of this reformulation for considering the refugee crisis racking Europe and especially Hungary.

Sociologists dedicated to internationalism in America identify Iván Szelényi as one of their principal intellectual inspirations.265 Indeed, as much as any figure in 20th/21st century sociology, Iván Szelényi has not only embodied the distinction of intellectuals, but also identified it. At least my work in the sociology of intellectuality has been indebted to Iván’s scholarship on this subject more than to anyone else’s.

In my first book,266 I used Konrad and Szelényi 267 to depart from the dominant nationalist framework used in explaining the formation of Solidarność in Poland in 1980-81 in order to explain the formation of this greatest social movement of the 20th century268 in terms of class alliances. Rather than presume a national basis for the alliance between professionals, intelligentsia and workers, I explored both how systemic conditions and strategic action minimized the apparent significance of class divisions for the nation.

That class alliance not only laid the foundation for communism’s end,269 but the dynamics of that transformation also led to the decline of labor as a social force and to the ascendance of neoliberalism as a reigning ideology.270 Some even argue that communism’s end laid the groundwork for the fourth new class project of the East Central European intelligentsia.

Of course that reference invokes the work Iván did with Gil Eyal and Eleanor Townsley to characterize the postcommunist system.271 There are many more dimensions of that work that deserve mention, but here let me focus on two aspects I have previously identified. First, Eyal et al characterized this postcommunist capitalism according to the qualities of the intelligentsia that made it. They especially emphasized the character of

265 Michael D. Kennedy and Miguel Centeno, “Internationalism and Global Transformations in American Sociology” pp 666-712 in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Sociology in America: A History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/An American Sociological Association Centennial Publication, 2007). 266 Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991) 267 George Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979).268 Kubik, Jan. 2009. “Solidarność” In Immanuel Ness (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest 1500-Present. London: Blackwell. pp. 3072-80.269 Chapter 1 in Michael D. Kennedy Cultural Formations of Postcommunism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).270 See David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell University Press 2005) and my own take on his work here: (2007) “Anger and Solidarity in Transition Culture” Labor History 48:1:81-88.271 Eyal, Gil, Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe. London: Verso, 1998.

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relations within this class and the individual adaptations of elites with different forms of capital to form an alliance enabling their hegemonic managerial bloc.272

While I appreciate very much this kind of capital-based argument, I like even more the turn Iván and his coauthors took when they elevated irony in their characterization of this class. They also identified it as a method for critical social science.

During the symposium organized around the 25th anniversary of the publication of Konrad and Szelényi in English, irony was blasting. In that symposium’s subsequent publication in Theory and Society, I wrote,

During the symposium, Iván pointed out that our recognition of irony was quite appropriate. In fact, he said, he and his coauthors had recently written a paper on how irony lies as the epistemological foundation of his oeuvre, but the mainstream sociology journal to which it was initially submitted declined to publish it. A journal more accustomed to critical theory’s elaboration published it subsequently.273 It’s tough to capture in print the audience’s reception of this fine point, but most appreciated how irony might be used to illuminate irony’s own place in professional social science. However, the irony at work in Thesis Eleven didn’t have the same critical power as I found in The Intellectuals.

Iván and his 2003 colleagues put irony in the place of socialism’s

counterculture.274 While they acknowledged humor’s importance, the main place irony occupied was in absolution from responsibility for identifying a positive normative standpoint from which to develop critical sociology. In this, socialism’s demise and globalization’s hegemony becomes almost a relief for critical intellectuals, released from the obligatory defense or critique of societies made in the name of their allegiance. Nonetheless, irony’s revival is especially apparent in the assessment of the fourth new class project.

Reflecting on Making Capitalism without Capitalists, Iván and his

colleagues find intellectuals to be a particularly flawed class. While Gouldner may have evaluated their flaw in terms of their distance from universality,275 the intellectuals’ flaw in Eyal et al. (2003) comes in their failure to hold onto power once they get it. Using their capacity for rational discourse as the means by which they construct capitalism,276 much as they once constructed socialism, this East

272 Michael D. Kennedy Cultural Formations of Postcommunism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 25). 273 Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi, and Eleanor Townsley, “On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology” Thesis Eleven 73(2003):5-41.274 As Zygmunt Bauman famously identified its place: Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976.275 Alvin Goulder. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York: Seabury, 1979.276 Charles Derber, William A. Schwartz and Yale Magrass Power in the Highest Degree: Professionals and the Rise of a New Mandarin Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) might thereby provide a better foundation for argument with their emphasis on the culture of rational discourse.

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European intelligentsia loses its distinction, or its power, as soon as it has the capacity to realize it.277

I love irony, and indeed, Iván and his coauthors are right in signifying its critical place in their articulation of intellectual distinction. But that was more than a decade ago. Irony’s power has, I believe, remained relevant mostly for those who find their greatest comfort in the café, and worse a justification for remaining distant from the implications of addressing intellectual responsibility itself.

In my last volume, 278 I identified my book’s foundational question as this: “Who is intellectually responsible and why?” (p. xviii). In preparation for a talk in Singapore about the book, Hiro Saito helped me recognize this more adequate, if less parsimonious, question for my life’s work: how do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion? Irony might be that vehicle, but I’m not sure that it suffices, especially in the face of the refugee crisis overwhelming Europe today.

Subsequent to the publication of Globalizing Knowledge, I developed a list of issues that might help us recognize intellectual responsibility in relation to the crisis in Ukraine.279

1. Commitment to figuring priorities in global transformations Climate Change is essential, but how important is Crimea’s fate?

2. Commitment to evidence-based coherent arguments But what kinds of evidence and coherence are critical?

3. Openness to reasoned challenge But when does that challenge become distraction?

4. Willingness to confront “nightmare questions” But when does that disable conviction and courage?

5. Embrace of reason’s autonomy as ideal, But how does that fit with a commitment to public engagement?

6. Does Responsibility mean “Facing Reality?”But how does that reflect a set of norms articulating that reality?

That set of questions was useful in pulling apart the debate about the crisis in Ukraine, especially given the significance of information war in that context. However, I think we need to see this as something that is, itself, implicated in transformations of the 21st century and the distinctive challenges this epoch offers us. In what follows, I identify several steps that help us recognize an intellectuality that can help us navigate that challenge. 277 Michael D. Kennedy, “The Ironies of Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power” Theory and Society 34 (2005): 24-33.278 Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 279 “Globalizing Knowledge and the Articulation of Intellectual Responsibility With Special Regard to Ukraine: A Knowledge Cultural Sociology”, a lecture at American University supported also by George Washington University, April 9, 2015. Available here: https://www.academia.edu/10282109/Extensions_of_Globalizing_Knowledge

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I am also working to refine my sense of what this 21st century means (and is the

object of a paper scheduled to be presented one month from now280). I began to develop that project in the final substantive chapter of my last book where I discussed the systemic crisis in which we now live, as well as the crisis of subjectivity that moves with that crisis, and also independently of it.281

Put all too simply, I proposed there that the explicit governance of global, regional, and national systems is increasingly at odds with its legitimations and everyday practice. That, in turn, leads a growing number of actors to reject those everyday terms of governance and embrace new subjectivities based on their alienation from the system. Anarchist sensibilities are one expression of this, but so too are proto-fascist or fascist movements. Irony might also be one way to adapt to the absence of alternatives. Solidary knowledge is another.

Solidary Knowledge

Aleksandra Gołdys, Maria Rogaczewska and Maria Szymborska are sociologists and founders of a unit of University of Warsaw282 dedicated to supporting “bottom-up” change in public policies (especially in sport-for-all and public health policies). They develop “solidary knowledge” – active “co-action” with local actors and policy makers in making change and new knowledge simultaneously. 

They recently visited Brown University to work with Alan Harlam, the founder of the Social Innovation Initiative at the university’s Howard Swearer Center, 283 and me to figure how social entrepreneurship, engaged scholarship, social innovation and like endeavors travel and are translated.

Harlam is among the leaders in this field associated with, among other things, the Ashoka vision. Ashoka says it plainly:

Ashoka’s mission has evolved beyond catalyzing individual entrepreneurs to enabling an “everyone a changemaker” world. This means equipping more people – including young people – with the skillset and a connection to purpose so that they can contribute ideas and effectively solve problems at whatever scale is needed in their family, community, city, workplace, field, industry, country. This evolution comes from the urgent realization that the pace of change is

280 “What Was 20th Century Transition Culture and What Has Come Next?” A Keynote Address at a conference entitled “Transition in Retrospect: 25 Years after the Fall of Communism”, Tirana, Albania, November 2015.281 “Framing: Cosmopolitan Intellectuality and Consequential Solidarity” in Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.282 The Social Challenges Unit (Centrum Wyzwań Społecznych) is one of the centers of the Robert B. Zajonc Institute for Social Studies at the University of Warsaw (http://cws.uw.edu.pl/en/) The unit’s mission is to support innovation in the social sciences, as well as to mobilize resources from throughout the university to address critical societal challenges in partnership with other institutions, organizations, entrepreneurs, leaders and groups of citizens.  They put into practice “learning by doing”. 283 http://www.brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/social-innovation-initiative/

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accelerating in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Our strategic initiative focus on setting in motion the people, resources and ecosystems that will bring about a social revolution where everyone contributes to change for the good of all. Working in partnership with private, philanthropic and citizen sector players we are achieving large-scale social innovation that is grounded in decades of entrepreneurial experience. 284

There are different emphases, backgrounds and ideologies in this family of social intervention. Harlam himself emphasizes the following distinctions in teaching his own course on social innovation.

Social Innovation refers to the creation of new ideas that address social problems by reconceiving the status quo to create more sustainable and just systems that benefit marginalized groups and society as a whole. To meet this definition, these ideas should be able to demonstrate their impact and consider pathways to scale and sustainability

By contrast,

Social Entrepreneurship refers to the implementation of social innovations through organizations of various forms including not-for-profit, hybrid, and for-profit. Other modes of social change: public policy, advocacy, social movements, philanthropy, etc.

Clarifying

Social Enterprise refers to organizations whose business models prioritize social justice motives, stakeholder accountability, and reinvestment in mission over strict financial returns and shareholder interests prioritized by traditional private sector. Social Enterprise may/may not be Social Entrepreneurship

A kindrid venture at Brown University is something called “engaged scholarship”. Although there is no settled definition, the university and its program leaders have settled on this working understanding:

“Engaged scholarship” refers to community-based inquiry by students and faculty in partnership with community members outside of the academy. Its goal is to create high-impact learning experiences and collaborative educational partnerships that address major social challenges and produce tangible public benefits.Engaged scholarship is premised on the idea that reciprocal exchanges between academic and non-academic partners - in the classroom, on campus, in the community - create rich opportunities for learning, knowledge-creation, and problem-solving that will help to create a more just and equitable society.285

284 https://www.ashoka.org/about285 http://www.brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/engaged-scholars-program

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As my Polish colleagues and I discussed these examples, we found that there was no simple translation of terms, much less of concept and especially of practice to their own work. Simply there are very different traditions of scholarly engagement with publics; even the translation of entrepreneurship does not carry the non-economic connotation in Poland that it has developed in English. But beyond this question of translation, there is also a point of emphasis, and standpoint, that animates debate even on the Brown University campus.

Each of these Brown University approaches can privilege the vision and experience of those from Brown, rather than the conception of problems, and diagnosis of ills, from the partner community. This statement is too crude, but it illustrates the problem: to be an intellectual, one needs to lead others with one’ superior understanding, one’s capacity to recognize how change can happen within the terms of the existing system. In some ways, this may be too difficult to address on the Brown campus to everyone’s satisfaction. Questions of diversity and public engagement for a privileged Ivy League university may vex and defy resolution despite the university’s most liberal disposition. On the other hand, it might do better, and I think solidary knowledge invites the question.

The Social Challenges Unit’s preferred term in solidary knowledge rests in an active sense of partnership, where they are committed to “bottom up” development strategies rooted in values of openness, equality, sustainability, diversity, design thinking and doing things “out of the box”. My colleagues have developed this approach within Poland, and it seems quite resonant with the intentions, if not always perceived approaches, of what social innovation and engaged scholarship represent at Brown University. While these examples are all engaging partners “within” a legitimate system, there is no reason why this method could not also be associated with those who are beyond a system, or even opposed to a system.286 Indeed, none of these approaches really even mark a system at all.

These different approaches from Poland, Providence and Ashoka bear a set of family resemblances including these more appealing attributes:

a) They focus on problem solving approaches;b) They recognize the value of knowledge-in-action; andc) They celebrate justice and sustainability as values;

In this, intellectuals associated with this movement bring learning out of precious bastions into meaningful dialogue and struggle for improving everyday lives. At the same time, however, they also minimize the significance of ideology in their work. They also avoid marking any major systemic problems in preference for addressing more immediate and tangible issues. In this, actors of different ideological persuasions can find common ground.

286 I would someday like to consider how their approach, and the “sociological interventionism” associated with Touraine, could reinforce one another.

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Indeed, social democrats and conservatives alike can embrace such a problem solving approach.287 Some might suggest that neoliberalism encourages this very kind of method, “filling in” for what the system itself cannot address.288 That may be true, but it all depends on who one works with in developing solidary knowledge.

I think this quality of intellectuality is very much characteristic of the emergent intellectuality of the 21st century: the system is too hard to figure out in total, and therefore we redirect our efforts to analyze the qualities of our interventions themselves, and how they address immediate and broader problems. Intellectuality move aside; let us analyze, and think in terms of, interventions themselves.289 But intellectuality is essential for figuring out our partners, our problems, and why we take on what we do. Thus, a critical complement to our work around social interventions of various sorts is a reconception of what solidarity is about. Fortunately for me, another Polish knowledge network is at work rethinking this very project.

Engaging Solidarity

I was drawn to participate in a different knowledge network organized around the Center for Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw (http://www.centrumjp2.pl/aktualnosci/solidarnosc-w-brukseli/ ) by chance conversations.290 This network produced a volume called Solidarity, Step by Step (2015)291 http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/solidarnosc-krok-po-kroku/?lang=en. I wrote the following as a blurb:

Solidarity has inspired millions, as word and as concept, as movement and as ideal.  Łuczewski et al do more than translate the meanings of Poland’s struggles. Thanks to this volume, the world has a much better sense of how solidarity might be itself globalized with humility, with sincerity, and above all, with consequence.

Michał Łuczewski and Karol Wasilewski also made a film entitled “The Father, the Son, and the Friend”, one of the most moving films I have seen in some time. Its humility in inviting us to experience the real human emotions of the suffering, and forgiveness, involved in that struggle for Solidarity, in every struggle of solidarity, was powerful and profound. And it stands in stark contrast to many who talk of solidarity today. I know because I also saw this film for the first time at a conference in Brussels

287 Too, Pendleton-Julian and Brown recommend with their own ecosystem design approach a very similar approach if their exemplary practice at book’s start is any indication. They celebrate José Antonio Abreu and his own intervention in Venezuela with a “paper orchestra”, transforming children’s experience of poverty with considerable effect. See for example https://www.ted.com/talks/jose_abreu_on_kids_transformed_by_music?language=en288 Interview with Aleksandra Gołdys, Maria Rogaczewska and Maria Szymborska on October 8, 2015.289 Of course this references Gil Eyal and Larissa Bucholz, “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions” Annual Review of Sociology 36:117-37.290 I drew on contributions to this collection of reflections extending themes of my book: https://www.academia.edu/10282109/Extensions_of_Globalizing_Knowledge for this section. Please review to see a longer version of these comments.291 Michał Łuczewski , Mikołaj Achremczyk, Piotr Czekierda, Michał Gawrilow, Maria Szymborska, Paweł Łaczkowski and Małgorzata Fałkowska-Warska . Solidarity Step by Step. Warsaw, 2015.

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where divergent takes on Solidarity were readily apparent (http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/konferencja/?lang=en). We subsequently hosted some of the team at Brown University where we discussed their book and their film.292

Most who talk about solidarity today seek to own it, to appropriate it, to say that

they stand for it while their opponents, or even enemies, denigrate it with their practices. It becomes a resource in political competition, not a foundation for extending connections, building ties to those not recognized in that web of mutuality, to invoke the words of Martin Luther King Jr. In the work of Łuczewski and Wasilewski, we have a film which extends solidarity most profoundly because it is not about the politics of a movement as much as the spiritual roots of our connections to others. It is about how that kind of love might itself be transformative. But this is a love that is different from most sociological conventions of solidarity. It is more than a love of one’s brothers and sisters in struggle. It is also a love of one’s enemy, to recognize the pain of those who would inflict harm.

The authors of this film, and of the text, are associated with the Catholic Church, and find in the worlds of Pope John Paul II, Father Tischner, Father Popiełuszko, and others in that tradition adequate inspiration for love. But they don’t rest on their own traditions only. In an expression of their vision of solidarity itself, in the embrace of the very love they also seek to understand, they acknowledge those who would now be identified as their opponents in politics. Instead of marking them as those who threaten the chosen, they recognize their intellectual aliens’ own expressions of love, and express in this act a spirit of generosity. For example, they write about those individuals, and traditions, I know better from my own knowledge networks:

Members of KOR knew that hate is self-destructive, and that if they allowed hate to be a response to state violence, beatings, arrests and provocations – they would lose. They treated it as a “sin, a sickness and a misfortune”. Solidarity cannot be founded on hatred of the enemy. For Jacek Kuron, a truly human world is a world in which one creates and loves. (Łuczewski et al, 2015:82).

Of course it was Pope John II who said that there is no solidarity without love (Łuczewski et al, 2015:85).

Some of those who saw the film at a showing in Brussels were critical – how can you talk about forgiveness at the individual level? Shouldn’t we be thinking about political confessions at a higher level? To be sure, this is the currency of political contest, but I think this is precisely why this film, and this book, are different. The creators of this work offer a currency of love and care that this film itself celebrates. Of course this is not the typical kind of thing sociologists address, but it could be, and I’m so glad that Łuczewski and his team are taking this up.

As I engaged this Brussels conference, I was struck by two ways in which solidarity was conceived. There were some who wanted to address it as something that could be possessed, something that could be owned, something some political parties

292 http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/globalizing-solidarity-step-step

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might accuse others of lacking. Of course those who struggled within that original movement, those who made the impossible possible, have more than a right, and rather a duty, to recall those experiences, to own that history, to explain to those who were not a part of that time what solidarity was.

Some can manage that in the spirit of openness and generosity I saw in Solidarity and its underground when I first came to Poland in 1983. Others can’t, and rather use it to draw a line between us and them. Of course back in those founding days, both spirits were present, as they were in that Brussels conference. I am frankly drawn to the one that invited me to explore, not to the one that demanded I recognize those with authority to tell me what is right. Luczewski et al invite that exploration.

The team devised six steps in realizing solidarity – to face reality, seek the good, work on yourself, serve others, strive for agreement and forgive in truth. These are really compelling and deserving of deep reflection. They introduce each so powerfully, not least because they are able to bring people into dialogue in this history that today cannot speak with one another with their divergent locations across ideological barricades. To listen to my colleagues speak today of the offense they suffer with the words and actions of their political opponents is riddled with such pain, and such resentment. It is no wonder that dialogue is so difficult, but they are working to figure the bases of that dialogue leading to solidarity. In that spirit, they offer 10 principles.

11. The identity of the parties to dialogue must be defined; there can be no dialogue between people who do not know who they are. Sometimes the identity of the parties is only revealed at this stage. 12. The parties undertaking dialogue must do it honestly and with good will.13. The parties are mutually open to one another, they identify with their cause, they do not arbitrarily select who they are going to talk to; an opponet becomes a partner, who may be in the right.14. Both parties are open to changing their mind, accepting that they may not be in the right. 15. Both parties demonstrate commitment to dialogue, they react to one another’s voices (responsiveness) and they are predictable. 16. The means of dialogue is a peaceful exchange of thoughts, which is transparent and with the same access to information and resources. 17. The means of dialogue is opposition. The partners in the dialogue most oppose one another. 18. The aim of dialogue is compromise. We note that compromise may be an aim in a practical dialogue concerning a conflict of interests, which may be partially conceded; yet in a solidarity dialogue, compromise is not the aim; at most it is a milestone on the road to the next two aims. 19. The aims of dialogue is the rebuilding of ties and an exchange of gifts. 20. The aim of dialogue is a common quest for truth and goodness. (Łuczewski et al, pp 118-19).

Keep in mind these principles can become quite transformative, depending on with whom we have this exchange, especially if that project is knowledge in action itself.

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To develop solidary knowledge, therefore, requires embedding the strategy of partnership selection in a larger project of solidarity making, which itself has implications for the ways in which we think about the reproduction and transformation of systems. Unbinding design helps here. Design Unbound

Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown are developing a radically different take on how to mobilize knowledge in the address of social problems and systemic crises. I did not, in my volume, mean to suggest that they represent a kind of design thinking – indeed, they are purposely moving beyond design principles if by that we think of thinking without doing. For Pendleton-Jullian and Brown, they are working to design for emergence, both in and on systems and organizations. That approach requires deep listening, and new forms of listening for different scales of design.293

Their premise from Chapter 2 of their forthcoming book: "Understanding that we are matter too, infused with systems of meaning, and part of an interconnected and interdependent world, requires a major shift of perception, but one that is necessary if we are to take on the key problems and opportunities of our time.” I think this is one of the most important foundations for developing an intellectuality of the 21st century.

Their volume is not yet published, but they were kind enough to allow me to draw on it for my work on Globalizing Knowledge. This is Pendleton-Jullian and Brown’s presentation of design’s distinction that I cite in GK.

Design has always been a visionary pursuit and a visionary practice, – one that projects the future while remaining deeply grounded in the past and the present. The link between vision as a mental activity — imagining a future — and its accomplishment in the world — the building of the imagined future — is design. Design’s principal focus is the making of things, whether material entities, virtually produced material entities, or fully virtual entities. Because design’s principal enterprise is the making of things that operate in the world – a world unfolding — design is an agent of the future. Design is optimistic. It brings new things into the world. Designers take on problems, model them, frame them, and create responses through the distribution of material, real or virtual, in space. Designers are by nature opportunistic. They create openings from which to make things. When there are no clear and present problems defined, they go out and find them embedded in the intricacy of everyday life. By problems, we do not mean only things problematic, but also opportunities for working on the questions, puzzles, and enigmas that are inherent to human existence. The beauty of design as an approach to life is its creative opportunistic tendencies. The entrepreneurialism associated with these tendencies has always been a driving force and one that has been effective in negotiating change at all scales.

293 John Seely Brown, personal communication, May 31, 2015.

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From elegant objects to infrastructure, design has the distinct capacity to affect the context in which it sits. Visionary, optimistic and opportunistic, design is different than instrumental problem solving. Instrumental problem solving works to solve defined problems. Design works within a rich mental space in which problems are the impetus for work that converts ideas into things that are integrally linked to human behavior, perceptions, values and desires. As such, design may or may not solve problems directly. It engages the life around problems. This distinguishes design not only in its focus, but also in the methods and practices it engages. It requires a different set of skills and capacities, a different disposition, and a different set of instincts. Quite simply, design has a different DNA.The optimism associated with design is a skeptical optimism. It is an optimism shaped by questions that arise. It is not abstract or naïve. As a process that interweaves thought with action, one receives feedback from the action and the feedback leads to new questions that expand understanding of the problem space. Thought is grounded through the test of theory hitting the real world. Trying out ideas leads to failures and unexpected new questions, and ultimately to greater depth, breadth and sophistication of the responses. Design activity relies on perpetual skeptical optimism. Optimism that is called into action again and again, as one faces new questions, limited successes, and things that do not work. Optimism drives design forward, leveraging learning and insight from action that is integrally associated with questions. Design’s skeptical optimism is aimed at the world. It serves to translate and mediate change. It serves to assimilate and shape the ongoing disruption and evolution of culture, society, and technology. Further, design makes things that participate in the evolution of culture, society, and technology. Think about the iPod to iPhone to iPad revolution and its impact on how we express ourselves, how we connect to each other, and how we work with new platforms of information (Pendleton-Julian and Brown 2013).294

Here, then, we can see intellectuals at work, cutting across conventional fields of intervention, drawing on new forms of intellectuality to construct effective means of addressing opportunities and challenges. It is intellectuality, and it is problem solving, without focusing necessarily on problems per se. Nonetheless, Design Unbound bears some resemblance with that problem solving approach, to the social innovation, engaged scholarship, and social entrepreneurship, I described earlier.

In fact, in the start of their book, they celebrate José Antonio Abreu and his own intervention in Venezuela with a “paper orchestra”, transforming children’s experience of poverty with considerable effect. 295 Their approach is, however, also different from social innovation: it swings back around to rethink the larger systems in which it is embedded with an eye toward shaping change.

One of the reasons this approach appeals to me is because it does not begin its analysis with an identification of the system as such. The networks and bounds of the

294 Kennedy, 2015: 231-32295 https://www.ted.com/talks/jose_abreu_on_kids_transformed_by_music?language=en

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system emerge from the problem they study. That, it seems to me, is especially important in the 21st century given the difficulty we ought to have in recognizing the boundaries and cumulation of systems themselves.

21st Century Systems

During the Pécs conference, Karl Ulrich Mayer proposed that Ivan has developed one of the last projects where societal analysis as class analysis can explain systems of domination and exploitation as well as directions of social change. No longer, he argues, can one derive change from understanding the relationships between collective actors representing broad social groups. That proposal is well worth considering, but I think it reflects something more than the eclipse of an analytical position. It also reflects qualities of the 21st century. We can consider two other works that illustrate that very point.

Saskia Sassen’s recent account of the emergent system296 in which accumulation takes place through expulsion rather than through incorporation illuminates this kind of disarticulation.297 For her, inequality becomes less central to a critical sociology precisely because that depends on a kind of coherent system thinking that is inconsistent with the world in formation. She would rather focus on the expulsion of peoples (of the poor and of their health, for example) and of things (of proximate environments and global atmospheres, for example). Given the dependence of so much sociology on thinking about structures and processes within systems, we need to reformulate much of sociology itself. We need to think about how people and things are expelled from systems in order to allow systems to function, and capital to be accumulated. We need, then, to analyze the spaces in between, and beyond, systems to understand the conditions of life, and of destruction. Refugees fit squarely in that mission.

Michael Mann’s last volume on social power also helps us think about systems in more disarticulated ways. At the very least, we need to think about non-equivalent and non-congruent forms of power in the organization of systems of power. He identifies political, military, ideological, and economic forms.298 This rather Weberian approach to power is consistent with Szelenyi’s own Weberian inclination too. But the person who understands this contingency better than anyone in the world may be Putin.

Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, first, and now Syria, threatens to move us into World War III. Although his economic and ideological powers are profoundly limited, his use of military power in system-disrepectful fashion has garnered for him a certain political power whose end state we cannot anticipate. It is, however, part of a more general Ubermensch escapism whose approximations we can see in Donald Trump and Brexit.299

296 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.297 I reviewed it here: (2015) “Centering the Edge in the Shift from Inequality to Expulsion” Contemporary Sociology 44:1(11-14)298 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 4: Globalizations, 1945-2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, esp. 423-32.299 (forthcoming) “Brexit, Übermensch Escapism, and Anglo-American-European Solidarity” Queries

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Such escapisms don’t solve problems, but they put system problems off and move crises of power’s abuse to the center of our attention. This, in turn, makes problematic systems even more difficult to govern, and all actors appear equally incompetent before the challenges destroying us. It may be useful for authorities seeking to hold onto power, and might increase the sense of intellectuals’ political responsibility, but it also might distract all from the more foundational and critical problems prompting such escapism. I wonder if certain Hungarian authorities might resemble this remark.

Mentioning Hungary in this moment is meant as an invitation to those far more knowledgeable than I am to consider the refugee crisis overwhelming Hungary not only on its own terms, but also for how it represents a larger crisis and transformation of the world system and of our own sense of intellectual responsibility.

The Refugee Crisis and Intellectual Responsibility

For a conference honoring Iván Szelényi, it’s most appropriate, it seems to me, to begin with how I might envision his own approach.

I have never been Iván’s student, but he has been most generous with me in the times we have visited with one another – in Los Angeles, Budapest, Ann Arbor, New Haven, and Abu Dhabi, and in various conferences. I once interviewed him formally, where I asked him explicitly to mark his position. It’s hard to know whether a position he articulated 20 years ago still looks familiar, but I think it is. I draw on my summary from 10 years ago.

Iván has identified himself as Weberian, on the one hand, emphasizing that our conceptual tools are always inadequate before the complexities of reality, thereby only capturing that which our values lead us to recognize as important to address. He also self-identifies as populist, in preferring the viewpoint on reality that is from the bottom, from the underdog. Although he has focused on elites and intellectuals, his interpretation of them rarely squares simply with their own self-understanding, and is more likely to be something plausible according to those who are the beneficiaries, or victims, of their power. 300

You can see this disposition again in his recent account of the triple crisis of sociology.301 There, he recommends that we “return to the classical tradition of Marx and Weber when sociology asked the great questions and was in its reflexive, interpretative mode a serious challenge to economics (and the just-born political sciences). Why not a left-leaning, critical, neo-classical sociology?”

It is not obvious, however, how such a sociology ought engage the refugee crisis. That neo-classical sociology, after all, focuses most on systems that are coherent and relatively bounded unlike those today. Too, before the conference, I looked for Ivan’s own public commentaries on the refugee crisis, but given my language limitations, I

300 Michael D. Kennedy, “The Ironies of Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power” Theory and Society 34 (2005): 24-33.301 http://contexts.org/blog/the-triple-crisis-of-sociology/

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could only find this clue. Iván shared on his FaceBook stream one commentary on the Refugee Crisis without comment. 302 He shared what Eszter Kovacs wrote. She develops her contribution,303 as I see it, in these steps:

1. The Hungarian authorities’ horrific response to refugees reflects a disposition that is distributed powerfully across the world.

2. Those authorities can profit from the crisis and their approach to its management by mobilizing public opinion against the EU and those who can imagine solidarity beyond the nation;

3. This in turn divides Europe further, by allowing those beyond the front lines of the refugee crisis to castigate the barbarians on the European Union’s side of the gates.

302 Eszter Krasznai Kovacs, “Looking through the Fence: Hungary’s Refugee Psyche” Open Democracy 18 September 2015 https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/eszter-krasznai-kovacs/looking-through-fence-hungarys-refugee-psyche

303 In more detail, she invites us to recognize the larger system of which Hungary is part, and the responsibilities of other actors for the crisis that looms largest in Hungary:

Hungary’s attitude reflects the xenophobic rhetoric of the current British government. It takes lessons from Australia, a country that detains its asylum seekers in off-shore processing camps. Calling out eastern Europe for its “crisis of shame” deflects and belittles the inaction of wider Europe and the world, draws attention away from the recent decisions to go to war, and displaces responsibility for refugees to the ‘frontline’ of the Schengen zone.

Still, the crisis in Hungary provided immediate political effect for the authorities: Now, refugees crossing the Hungarian border are arrested. Escalating the impression of conflict served the Hungarian government well: it legitimises the criminalisation of refugees crossing the military-protected razor-wire fence, punishable with three years’ prison. A sad black comedy: refugee camps - no; prisons - yes….. Alongside a new Constitution that took over media stations and reorganised the courts, the past few years have seen an institutionalisation of fear, corruption, racial tensions and intolerance for the homeless and the less well off. High unemployment and low opportunities for well-being have led to upwards of half a million Hungarians leaving the country since 2010 to seek work abroad.

Regardless of how this crisis affects political power within Hungary, it shapes the articulation of power across Europe, reinforcing the inferiority of the eastern part of the EU, and of Hungary as well. It implies a moral inferiority that drives east European resentment even more.

These responses highlight western Europe’s distance from the realities of the conflicts at train stations and roadsides between refugees and citizens, whether in Greece, Macedonia or Hungary. The stories serve to ‘other’ the concerns of eastern Europeans, to elongate the distance between their reasons and responses, and fail to understand the roots and embedded nature of perceived threats to these Europeans’ way of life….The Hungarian memory of its oft-invaded country has led to a culture that easily sees itself as a victim, forever enduring, and always on the wrong side of history. Social science research has found that Hungarians identify time and again as “sufferers” amongst their European compatriots…. Many Hungarians feel that they have been relegated to the underside of the European reality for too long – their somewhat displaced vindictive stance on immigration, I would argue, is minted by this simmering anger…Understanding these must not be confused with a defence of the traditional. Coming to grips with local realities is a precondition of change, and clear-eyed appreciation for these has been almost entirely absent from this debate. To really give life and meaning to the rally cry “All of us are human beings!” requires the recognition that we are surrounded by rules that are racist, parochial and divisive and that these rules affect and regulate our bodies by virtue of where we happen to be born. These rules in our day-to-day lives are often invisible and so remain unquestioned; they are such a strong part of our societies that they become a part of our identities.

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This helps me understand the crisis from both within Hungary, in the relationship between Hungary and Europe, and in terms of general systemic principles. For those reasons, I can see why Iván posted this piece. It also reflects that Weberian complexity, and invites us to think with the author, and with him, about who the underdog really is, and why the concepts we have are trapping us in an ironic position that defies consequential intellectual practice. But given our public conversation in the conference, and subsequent reflection, we can imagine these elements that are critical.

First, the refugee crisis demands a transformation of subjectivities on many levels. We can see acts of real personal and small group generosity and solidarity seeking ways that recognize the human suffering these brave souls bear.304 Here, I could readily see solidary knowledge in action. Iván himself wondered, in discussion, why it was that we did not have so many ethnographies about the refugees themselves, and why we are not collecting more data about them. Journalists are doing the job better than social scientists, but the latter should also be present simply to get more accurate information.305 After all, when some declare refugees to be dangerous, or possibly stealing Hungarian jobs, we can readily learn whether that is the case.

We not only witness a transformation of subjectivities among refugees and within civil society. We also see transnational mobilizations of experts on the refugee crisis itself, challenging authorities who make the plight of refugees worse with their own state polices and practices.306 Of course not all political authorities make that plight worse.307

We see terrific variations evident among political leaders in their own assumption of political responsibility for this kind of suffering. This, it seems to me, is an expression at a political level of some of the principles of solidarity articulated by those in the project associated with Solidarity Step by Step. But we also see something else too.

Even as we see a new kind of transnational solidarity both on an everyday level and among political authorities, we also see a new hardening of positions, where solidarities are limited to those who bear the same religion, the same nationality, or even the same ideology. Indeed, during the conference, Ilona Tomova suggested that we look at the repertoires of racism vis-à-vis national minorities to recognize how cultural schema used to diminish certain members of a national community might be repurposed to explain why refugees are undeserving of the emergent solidarity I describe above.308 We might even ask, as Doro Bohle posed, whose images we see when refugees are discussed

304 See Bela Greskovits, “Refugees in Budapest” Voice In Journal September 4, 2015 http://www.voiceinjournal.com/20150904-bela-greskovits-refugees/305 In subsequent discussion, I have learned about the efforts of Antal Orkeny and his colleagues in http://menedek.hu/en/about-us who were working extensively with refugees during the crisis and have not yet translated that work into research and English language publication. Too, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has done a substantial research report on the qualities of refugees and migrants coming into Hungary based on their national and regional origins, gender, age and a few other dimensions. http://mta.hu/data/cikk/13/70/8/cikk_137008/_europabairanyulo.pdf 306 See for example http://crs.info.yorku.ca/open-letter307 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/world/europe/hungary-croatia-refugees-migrants.html?_r=1308 We see this already where Hungarian authorities merge abiding racism against Roma to mobilizing fear about refugees https://euobserver.com/justice/130740

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in the media. If adult men, they are designed to evoke fear; if children or families, they can evoke sympathy, or even solidarity.

I think this focus on transformations of subjectivities is a most productive avenue for research, but it cannot address, adequately, the system crisis facing us, in part because the system crisis is broken down into a number of more specialized domains each with its own mode of interventions very much along the lines that Gil Eyal recommends we research.

We have experts debating how to resolve the Syrian civil war made worse by the introduction of Russian power on the ground. We have experts debating the appropriate European Union mechanisms for addressing the rights of refugees to safety.309 We have experts, and activists, debating the exercise of political power in the light of these refugees. Each of these debates and others stimulated by the refugee crisis operate in their own fields with their own forms of capital and stakes of struggle, with only weak ties connecting them. With this organization of public and expert discussion, legitimate intellectual questions can be displaced, by asserting the priority of one’s own favored questions.

Those who demand, for example, that we recognize the vulnerability and fellow humanity of refugees will find opponents insisting that such humanitarians fail to recognize legitimate security questions and the real roots of the problem in wars conducted elsewhere. By refusing to have meaningful discussion with such political performances organized around different priorities, it is impossible, it seems to me, to have intellectually responsible engagements of the manifold dimensions of the refugee crisis. This, it seems to me, is why we need to keep thinking in terms of intellectuals, and not only in terms of interventions.310

I won’t rehearse the arguments of Globalizing Knowledge about intellectual responsibility here except to say that by speaking in terms of intellectuals, we must consider whether we pose the right questions. We must then ask whether our methods are sufficient for recognizing the right questions. And then we must consider whether we are engaged in the right knowledge networks to pose those right questions. And sometimes, that means we must go beyond our familiar networks to figure ways to address the crises we now face.

From the crisis in Ukraine to the refugee crisis on European Union borders, I believe we are in that very moment, where we need to develop intellectual practices that

309 Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, for example, tweeted this: https://euobserver.com/opinion/130678310 That is an invitation to colleague Gil Eyal to help me understand whether one of my primary concerns can be found in the shift to interventions and away from intellectuals. See an earlier statement: Gil Eyal and Larissa Bucholz, “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions” Annual Review of Sociology 36:117-37. I am rather loathe to give up on intellectuals as point of reference because it keeps responsibility in view. Indeed, many of Gil’s wonderful comments at the conference can be addressed by redirecting our attention to a notion of intellectual practice. See for example, Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, “Towards a Theory of National Intellectual Practice” pp. 383-417 in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy (eds.) Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

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can diminish the politicization of intellectual life in order that we address, in common and real and meaningful exchange, the real crises we have before us. The following questions help us recognize how we might recognize responsibility when we see it.

A) How active, open, and inclusive is public reason around different issues? B) How are claims evidenced & legitimated? C) How consequential is rational/critical discussion?D) To which issues is credentialed reason / expertise attached? E) How do these issues and intellectuality cumulate?

My Hungarian colleagues will tell me how intellectually responsible the debate around the refugee crisis in Hungary is. I offer the following as my own small contribution to this effort, building on previous work around Fortress Europe.

Pierre Monforte distinguishes social movement organizations dedicated to immigrant rights in France and Germany along a variety of dimensions. He especially distinguishes more humanitarian organizations like France Terre d’Asile and Caritas Deutschland from more politicized SMOs like France’s Act Up and Kein Mensch Ist Illegal in terms of how they relate to existing authorities. The humanitarian organizations work with existing authorities in order to provide better care for the most vulnerable; the more politicized vary, of course, but some of them work with the refugees and migrants to challenge the political organization of the European Union itself. They certainly do this on a rhetorical level, charging EU policies with a kind of global level apartheid. (p. 207). Before the refugee crisis, it was radical social movements who worked to transform the European Union.

Although his main focus is to consider different modes of Europeanization, I find his approach very helpful for considering how different movements, with their attending intellectualities, envision, and affect, political systems (Table 1).

Table 1: Variations in Social Movement Organizations around Immigrants

Political reproduction

Political Reformist Political Revolutionary

Migrant Care Humanitarian (Caritas)

Amnesty International

Kein Mensch Ist Illegal

His volume was, however, prepared long before the refugee crisis in which the European Union finds itself. When refugees are relatively few, it seems more than appropriate to focus on the movement organizations themselves (although I would have loved to see how refugees and immigrants themselves approached these different SMOs).

However, when crisis moves states to respond in radically different directions, the consequence of different kinds of movement, and intellectual, inteventions varies

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terrifically. Here, we might even invoke the kind of ecosystemic design thinking Pendleton-Jullian and Brown suggest. But it will take new frames of reference, new boundaries of thinking. The old systems that formerly guided our work – based on politically sovereign actors – are profoundly inadequate frames of reference for this crisis, and many others we now face. And that is why we need to think about solidarity and systems together in a new way.

Table 2: Variations in States and Social Movement Organizations around Immigrants

Political reproduction

Political Reformist Political Transformation

Statist Vesna Pusic Angela Merkel Viktor Orban

Migrant Care Humanitarian (Caritas)

Amnesty International

Kein Mensch Ist Illegal

As before the crisis, we can see solidary knowledge being extended to refugees, with clearly variable effects. Only in the middle column do we see transformative coordination between state practices and migrant identifications. Germany’s welcome to refugees, and attempt to accommodate them, demands a huge reallocation of resources, new structures of support, and new modes of coordination and practice among various levels of the state and civil society to support these refugees. This is certainly a transformative project, but one that primarily reforms existing systems of governance.

Before the refugee crisis, the coordination of humanitarian action with state powers mainly served to reproduce power relations while attending refugee and immigrant needs. That is however only possible when numbers are relatively few. It takes extraordinary action to reproduce institutions while being on the front lines of the refugee crisis. One can see that most clearly in the response of Croatia.

Vesna Pusic, herself a sociologist who in this crisis seems to me to exemplify intellectual and political responsibility, has worked hard to figure ways to transport the refugees through Croatia, and once Hungary blocked its borders, through Slovenia to get to Austria and Germany, their preferred destinations. Instead of treating this refugee crisis as an opportunity to transform political structures, she sought to minimize the stress on Croatia and on the refugees both. Viktor Orban did just the opposite.

Orban magnified the humanitarian crisis by turning it into a political crisis. Before large numbers of refugees arrived, he mobilized fear among the Hungarian population, turning an understandable anxiety into a panic-inducing one, warning Hungarians that the refugees could endanger their communities’ well being and steal their jobs. He even worked to make that feel real by preventing the refugees from leaving Hungary. Sociologists could contribute significantly to the public good by publicizing just how destructive these refugees have been. Informal accounting suggests quite the opposite.

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Some speculate, however, that Orban used their presence to magnify his own political capital within the country, as well as within the European Union. Indeed, he has helped to mobilize a postcommunist disposition in opposition to refugees (the so called Visegrad + alliance), one that seems to defy their own history of benefitting from transnational solidarity after wars and repression. In this, he has mobilized the spectre of threatening refugees to remake Hungary and the European Union.

This, of course, is not the only position I heard in Hungary and in discussion. There are some who do not see in Orban’s position a naked grab for power, but a demand for the rule of law. After all, I was told, refugees must register in their place of first arrival, and to pass them through to Austria or Germany is a violation of the rules of the European Union itself. This, they argue, is the foundation for crisis. By contrast, the European Union should be marshalling force to keep refugees out of Europe itself. This, however, violates international law too, refugee experts argue.311

Akos Rona-Tas has argued that Viktor Orban’s actions in closing the border not only with Serbia but also now with Croatia poses an inestimable moral cost.312 Maybe so. But it also seems to me Akos Rona-Tas illustrates the quest for intellectual responsibility in this moment. His kind of language invites a measure of intellectual practice that has not so far been evident. The costs of solidarity might be great, but the costs of its rejection might be even greater. It is a matter of intellectual responsibility to take this up, and the remaking of the class I wish were in statu nascendi.

Notes in Preparation for, and following, a conference entitled “The Treasure of Solidarity: Lessons for Europe” International Seminar May 4-5, 2015 http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/konferencja/?lang=en

Michael D. Kennedy

May 8, 2015

I was drawn to participate in this knowledge network organized around the Center for Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw (http://www.centrumjp2.pl/aktualnosci/solidarnosc-w-brukseli/ ) by chance conversations. It is not a typical extension of my knowledge networks, but it is an appealing one. And thus, in addition to my reflections on the conference, I want to share a bit on how this new knowledge network worked.

Through my friend and colleague in sociology, the director of the Institute for Social Studies at Warsaw University (http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/en/ ), Tomek Zarycki, I met another sociologist named Maria Szymborska http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/informacje-o-instytucie/zespol/maria-szymborska/ on my last visit to Warsaw in March 2015. Following our discussion of other matters, she mentioned that she was to go to another meeting where she was working on the 6 steps of solidarity. Intrigued, given my abiding interest in solidarity, I asked if she would send me more about those six steps. After her consultation with others, including the team leader, Michał Łuczewski

311 http://crs.info.yorku.ca/open-letter312 Personal communication, October 17, 2015.

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https://uw.academia.edu/MichałŁuczewski , I received more than a note about those six steps. I received a draft of the entire volume called Solidarity, Step by Step (2015). I read it with great interest. I offered a few comments along with some appreciation for the work. Michał asked if I might write a blurb, to which I agreed with pleasure. I wrote the following:

Solidarity has inspired millions, as word and as concept, as movement and as ideal.  Łuczewski et al do more than translate the meanings of Poland’s struggles. Thanks to this volume, the world has a much better sense of how solidarity might be itself globalized with humility, with sincerity, and above all, with consequence.

After that exchange, Michał and his colleague, Monika Bartoszewicz http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/about/team/?lang=en, invited me to join the conference on Solidarity about which I reflect here. It was held in Brussels, in the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland on May 4-5, 2015. Of course it is far better to watch the original presentation in recording, but for now I content myself, and offer to you, my accounting of the gathering.

I was originally scheduled to address this question: 'How did we benefit from Solidarity?” along with Jerzy Buzek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Buzek), Irena Lipowicz (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Lipowicz) and Bogusław Sonik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus%C5%82aw_Sonik), all very well known figures in Poland but not as broadly known as they ought to be in the west, hence the links. We were invited to consider these three questions.

-What is solidarity?-What is the relation between the Polish individual exemplars and theSolidarity movement itself?’-Did Solidarity change Europe? Did it change us? Is it relevant today?

As it turned out, and as is often the case when prominent political figures appear, panels need to be reorganized. I moved to the second panel, Irena Lipowicz could not appear, and Alojz "Lojze" Peterle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojze_Peterle) , the former president of Slovenia and Jan Olbrycht (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Olbrycht), a former sociologist become prominent political figure, joined the discussion. Jarosław Guzy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarosław_Guzy moderated the discussion. It was good I moved, for this panel was overwhelmingly about the politics of the post-Solidarity parties today, and what happened to the movement of 1980-81. All of the Poles were themselves involved in the struggles associated with Solidarity from 1980-81, and also participate in politics today. This panel was filled with folks associated with Platforma Obywatelska or the Citizen’s Platform, the ruling party in Poland. This is also a prominent party in the European Union, as Jerzy Buzek was himself President of the Parliament and Donald Tusk, the current President of the European Council, a member of this party.

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In many ways, what these prominenci could offer about 1980-81 would not surprise anyone familiar with that period. It was a time where everything seemed possible, and surprising that so much could be realized. It was also a time where everyone was together. These points are both of course true, but they stand mainly in contrast to what exists now, where people from different political parties in Poland can hardly speak to one another. This everyone in Poland knows, but it is a striking point that deserves broader comparative analysis.

It’s intriguing to compare this problem to what those in America face. In conversation with Monika subsequently, I wondered whether the intensity of partisan difference comes, in part, because parties have such great difficulty reaching constituencies beyond their most dedicated supporters. I wonder if party contest is less about different philosophical positions on the state, and more a way to channel energy, and attention, away from the gap between political elites and the everyday concerns, and sensibilities, of society.

Buzek offered a great and different contrast: his government in mid-1990s Poland was able to close twenty some mines with resulting unemployment. This was due to institutional needs of economic transformation, he said. But he also said that he could do that only on the basis of the trust solidarity offered. Today, that could not have been realized. Indeed, Sonik argued that the trust has evaporated because those who did the most to end communism are themselves lost to the new system defining Polish, and European, futures.

My own starting point for that intended panel would have not been controversial, but that would have been only because there were so many Poles in the room.

Each time the world is called upon to recognize the significance of 1989, we are invited to hear President Reagan tell President Gorbachev to tear down that wall. We see young people chipping away at this real division in Berlin, this symbolic division of Europe. But with that image, we think of this great world historical change as if it were the result of a system’s exhaustion, a system’s collapse. That is wrong.

In my own work (e.g. Chapter 1 of https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cultural-formations-of-postcommunism), I have emphasized that the fall of the wall was but one sequence in a chain reaction that had its most significant start in the Solidarity movement of 1980-81. It was not just that people protested, but it was the way in which they organized that made a difference. Because they were non-violent, because they were organized, because they embodied solidarity, they provided not only a practical but an ethical foundation for the end to communism. That is why I was so pleased to be able to participate in the second panel.

In the second panel, we turned to the spiritual roots of Solidarity. Those speaking included Zdzisław Krasnodębski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Krasnod%C4%99bski_%28sociologist%29) another sociologist become

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political figure,313 Ryszard Legutko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Legutko), Frans A.M. Alting von Geusau and another American, Daniel Philpott, an expert on reconciliation from Notre Dame. The latter’s blog is worth following (http://arcoftheuniverse.info/author/dphilpott), and his broader work also worth learning more about (http://www.amazon.com/Just-Unjust-Peace-Reconciliation-Peacebuilding/dp/0199827567), especially because the Polish team came to understand solidarity and reconciliation better through their own engagement with Dan’s work.

This was an unusual panel for me, although not because it concerned the spiritual. Rather, I am not accustomed to those who articulate Christianity’s vulnerability before secularism’s onslaught. I am familiar, and find quite intriguing, the recognition of how secularism is no neutral ground; here, authors from Talal Asad314 to Paul J. Griffiths,315 have moved me. But for these authors, that recognition opens up discussion rather than fortifies positions. Indeed, it seems that Łuczewski and his colleagues in this project share that very position of openness, for I have felt quite invited to their quest to learn even if, and perhaps especially because, we share a quest without sharing initial starting points. I do think, however, my openness to discussing spiritual roots, and not only their sociological accounting, made my own orientation suitable to such dialogue.

Regardless of our starting points, conference members were prepared well for both a discussion of spiritual roots and a notion of theological and sociological curiosity by the film we watched on the previous evening.

“The Father, the Son, and the Friend”, made by Michał Łuczewski and Karol Wasilewski (http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/about/team/), was one of the most moving films I have seen in some time. Of course its start with Pope John Paul II’s 1979 address to the assembled in Warsaw, an event that some (including me in my 1991 book on Solidarity, http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/sociology/organisational-sociology/professionals-power-and-solidarity-poland-critical-sociology-soviet-type-society pp. 43-46) consider foundational for Solidarity, was most appropriate. Clearly the Holy Father’s words, his expression of the foundational dignity of the human being, helped to provide a language with which the Solidarity movement could distinguish itself from the domination communist rule’s appropriation of class struggle denied working class emancipation. But there was another father in this film.

This father was a Solidarity activist whose brutalization by police destroyed his son. As a father myself, I could only imagine the pain one feels when one’s child suffers because of a father’s choice to resist evil. This man cannot forgive those who did such harm. I don’t know that I could either, but others have forgiven their oppressors from communist times.

313 This deserves a sociology by itself: how many sociologists have become among Poland’s political and diplomatic leaders. I was delighted to learn that Poland’s ambassador to the European Union, Marek Prawda, is himself a sociologist and known in the diplomatic world for his ability to get to the foundation of things, rather than be consumed with an organization’s rules and procedures as such. 314 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.315 Paul J. Griffiths, Problems of Religious Diversity. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2001.

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Another victim, another survivor, is a woman, now grown with her own child, who lost her father in an assault by the authorities during martial law’s imposition. Unlike many other miners and their families, she has chosen to forgive those who killed her father, those who robbed her of the life she should have had. Another victim, or rather perpetrator of injustice, has, for me, an even more extraordinary tale. There were thousands of informants in communist-ruled Poland, those who reported on their friends and families at the behest, or the threat, of those who ruled Poland. Stanisław Filosek, a leader of the opposition, could no longer bear the burden of this betrayal, and confessed first to his family and friends, and then to the public in 2006: “He confessed because he wanted to feel the miracle of solidarity one more time.” (Łuczewski et al 2015:18). The pain on his face, in his very being, in that confession, comes across so powerfully in this film, in a way that could never be communicated in text alone. That his friends might forgive him, but he never himself, moved me terrifically. It also helped me to appreciate the powerful relationship between friendship and solidarity, between trust and, in the end, forgiveness (the relationship to Leela Gandhi’s work, especially https://www.dukeupress.edu/Affective-Communities/index-viewby=title.html comes to mind). And that recognition leads me to appreciate solidarity in a profoundly new way.

Łuczewski and Wasilewski, and all of those in the film and around its making, invite us to think about solidarity and forgiveness together. Łuczewski is developing this further, in ways that those sociologists interested in affect and social transformation will much appreciate. I will only offer one point that most strikes me.

Most who talk about solidarity today seek to own it, to appropriate it, to say that they stand for it while their opponents, or even enemies, denigrate it with their practices. It becomes a resource in political competition, not a foundation for extending connections, building ties to those not recognized in that web of mutuality, to invoke the words of Martin Luther King Jr. In the work of Łuczewski and Wasilewski, we have a film which extends solidarity most profoundly because it is not about the politics of a movement as much as the spiritual roots of our connections to others. It is about how that kind of love might itself be transformative. But this is a love that is different from most sociological conventions of solidarity. It is more than a love of one’s brothers and sisters in struggle. It is also a love of one’s enemy, to recognize the pain of those who would inflict harm.

Of course the authors of this film, and of the text, are associated with the Catholic Church, and find in the worlds of Pope John Paul II, Father Tischner, Father Popiełuszko, and others in that tradition adequate inspiration for love. But they don’t rest on their own traditions only. In an expression of solidarity itself, in the embrace of the very love they also seek to understand, they acknowledge those who would now be identified as their opponents in politics. Instead of marking them as those who threaten the chosen, they recognize their own expressions of love, and express in this act the spirit of generosity that drew me to Poland in the first place.

For example, they write about those individuals, and traditions, I know better from my own knowledge networks:

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Members of KOR knew that hate is self-destructive, and that if they allowed hate to be a response to state violence, beatings, arrests and provocations – they would lose. They treated it as a “sin, a sickness and a misfortune”. Solidarity cannot be founded on hatred of the enemy. For Jacek Kuron, a truly human world is a world in which one creates and loves.” (Łuczewski et al, 2015:82).

Of course it was Pope John II who said that there is no solidarity without love (Łuczewski et al, 2015:85).

Some of those who saw the film were critical – how can you talk about forgiveness at the individual level? Shouldn’t we be thinking about political confessions at a higher level? To be sure, this is the currency of political contest, but I think this is precisely why this film, and this book, are different. The creators of this work offer a currency of love and care that this film itself celebrates. Of course this is not the typical kind of thing sociologists address, but it could be, and I’m so glad that Michał and his team are taking this up.

As I engaged this conference, I was struck by two ways in which solidarity was conceived. There were some who wanted to address it as something that could be possessed, something that could be owned, something some political parties might accuse others of lacking. Of course those who struggled within that original movement, those who made the impossible possible, have more than a right, and rather a duty, to recall those experiences, to own that history, to explain to those who were not a part of that time what solidarity was.

Some can manage that in the spirit of openness and generosity I saw in Solidarity and its underground when I first came to Poland in 1983. Others can’t, and rather use it to draw a line between us and them. Of course back in those founding days, both spirits were present, as they were in this conference. I am frankly drawn to the one that invited me to explore, not to the one that demanded I recognize those with authority to tell me what is right.

Solidarity as past movement and solidarity as emanating ethic are of course far more than what any single narrative might offer, might contain. Indeed, I so appreciate the whole aim of the Treasure of Solidarity project, not least for its quest to understand the relevance for a whole new generation of Poles what this project was, and what it might still be. Indeed, to the extent that these young Poles help others appreciate what solidarity can be, rather than what it was, we will have something far more valuable than apples or Ida as a Polish export. We will have something that might inform a different kind of politics. Indeed, I do think that Poland would be richer if it didn’t seek to own solidarity, but rather extend its meaning and seek its possibilities with others.316

316 When Craig Calhoun and Gianpaolo Baiocchi identified my latest book as a politics of generosity in the NYU book panel of April 2015 https://vimeo.com/129003932, well, I would love to explain that its roots lie in the expansive notion of solidarity I experienced in Poland over 30 years ago, and which I can occasionally find in Poland today.

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Solidarity was something extraordinary in 1980-81. It was filled with “priests and atheists, communists and ant-communists, workers and intellectuals, young and old, people on the left and those on the right, nationalists, socialists and agrarians” (Łuczewski et al, 2015: 24). Its heroes were people who were born and bred on different sides of a Poland left by its World War II allies to find itself being remade in the occupation by Soviet power and its allies. And some of the heroes of 1980-81, as Łuczewski et al remind us, were not so likeable in their earlier incarnations. Nonetheless, in their actions, at least for me, they found redemption in their struggle for something that seemed impossible, for a Poland that could otherwise be than what the conventions of Cold War geopolitics declared.

Might we find connections like that, imaginations like that, a kind of transcendent politics like that, again?

That, of course, demands that we understand solidarity as past movement and as emanating ethic better than we currently do.

Several connotations of solidarity were swirling during the conference. Sometimes I heard notions of solidarity that were offered from above, while at other times, they were certainly generated from below. To be sure, solidarity as slogan was more than present, but solidarity as connection was foundation. But which foundation?

There were some who could only see solidarity in community. They were generally not Polish, however, for so many Poles are known for their capacity to identify with those beyond their narrow community, whether based on nation, religion and certainly language. Indeed, “for your freedom and ours” is one of the most inspiring statements of solidarity I know. (If you don’t know this expression, you can’t know Poland. And that is your loss!)

To identify solidarity as only conceivable within one’s community is the most restricted version and vision of what solidarity could mean, as it could only extend to “one’s own”. This lends itself, of course, to the worst nationalism and racism, even if not intended by its advocates. And indeed, this is one reason why such narrowness immediately alienates. Not all Poles, of course, recoil from such egoism, but most I know do because of their own generosity.

Some suggest that solidarity beyond one’s community is only an expression of pity, something certainly not part of solidarity. Jacek Kurczewski (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacek_Kurczewski) is a long time friend and colleague whose sense of intellectual distinction and ironic presentation always intrigued me. I could not recognize, in his contribution, whether irony was present, but certainly his critique of those with boundaries first in their mind moved me. He invoked John Paul II to clarify the meaning of solidarity with which we ought wrestle, and what cannot be lost to those who could only see its boundaries, and not its extensions.

In an encyclical, John Paul II said,

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It is above all a question of interdependence, sensed as a system determining relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious elements, and accepted as a moral category. When interdependence becomes recognized in this way, the correlative response as a moral and social attitude, as a "virtue," is solidarity. This then is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. This determination is based on the solid conviction that what is hindering full development is that desire for profit and that thirst for power already mentioned. These attitudes and "structures of sin" are only conquered - presupposing the help of divine grace - by a diametrically opposed attitude: a commitment to the good of one's neighbor with the readiness, in the gospel sense, to "lose oneself" for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to "serve him" instead of oppressing him for one's own advantage (cf. Mt 10:40-42; 20:25; Mk 10:42-45; Lk 22:25-27). (38:6. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html)

Solidarity’s boundaries are an object of political debate, philosophical contention, and social dynamics. I am frankly moved more by the moral courage and idealism of John Paul II and the Dalai Lama than by those whose claims to realism too easily mask an ethnocentrism and self-satisfaction that denies from the outset solidarity’s globalizing potentials. Indeed, I was quite gratified to see Alexander Norman, the director of the Dalai Lama Centre for Compassion in Oxford, as part of the conference’s discussion. His invitation for us to think together of how a Roman Catholic vision of solidarity, and how a Buddhist vision of compassion, might expand our thinking of “we-ness” is one of those conversations most worth having, especially when it invites sociologists and theologians to think together.317

Of course in my most recent (2015) book (http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24607), I offered my own sense of what solidarity means. I wrote, “Solidarity depends on the capacity to recognize affinities of some sort and to embed part of one’s identity in the fate of others” (p. 302).

I liked it when I wrote it, and I like it even more still. It makes it clear that solidarity is a choice, not an obligation, an ethic that requires work to fulfil, not a natural expression of who you assume yourself to be. However, I think I like even more what Łuczewski et al write about solidarity in the past, especially for how it could inform solidarity in the future. After reviewing what Karol Wojtyła and Jacek Kuron each wrote, Łuczewski et al concluded:

317 In subsequent conversation, Monika Bartoszewicz invited me to think more about the relationship between compassion and solidarity, and especially the relative emphases on active engagement within each tradition. That’s a discussion that can preoccupy.

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Solidarity was an idea that was waiting to be fulfilled.  Reality in this part of Europe was looking for a word that could change it, while on the other hand, the word itself was looking for a reality that it could change.  In short, the word sought reality and reality sought the word (Łuczewski et al 2015:35)

That is poetic, but it might also be most appropriate to account for the sociology of those times. Theory was in practice, and practice was in theory. Indeed, I very much appreciated what Jacek Saryusz-Wolski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacek_Saryusz-Wolski) emphasized in the final session of the conference along these lines.

He said that solidarity is not just a concept, but above all a practice. For him, it was massive action, and certainly not charity. It is an enlightened and rational long-term choice for a common good.

I know Saryusz-Wolski primarily from his work on behalf of Ukraine, in solidarity with Ukraine, from within the European Union. He is, himself, one of the most prominent within the European People’s Party, and has used his position, and his own knowledgeabilty and eloquence to move solidarity’s meaning. His own contributions to the conference were among the most politically inspired, and inspiring for me.

He insisted that the European Union must be defined by solidarity, and that this cannot be a selective solidarity. Solidarity must be developed for those in the east, as well as in the south; Italians cannot be expected to bear the burdens of those who would seek escape from the crisis in north Africa just as Poland and other newer members of the EU could not be expected to bear the burden alone of the crisis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This expansive notion of solidarity in geopolitics, he argued, certainly has its roots in the Polish experience of solidarity. After all, not only must solidarity be viewed holistically, and not selectively, it must be developed with asymmetries in mind. Solidarity in 1980-81 knew that, but I can see why Saryusz-Wolski would say that this is not an ethic as much as an enlightened self-interest. Addressing inequalities at one point in time could lead to having a stronger partner in addressing need subsequently. And certainly that is evident with regard to Ukraine. For the EU’s investment in Poland has produced a Poland better prepared to show solidarity with Ukraine.

There are few in the European Parliament more dedicated to solidarity with Ukraine than Jacek Saryusz-Wolski. Indeed, I especially appreciated his position that the greatest approximation to Solidarity in 1980-81 was the struggle on Maidan in Ukraine along similar principles, principles I also discussed in Globalizing Knowledge (pp. 288-97). As Saryusz-Wolski spoke, and others reacted, I was reminded once again why I am drawn to Poles when I think about globalizing knowledge and not only solidarity. Poles can recognize affinities in ways people of other nations, especially those accustomed to a colonizing disposition, cannot.

Too few remember the ways in which Poles have stood up in global solidarity. Whether in regard to Ukraine in the present, or even for the Dutch during World War II as Czesław Porębski reminded us, it’s easy to take Poles for granted. I don’t. It’s also easy for Poles, given their generosity of spirit, to overlook others’ ignorance of their own

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contributions to the greater good. That would be a great loss and almost impossible to overlook if one read what this new generation of those interested in solidarity have to offer.

Before, however, I turn to their volume I wish to recall two moments of my own personal history that indicate the ways in which solidarity can be something that is not only connecting, but also curious and dedicated to extending learning, and not consolidating positions. I recall that when I helped to organize a conference on the 1989 Polish round table at the University of Michigan for 1999, I was called more than once a dupe of the communists and the pinkos. My job was made much easier by the intervention of the Holy Father himself. In a letter from his secretary of state, he wrote that His Holiness hoped that “this disciplined reflection on the spiritual, cultural and political aspects of Poland’s peaceful transition to democracy will highlight their ultimate foundation in a moral imperative arising from man’s innate dignity and his transcendent vocation to freedom in the pursuit of truth” (Kennedy 2002:289). That disabled many who would have called me a traitor to a nation to which I was not born, but with which I identify, for pursuing an intellectual question that has implications for the peaceful resolution of deep and fundamental differences.

That quest can readily cross nations, and ideally, cross religions too given the challenge, and importance, of engaging religious difference in the world.318

While I was still at the University of Michigan, I had the privilege to host Zbigniew Bujak for some 5 months. During that time, he went to Washington to observe an award ceremony. He had already received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, but this was the first time that I met members of the famous family whose last name I share. This was also the first time I met the Dalai Lama in person. That meeting in Ethel Kennedy’s home was one of the most moving I have ever experienced. For me to have together in that room the spirit of Solidarity, and the person of the Dalai Lama, represented the kind of vision for change of which the world needs more, and for which I would wish sociology, and scholarship more generally, to address. And this is why the volume by Michał Łuczewski , Mikołaj Achremczyk, a physician, Piotr Czekierda, a businessman, Michał Gawrilow, a historian, Maria Szymborska, a sociologist (all of whom were at the conference) and Paweł Łaczkowski and Małgorzata Fałkowska-Warska who were unable to join, is so important. The comments of the third panel are so worth revisiting when available in recording.

I focus on their book in these reflections in part because the book not only seeks to understand solidarity’s making and possible extensions. It is also because the book itself is an expression of the solidarity that originally inspired me, and continues to inspire me: as an invitation to interdependence, an expression of connection, a search for the

318 David William Cohen and Michael D. Kennedy, Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics (2004) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/globalpublics/4726364 put that theme to the center of the workshop and this publication so associated.

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common good in action. Solidarity is not owned, but its value is increased in its extension to others beyond one’s immediate community.

The team devised six steps in realizing solidarity – to face reality, seek the good, work on yourself, serve others, strive for agreement and forgive in truth. These are really compelling and deserving of deep reflection. They introduce each so powerfully, not least because they are able to bring people into dialogue in this history that today cannot speak with one another with their divergent locations across ideological barricades. To listen to my colleagues speak today of the offense they suffer with the words and actions of their political opponents is riddled with such pain, and such resentment. It is no wonder that dialogue is so difficult.

No doubt dialogue in the time of solidarity was also difficult, but it was there. I especially appreciated Łuczewski et al’s discussion of the dialogue of solidarity and its ten principles:

1. “The identity of the parties to dialogue must be defined; there can be no dialogue between people who do not know who they are. Sometimes the identity of the parties is only revealed at this stage.

2. The parties undertaking dialogue must do it honestly and with good will.3. The parties are mutually open to one another, they identify with their cause, they

do not arbitrarily select who they are going to talk to; an opponet becomes a partner, who may be in the right.

4. Both parties are open to changing their mind, accepting that they may not be in the right.

5. Both parties demonstrate commitment to dialogue, they react to one another’s voices (responsiveness) and they are predictable.

6. The means fo dialogue is a peaceful exchange of thoughts, which is transparent and with the same access to information and resources.

7. The means of dialogue is opposition. The partners in the dialogue most oppose one another.

8. The aim of dialogue is compromise. We note that compromise may be an aim in a practical dialogue concerning a conflict of interests, which may be partially conceded; yet in a solidarity dialogue, compromise is not the aim; at most it is a milestone on the road to the next two aims.

9. The aims of dialogue is the rebuilding of ties and an exchange of gifts. 10. The aim of dialogue is a common quest for truth and goodness.” (Łuczewski et

al, pp 118-19).

This is a powerful construct that deserves much more reflection, not only in comparison to the present but also vis-à-vis the Round Table of 1989. Indeed, I found Tischner’s reflections on the Round Table in Między Panem a Plebanem (p.558) quite moving, as I recalled in Cultural Formations of Postcommunism. However, many who celebrate solidarity leave those Round Table negotiations to the side. That is a pity.

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The authors’ most distinctive contribution to rethinking solidarity, one reinforced by the film, is the role of forgiveness in solidarity. To recall Smolensk in that light is quite moving. They wrote

On 10th April 2010, a Polish government plane crashed on the way to events marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. Prominent members othe Polish opposition were among the 96 victims: Lech Kaczynski, a member of Solidarity, Janusz Krupski, whom Grzegorz Piotrowski had wanted to kill, Maciej Plazynski and Arkadiusz Rybicki from the Young Poland Movement, Grazyna Gęsicka, a member of Alain Touraine’s team, and Anna Walentynowicz. Although their patys had sometimes diverged, they were united in Smolensk forever. For a brief moment, the feuding political parties and Poles themselves were united. At Anna Walentynowicz’s funeral, Krzysztof Wyszkowski said, “If an enemy had forced Anna to choose the place where they would kill her, she would definitely have chosen Katyn” (Łuczewski et al, 2015:133).

It is still hard to believe so many remade with Solidarity died in Smolensk. That memory must be attended in Polish politics, it appears, in order that mutual respect be rekindled. And while the sadness of this loss can overwhelm, the following call for reconciliation moved me most. This is part of a letter written by Agnieszka Gzik-Pawlak, Magdalena Wiłk-Bednarczyk, Katarzyna Kopczak-Zagorna, Jerzy Wartak, Adam Skwira, Stanisław Plate, Fr. Henryk Bolczyk and Fr. Paweł Buchta in Katowice on April 21, 2005:

After the death of John Paul II, Jerzy Wartak, who had been a victim of the pacification of the Wujek mine, recalled, “Something snapped in me then. I burst into tears like a small boy who has had his father taken away and doesn't know what to do. But then I thought to myself – don’t sob, silly, the Lord didn’t take th Holy Father away from us; he gave him to us. And those nine young men who were killed by the ZOMO [the paramilitary riot police] were given to us by the Lord as well, not taken away. Then, for the first time, I thought of the ZOMO in categories other than as murderers. John Paul II’s will was read out on television. I thought to myself, ‘Am I writing my will? When St Peter asks me “What did you do, my son, on Earth?” what will I reply? That I earned a salary? That I was imprisoned for the sake of freedom? That’s not much!’”319 Then, together with his friends, priests, and the daughters of the killed miners, he decided to issue an appeal for reconciliation:

Moved by the great events caused by the suffering and death of the Holy Father, John Paul II, we do not wish to remain without a reply for those graces that included us too. Admittedly, we carry the wounds of martial law and the death of our fathers and friends, the miners of the “Wujek” mine, still not rehabilitated by our law. At the same time, we find a deeper order of mercy in these days, exceeding human justice. Many divided sides have become closer to one another, many walls have collapsed. Many people, discouraged by current difficulties, have come to believe that there is hope. The strangest thing is that they did not

319 Jerzy Wartak: interview for the “Skarb Solidarności” (The Treasure of Solidarity) programme, Warsaw 2014.

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look for it outside themselves. During these days, nobody raised any claims against anyone else. We found such deposits of goodness in ourselves, unnoticed by us before, that it is difficult to believe (Łuczewski et al, 2015:135-36).

Depths of goodness in ourselves. I don’t know that sociologists would ever look to themselves in such fashion, but those depths did mobilize a movement that changed the world.

In the end, of course, I am most drawn to this matter posed by the book’s authors: the globalization of solidarity. 320 They are quite right to observe this challenge:

The problem with solidarity today is that the processes of anesthetisation are considerably more advanced than in Communist times. These days evil does not hit with the same strength. It is easy not to notice it. It intertwines imperceptibly with goodness, making them increasingly difficult to tell apart. The mechanisms of modernity effectively push misfortunes beyond the pale of society, to the margins of our consciousness.” (Łuczewski et al 2015:158).

Challenging indeed.

They also write, “Solidarity will never be embodied unless we understand first that only the spirit can be embodied” (p. 147).

These authors offer hope because they are filled with that spirit. I am not sure that I find the same spirit that they do, but I don’t worry about that. I only know that I am delighted to be in dialogue with them. For while we may have different priorities, different prescriptions for what is right and what is wrong, which I feel no need to list here, I am gratified to be part of a knowledge network that wishes to globalize solidarity. And for that I can imagine a new question that they don’t resolve, but issues forth for those of us who do not find the spirit’s answer.

I take inspiration for this question from another quote they offer from John Paul II.

Three years after the death of Fr Popiełuszko, John Paul II defined it thus, “This then is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of each and every individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”321

320 Mujun Zhou’s 2015 sociology dissertation at Brown University, “Civil Society and the Potential for Solidarity: Toward a Critical Sociology of Post-Socialist Chinese Society” might be taken as an expression of that globalization, but also an invitation to think more critically and deeply about the variety of ways in which solidarity might be expressed, and its articulation with everyday life in various circumstances. 321 John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 38. [in:] <http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html> [accessed 22.02.2015].

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But that then leads to the dilemma of most globalizing things.

When Pope John Paul II says “for all” what does that mean? Of course all humanity if animated by universal love, but so much of our reference points to those of our nation, those who are common citizens in a bounded political territory of which the European Union is likely the greatest extension across nations. The interaction of morality and politics, of love and society, needs be posed if we are to imagine solidarity’s globalization.

I am much better situated for doing that, thanks to this volume, this conference, and the knowledge network built around Solidarity Step by Step.

April 24, 2015 6-8 pmA Book Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge, with Hillary Angelo http://www.hillaryangelo.com/, Gianpaolo Baiocchi https://ipk.nyu.edu/contacts/ipk-senior-fellows/93-gianpaolo-baiocchi and Craig Calhoun http://www.lse.ac.uk/aboutLSE/meetTheDirector/home.aspx organized by the Urban Democracy Lab at the Gallatin School, at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, (20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, Room 503) 6-8pm

Notes prepared for, and following,

“What Role for Global Universities? Knowledge Flows, Publics and Solidarity”

Michael D. Kennedy April 25, 2015

I am deeply honored to be in this building, with so many thoughtful friends, colleagues, former students, and folks I don’t know, talking about globalizing knowledge. Thanks to

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Jessica Coffey, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, the Urban Democracy Lab, the Institute for Public Knowledge and to all of you for making this event work.

In the book, I followed the penchant for pithiness of one of my UNC advisors. Gerhard Lenski set up a whole tradition in inequality’s study when he asked “who gets what and why?” In the book, I tried to approximate him when I asked “who is intellectually responsible and why?”322 That’s pithy, but doesn’t quite capture the heart of the book, and of my whole scholarly life. This does.

How Do Intellectuals Mobilize Institutions and Networks to Engage Issues in a More Globally Responsible Fashion?323

I develop answers to that question in many different ways in the book. I suggest we look for examples of responsible intellectuality rather than look for exemplary intellectuals in this era. I look at how universities legitimate their work, and the place of publics in that effort rather than try to define what global universities really are. I address how different national recognitions function in globalizing English language scholarship, ultimately considering why Poland, Kosova, and Afghanistan have the place that they do. I don’t assume that globalizing knowledge means sharing data with powerful actors elsewhere. I consider different kinds of flows, from Pussy Riot to energy especially, and knowledge networks, from SSRC and OSF to WEF and WSF. Finally, I bring these different knowledge cultural questions into these times of crisis and transformation, attending especially to struggles over digital transformations and Ukraine and asking why intellectuality seems so inadequate to the transformations begging to be realized.

Hillary framed that diversity differently. She noted that I addressed globalizing knowledge institutions as such, the spread of information and the transformation of knowledge contents and forms, and the transformation of individuals, the making of differently cosmopolitan intellectuals. Indeed, her comment reminded me of Marta Bucholc’s comments in Warsaw (see the panel discussion from March 24 discussed below). I wonder if I shouldn’t spend more time thinking about exemplars of that cosmopolitan intellectuality in terms that go beyond my intellectuals with institutional responsibility –Vaclav Havel, Ricardo Lagos, and Ashraf Ghani.

That is hard for me to do, however, because we cannot talk about intellectual and institutional responsibility without taking up specific issues. We can’t “globalize knowledge” without considering the space from which we imagine those ties beyond our place. We need, in the spirit of Robert Merton and Craig Calhoun both, to think about particular issues to grasp the general. That way, we can see more clearly the contradictions that animate the particular while invocations of the global paper over the problems in globalizing knowledge.322 Craig observed that I could have asked “who gets what knowledge and why?”. That would be a more proper extension of the Lenski tradition to be sure. That is, however, a more structure-focused sociology than I undertake in this volume, and something Craig himself has written and spoken about. Indeed, he noted that the inequality that formerly existed between college educated and non-college educated can be found within the college educated themselves. 323 Hiro Saito during my visit to Singapore Management University in January helped me recognized this more proper phrasing.

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With this invocation of responsibility, my commentators articulated in a way I liked the principal voice of the volume. Craig noted that this book is very much about “thinking for action”, and how we might frame alternatives. Gianpalo noted that when one reads this book, one can’t escape being interpellated, being drawn into dialogue with the problems presented. Hillary also noted the inequalities of expectations – that the kind of globalizing knowledge I spoke of might be fine for the already tenured, but what about those not so far along in their careers, or dare I say, in the precariate itself? I like very much that my critics recognized the focus on agency, and at the same time marked the importance of adding more structure to the book’s explanation, to figure more clearly what is possible, and more, to develop better pathways toward making public sociology more feasible and better recognized as good scholarship. That’s right. And while I have not made that my focus in the book, it deserves more extended attention in the future. Now, back to the book.

As you will see when you read the book, I am deeply informed by the work of my colleagues, and of my students. This book was conceived over the last 15 years, but actually written in the presence of students from my Brown University seminar on knowledge networks and global transformations over several years. They heard the arguments, read the drafts, and some of them – Katie Cohen, Elizabeth Karin, Olivia Petrocco, Eli Crumrine, Vero Testa, and Lola Bates Campbell -- are here today. I am very happy. Many of you will also see your influence in the book. Mujun Zhou’s influence would be even greater than it is now if I could have only finished my book after she finished her dissertation on solidarity in contemporary China. She defends on Tuesday.

No doubt Hillary’s influence would have been greater had I read her work before I finished this book. You will, however, see Gianpaolo Baoicchi and Craig Calhoun in that book. Let’s see if they like their place.

Regardless of what they say, however, I know I will like their remarks. After all, this book is not designed to consolidate a position, or verify an argument. It is designed to open up conversations, and to create a new kind of discussion that I do not see much of, especially in, sadly enough, places that claim to be global universities.

If I were to have such a conversation, I would want these panelists to be in it. And to have it here at NYU, the university from which my daughter earned her first degree, is ideal. NYU as much as any other university is working to define itself globally, from within this most global city. I know, then, I want to spend much less time talking about the book, and more time listening to the kinds of discussions about globalizing knowledge this place inspires.

However, the book should inspire particular conversations that I think most appropriate to this time and place, which take place around flows, publics, and solidarity.

I once proposed that one could develop an exceptional kind of international institute by comparing and studying the interactions among the uneven flows of knowledge, people, wealth and weapons that characterize increasingly the world in which we live (p. 198).

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“Global flows vary not only in terms of their materiality and virtuality” – this we know. However, we seem to overlook all too much the “qualities of the knowledge cultures accompanying” those flows (p. 227). When we study energy, for example, Tim Mitchell’s work should not be the exception, but one of the starting points with which most universities approach the carbon economy, a foundation of our capitalism, and foundation for our world’s slow and seemingly inevitable destruction.

Studying energy allows us to see quite clearly that various forms of power and privilege shape the terms in which energy is discussed. It’s hardly part of the kind of public knowledge it ought to be. That, of course, is not the case in the wake of accidents, from Fukushima to Chernobyl to Three Mile Island. But it should not be only in the wake of catastrophe. It needs be a public knowledge investment. That is changing a bit, of course, as fracking stimulates a new local awareness, and fossil fuel divestment movements challenge university practices. This, it seems to me, is one place where globalizing knowledge and public knowledge could thrive in new knowledge networks that flow as readily as the energy that organizes the global economy.

So, where in the university do we discuss which kinds of public knowledge in which we invest? That kind of debate tends not to happen in a public fashion without social movements pushing the university to live up to standards easily lost when bureaucratic logics and the reproduction of knowledge cultural fiefdoms dominate. And this is why divestment movements are so important. Such movements create the conditions for real public debate over university investments in public knowledge; in particular, such movements create the capacity to define development in terms that fossil fuel companies, and their leading shareholders, are unlikely to imagine. These visions beyond fossil fuel definition are of enormous importance for the public good.

Of course while we all wish to have more public knowledge, we cannot assume, Craig said, that knowledge is, by default, public. Indeed, we need to work to figure out how to make knowledge more public. Further, given his administrative responsibilities and not only his intellectual penchant, he is wise to ask this question: who is willing to pay for knowledge to be free? That’s a great question more administrators should ponder and not just assume that they answer it when they raise money for their universities.

Indeed, Guntra Aistara http://people.ceu.edu/guntra_aistara raised a terrific question from the floor about the dynamics of public use and intellectual property among the products academics produce. She is, herself, quite expert on these matters in agricultural arena, notably around the commodification of seeds.324 Also in the room was another colleague from whom I have learned much about property and copyright in the digital world – Joe Karaganis http://americanassembly.org/people/staff/joe-karaganis. Their conversation off line took the question of property much farther. I had just one extension: that the property question is but a subset of our rethinking the products of academic work more generally. If I might offer an old question resounding in the ears of most sociologists: sociology for

324 Aistara G. Seeds of Kin, Kin of Seeds: the Commodification of Organic Seeds and Social Relations in Costa Rica and Latvia. Ethnography. 2011;12(4):490-517.

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whom, sociology for what? Apply that to academic work more generally. And that puts us into a discussion about public sociology, appropriate for where we were talking.

Because we are in the institute for public knowledge, we are in a good position, then, to think about what this public means, especially vis-à-vis the university.

One of the most important contributions of my chapters on universities and publics rests, in my opinion, on the differentiation of these publics between those proximate and those distant, and between those evoked and those engaged. I outdo Michael Burawoy and create a 3X2 table for this work. Craig noted that Burawoy, of course, drew on Parsons for that style. That always, I do believe, makes Michael smile, I say with a grin.

However, Craig did push here on something I hadn’t really discussed in the book: can we think about the mechanisms that are, themselves, anti-public? After all, he noted, the bourgeois public sphere grew up outside universities as such, and public knowledge was very much, historically, not of the university. Indeed, universities do much that is anti-public in their knowledge production and practice. This observation and analysis deserves much more reflection, but it reflects a typically Calhounian question, and let me explain how.

Much like his first book elaborating the radicalism of tradition in contrast to EP Thompson’s focus on the making of the English working class, Craig’s question does not take the struggle for the future good as the problem organizing our empirical inquiry. Rather, he asks about the actually existing forces that resist what some might consider the normatively desirable. What, in short, mobilizes anti—public knowledge in universities? Great question. If we were to study the forces that move scholars to publish for narrower and narrower audiences, we might instead of lamenting the lack of public engagement, we could understand and potentially transform the dynamics that make niche recognition more important than public value. That might even prove productive for thinking about the divisions on our campuses that move too many to retreat from their public engagement and find comfort in their “safe spaces”.

Olivia Petrocco, a former Brown student, posed that question and wondered whether universities were not themselves moving away from the kinds of engagements that enable transformative conversations to take place. We know we need them at Brown, but also at many other places too. The so-called “Ray Kelly Incident” at Brown illustrated the gulf among different communities on campus, so powerfully illustrated and documented in this presidential committee report.325 Many have worked to change that dialogue.

I recalled in yesterday’s book panel discussion another panel on “white privilege” at Brown. The organizers sought in this event to create a more meaningful dialogue among white faculty and administrators and students of color under the rubric of allyship. 326 Instead, what appeared, especially to those who might have read Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s 325 Report of the Committee on the Events of October 29, 2013, February 2014http://brown.edu/about/administration/president/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.president/files/uploads/Report-on-Events-of-Oct-29-2013.pdfSecond Report of the Committee on the Events of October 29, 2013, May 20, 2014http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/president/Events-of-Oct292014Committee.pdf

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work,327 is the reproduction of white privilege itself even in the ways in which we putatively recognize that kind of racialized practice. Hannah Duncan, one of the organizers of the panel, posed the challenge clearly in a subsequent op-ed,328 embedding it in a larger project at Brown called “transformative conversations” (http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-diversity/transformative-conversations)

I admire the potential behind this project on transformative conversations, especially to the extent it moves from a safe vision that defines racism as a problem of misunderstanding toward a sense of racism as a deep structure of injustice, one that reproduces privilege even when nobody in the room recognizes the racist moment. When transformative conversations invoke misunderstanding one another misses the point: people victimized have been talking long enough, and are not heard. When transformative conversations are about building network capacities to name injustice and to figure ways not only to protest but also to transform institutional structures so that a university’s ideal form can be more reasonably approximated, then that’s worth our investment. I have already seen, at Brown, some of the fruits of that work. But we should not only be thinking about our most proximate public when we think about the struggle for justice in our communities of learning.

In Chapter 4 of my book, I draw on an earlier publication about the University of Michigan to discuss how anti-sweatshop movements on campus wind up bringing those who manufacture university brand apparel into the imagined public of the university itself, even if they are distant. They are often only evoked, however, and not quite partners. Solidarity might be articulated, but it is often from on high, and not in dialogue. Could it be? Here, this is where it becomes important to think about solidarity as such and not only the publics of the university. That seems especially important at NYU right now.

New York University is a private university with a very public face, one not only in the city itself but also abroad, especially in one of its flagship global campuses at Abu Dhabi. However, a report as recently been released that indicates the university and its construction contractors and subcontractors were not treated according to labor standards NYU had committed to follow. Already last spring concerns were expressed about that treatment, but it took this report to move the university to compensate workers maltreated.329 There is much more to be said, to be researched, to be done about this matter, far beyond my competence here.

326 A report on the event: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/10/16/panelists-check-white-privilege-dialogue-race/ and the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIA4tvkWxSo 327 http://www.amazon.com/Racism-without-Racists-Color-Blind-Persistence/dp/1442202181 328 http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/10/20/duncan-15-makes-transformative-conversation/ 329 (the report: http://www.nardelloandco.com/pdf/NYU%20Abu%20Dhabi%20Campus%20Investigative%20Report.pdf; the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/nyregion/nyu-labor-rules-failed-to-protect-10000-workers-in-abu-dhabi.html?_r=0 and the NYU President’s response: http://www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-university-administration/office-of-the-president/redirect/speeches-statements/email-to-nyu-community-on-thoughts-on-the-report-from-nardello-and-co-on-construction-labor-on-saadiyat-island.html).

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However, it is an indication of how globalizing knowledge is not only about extending the flow of information, students, and learning, but about figuring both the symbolic and practical presence of knowledge institutions rooting themselves in unfamiliar terrains and whether they are to take their own values, or the rules of their hosts, as a guide for how they engage their newly proximate publics. Indeed, Hillary asked me whether I might provide an example, more concretely, of how a culture of critical discourse works itself out in the academy. I did not answer her then, but now that I review the discussion about the Nardello report, I wonder if that ideal type coined by Gouldner might not be used as a foundation for an evaluation of the culture of legal discourse organizing the report’s public digestion.

Such a culture of critical discourse does not only exist in normative theory either, for I have seen it work up close. I recall one such instance in my book, drawing on my 2011 publication:

Claims to social justice can motivate public engagements even when there are no existing exchange relationships, but are inspired by historical ties. This is most powerfully illustrated by the events following charges Patrick Tierney offered in the winter of 2001, before the publication of his book “Darkness in El Dorado.” He suggested in private correspondence that two US academics, including one U-M faculty member, “intentionally caused or intensified a deadly measles epidemic among the Yanomami in 1968.” The academic community quickly refuted those charges, and Tierney modified his book. However, the U-M went further to dismiss the subsequently published book in its entirety. After protest from its faculty and students, the provost’s office then acknowledged that while its concern for the integrity of its faculty member and his research was important, it was also inconsistent with academic practice to settle complex scholarly questions with administrative decisions. With then Provost Nancy Cantor’s support, U-M anthropologist Fernando Coronil initiated an extended discussion with faculty and students from Michigan and Brazil on the production of knowledge and the university’s obligation to those indigenous peoples it engages in that research (Coronil 2001).

This illustrates how university leadership with integrity, combined with faculty committed to scholarly integrity and justice both, can make a difference. Academic authorities need to figure ways to network not only knowledge, but responsibility. Legality is not enough. They may even need to think about consequential solidarity.

My former students here will now smile and recall the hashtags we made – one of them, #ConsequentialSolidarity was too long to be twitter friendly but it was something that was built in class, and now lives among us accompanied by a smile. But it did lead us to think about what kinds of solidarity we mean, especially when solidarity goes beyond clicking the like button on facebook, or expressing symbolic solidarity in the styles we wear. I am eager to learn from you all about how solidarity with distant publics might work within this global university, within this global city. But let me conclude by talking about a new depth of solidarity about which I am learning.

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When I was in Poland last, I met a new generation of sociologists. My friends dating from the 35 years I have been going to Poland are mostly in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Tomek Zarycki, my youngest friend, in his 40s, brought me into new knowledge networks, some of which include 20 and 30 somethings!!! One of them is organized at the Center for the Social Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw and has brilliant sociologists at work on the steps of solidarity.

Regardless of your affinities for that Pope, or for religion in general, Michal Luczewski, Maria Szymborska, and their colleagues are writing a book in which they hope to elicit the meanings of solidarity from Solidarity, providing a historical and cultural richness, and frankly a normative and dialogical depth, that will inspire much more profound reflection on what consequential solidarity might mean. It will challenge especially those who throw the term around as a slogan for struggle with others, and fail to recognize that abiding solidarity demands a struggle within oneself about the practice of responsibility and the quest for integrity as much as a struggle with those who oppress imagined classmates. From their work http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/ we can learn more about their steps of solidarity -- to face reality, seek the good, work on yourself, serve others, strive for agreement and forgive in truth. I anticipate learning much more next week in Brussels when I meet with them and others to figure how these steps in solidarity’s extension might travel. That work illustrates how I understand globalization itself.

There are many different kinds of globalizations, first of all. I was very glad to see John Guidry https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaguidry at last night’s event, my co-editor with our dearly departed friend and colleague Mayer Zald, of a volume making that very point (https://www.press.umich.edu/11707/globalizations_and_social_movements) . When we applied that notion to the study of social movements, John, Mayer and I emphasized that these movements have various normative penumbra about them, deserving articulation as much as the resources, opportunities and frames that typically animate social movement studies. We also emphasized in that work that globalization varies not only across aspects of a transnational flow, but about the places of its enactments.

Craig picked up on that emphasis in my 2015 book, as it is also his. He emphasized that when scholars and practitioners talk about globalization in terms of increasing sameness, they miss a profound point. Because of our histories, our cultures, or different locations in various power relations, we engage globalization differently. Globalization is not about sameness: it is about how different kinds of connections, with different kinds of foundations and articulations, create alternative futures. Craig noted that I don’t follow many globalization perspectives in my book because I don’t emphasize how globalization affects us, how globalization is something to which we must adapt. Rather, I ask how in the exercise of our responsibility we can refashion the ways in which globalizations work. He’s right.

Another person from the audience asked about the ways in which these knowledge flows work, and whether it’s always so hegemonic, whether the terms of knowledge always flow from north to south. Again, that can happen, of course, but not always. I refer to one of my fellow panelists in my book.

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For example, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza have worked extensively on how transformations of political process develop within particular contexts and are translated across the world. Focusing in his first book on the innovations in “participatory budgeting” in Porto Allegre, the process by which local publics obtain control over portions of municipal budgets to allocate according to transparent public discussions, Baiocchi (2005) helps clarify one of the local institutional transformations that made Brazil’s Workers’ Party so successful. He has developed these notions to consider how these ideas traveled across Brazil and their implications for the local state and its civil society (Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva 2008). However, in his subsequent work with Ernesto Ganuza, he has explored how these ideas have traveled across Brazil and the world (Baiocchi and Ganuza forthcoming).

Now in some fifteen hundred municipalities across the world, participatory budgeting as an idea has taken off. It has become unmoored from its grounding in the Brazilian context and from the ideas around administrative reform and social justice that give its original purpose. By tracing its travel across the world, Baiocchi and his colleagues have explained how this technique adapts to different circumstances and different agents of implementation. This knowledge flow highlights the ways in which things are transformed and can transform. By breaking down participatory budgeting into its communicative “Habermasian” moment, and the Rawlsian administrative one, Baiocchi and Ganuza illustrate that in a world of flows, some things are a bit stickier than others, while other things more easily go with the flow.

Our colleague Claudio Benzecry http://sociology.uconn.edu/benzecry/ also pushed the global south point a little further, inviting me to reflect more on this binary. I am not, frankly, a fan of the term if only because it leads us to think about the world in terms of a primary binary, and distracts us from the variations across the global south and the multiple imperialisms at work. In my book I focus on the relative position Poland, Kosova, and Afghanistan enjoy in “global” English language scholarship in that light.

In the global south literature, Afghanistan would certainly be present in theory, but not so much in practice. It certainly does not inform a global south theoretical frame in the same way that Bengali histories and cultures would, for example. Kosova, despite being European, would be even more invisible than Afghanistan in a global south despite the fact that Vetevendosje, one of the most creative social movements in the world today, does identify with global south kinds of politics. Even the translation of its name from Albanian into English as “Self Determination” indicates that. For too many experts on the global south, however, Kosova is in Europe, and therefore, not of the south, not appropriate to their conversation. That’s a cultural politics impossible to see when terms privilege certain voices over others based on the empires they have suffered. But global south scholars can transform the terms that limit us.

I am myself rather fond of how two scholars focused on the global south reframe the discussion. As I suggest in my book, the Comaroffs (2011, 48) have argued,

If indeed rather south-like conditions have become the “grim New Normal” in

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Euro-America, there is clearly a need there too for a return to Theory . . . [by which they mean] the historically contextualized problem-driven effort to account for the production of social and cultural “facts” in the world by recourse to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between the inductive and the deductive, the concrete and the concept, also in a different register, between the epic and the everyday, the meaningful and the material

That’s really good. Still, there are some complex dynamics that reflect power relations that I have not sufficiently considered. Another of our colleagues and one of the leading researchers of the public sphere, Andreas Koller (https://ipk.nyu.edu/contacts/ipk-alumni/59-andreas-koller) put a question to me this way following last evening:

In order to globalize knowledge, do you, essentially, propose to BYPASS the national American public sphere and leave its "nationalized knowledge" as it is while hoping for some positive FEEDBACK EFFECTS later on (which effects and how precisely?) from the transnational knowledge networks that you see at the forefront of "globalizing knowledge"?

Andreas pushes me to think more concretely here than I have so far. I have to think far more deeply than I can manage now in the afterglow of yesterday’s seminar, but it all depends on what we mean by bypass. I certainly don’t believe these knowledge networks can be maximally effective by avoiding the resources of the richest and most powerful knowledge institutions. On the other hand, I would propose that we should figure how we can use these knowledge institutions to increase the impact of Kosovar scholarship in English language learning.

That happens, as it happened in Poland, when more and more of that scholarship is available not only in Albanian or in Polish, but also in English. As the Polish Sociological Review made Polish sociology accessible to the Polish language deprived, so too was a new publication from Kosova helping to publicize what some of the scholars in Prishtina now address. Njohja (I make it available here -- https://www.academia.edu/3630827/_2013_Articulations_of_Transformation_Subjectivities_and_Structures_in_Crisis_) is one immediate way to gain access to Kosovar scholarship that is less widely circulated than, say, Latin American scholarship with a much wider Spanish or Portuguese language readership.

Now, what does this mean, concretely? It’s not enough, as I argue in Chapter 5, to just put work out there. One needs arguments that help to make certain world regions prominent in the global imagination. Indeed, when Hillary asked what makes the Ruhr region interesting for English language scholars, she rehearses the familiar problem those beyond America face when they face US ethnocentrism’s hegemony in global social science scholarship: either such scholars must explain how this is similar to or different from American conditions, or must elaborate how it is so different from existing US-based theory that it highlights something new and exciting in general terms. This set of choices suffocates.

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Thus, to globalize knowledge, we need to find a way to limit the ethnocentrism undergirding definitions of scholarly excellence. And that limitation begins with attempts to mark it. But it must go further. I look forward to learning how.

In conclusion, let me turn to one more remark Gianpaolo made.

He suggested that this is very much a document of the times in which we live. I intended that, and dared write in ways that are as provisional, and maybe even sometimes provocative, as being in the moment inevitably is. In this set of extended comments, however, it also allows me to extend that moment into the future, and into different spaces for dialogue about globalizing knowledge. It might even allow me to depart, someday, from the “politics of generosity” Gianpaolo identifies in the book, and to mark the roads not taken. I’ll do that some other time.

And there were many other conversations worthwhile, but those are also due another time, another space, another extension of globalizing knowledge.

4/23/15: Comments in a Session Entitled, “Ways of Knowing” at Thinking the Earth, 330 http://www.brown.edu/academics/institute-environment-society/sites/brown.edu.academics.institute-environment-society/files/uploads/Thinking%20the%20Earth%20Brochure.pdf

Notes in Preparation for a Panel Discussion with Geri Augusto https://vivo.brown.edu/display/gaugusto, Hannah Freed-Thall https://vivo.brown.edu/display/hfreedth Keisha-Khan Y Perry https://vivo.brown.edu/display/kyperry and Sarah E. Vaughn http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty_member/sarah_elizabeth_vaughn/

Michael D. Kennedy

April 23, 2015

Ways of knowing. Initially, I had translated ways of knowing into “alternative knowledges” in order to think about the knowledges associated with different positions of power within nations and across them. But I think ways of knowing is a better way to

330 Prepared for http://www.brown.edu/academics/institute-environment-society/thinking-earth-about-participants

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frame this, for it is better to think about the process of knowing that to assume certain identifications of knowledge.331

I take that emphasis on process from Andreas Glaeser’s wonderful book on political epistemics http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo9016717.html. In that, he prefers to use the word understanding rather than knowing, something we could talk about later. But in that book he also suggests that we consider at least 3 different modes of understanding – discursive, emotive, and kinesthetic. I am glad to see that thinking the earth has so many modes of knowing present, and I will return to that in a moment. First a point about power given that I have no powerpoints today.

Different ways of knowing are associated with different kinds of powers. Of course not all ways of knowing enjoy the same authority or even the same consequence in their expression. In my book on globalizing knowledge (http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24607) I spend a good amount of time thinking about the ways in which different modes of knowledge production are variously legitimated, and how intellectuals, universities, and publics can mobilize knowledge in different ways to realize various outcomes. As a consequence of that emphasis, I’m especially interested to think about what intellectual responsibility means. And that is a lot easier when it comes to thinking the earth than in thinking Ukraine, my typical obsession of late.

No doubt this audience is shocked to hear me say that it’s relatively easy to think the earth with intellectual responsibility. But I say this on good authority. After all, if you have not seen John Oliver talk about climate change, then you have not completed your schooling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg) On his television show, he invited Bill Nye the Science Guy to debate a climate change skeptic. But then John Oliver realized that this was intellectually irresponsible. His debate should be more representative. So, he invited 96 others to join Bill Nye, and 2 others to join the skeptic. That, he said, is a more representative scientific debate. We all had a good laugh. But what does this mean in terms of ways of knowing the earth?

It means that, at least on the biggest question facing our world’s survival, the science is relatively clear. It is at least clear enough for the amount of climate science public policy needs. But what climate science and its public policy allies might not have enough of is a sense of humor. Humor, is, after all, a way of knowing and it can sometimes move substantial obstacles from the path of right action.

331 I have been privileged to work on environmental ways of knowing throughout my career with colleagues far more knowledgeable than I, whether in supervising and reading the dissertations of Guntra Aistara and Janice Brummond https://www.academia.edu/3532139/_2014_Knowledge_Networks_and_Former_Students working on the environmental aspects of transition culture in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan with scholars from the University of Michigan and those countries https://www.academia.edu/1205338/_2002_Cultural_Formations_of_Postcommunism_Emancipation_Transition_Nation_and_War, or in the wonderful project analyzing the place of the environment in higher education, undertaken with Timmons Roberts and Nancy Jacobs and the many participants whose awards from the Luce Foundation made this a great assembly http://www.luceenvironment.org/. I regret not being able to mention more of these endeavors in this brief set of remarks.

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Last year, Lucy Bates-Campbell wrote a Science and Society honor’s thesis called “Whose Climate Is It Anyway?” https://www.academia.edu/12091322/Whose_Climate_is_it_Anyway_Climate_Change_and_Comedy_in_Contemporary_America She outlined in that how comedy functions in the climate change debate, and the ways in which comedy might take the science and politics around the environment into everyday discussion. Meta-analytically, she asked us to think about how the ways of knowing associated with humor might help us understand the dynamics that continue to move us toward the destruction of our planet.

It might seem counterintuitive, but it can be critical. Recall the ways in which humor has helped folks talk about race across its divides better – think Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock…

What about humor as a mode of knowing the earth? I told Lucy, following her exceptional presentation, that I wished she would take that presentation on the road, for in order to have a way of knowing the earth that might be more consequential, more people might need to be able to feel it, even with a laugh, in order to have it at the core of their being.

Of course, by virtue of the way some people live, and the way their ancestors have lived, some folks have that very mode of knowing in their very mode of being. This is certainly the case for our colleagues and friends from island nations.

I am very glad that this conference is able to host Kekuhi Keali’ikanaka’oleohaililani, but I have also learned substantially from Kumu Ramsay Taum about the value and opportunities coming from stepping beyond continental thinking.

I met Kumu Ramsay Taum during one visit to Hawaii because I was interested to learn more about Lua for the course I teach on martial arts, culture, and society. Our first conversation became a 3 hour discussion that has continued on across time and space.

He came to Brown in the fall of 2013 to talk not only about Lua, but also to explore the ways in which his own learnedness in Hawaiian knowledge cultures could help us appreciate the earth anew. What, he asked, would happen to our approach to the earth if we diminished our continental mindset, and added more of an island sensibility? Would we not think less about the ownership and exploitation of this earth? Would we not think more about our stewardship or kinship with it?

It’s too bad that thinking the earth does not have the linguistic roots of Hawaii itself. As Kumu Ramsay explains it: Ha refers to -- life giving breath, Wai -- live giving waters, and the I refers to the spiritual energy that connects us. The spirit of Aloha could be the spirit of our earth’s salvation. See Kumu Ramsay Taum’s own Ted Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj1WKf0fRMM as well as his introduction to this volume: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9328-9780824847616.aspx. Also note his conclusion: he does not conclude with thinking the earth. He says we need to act ourselves into new ways of thinking and not presume that we can think ourselves there. That’s martial arts learning, too, and that is my next step here.

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I have been a student of social movements for my whole professional life, from the Polish Solidarity movement of 1980-81 through today, where I support students working to figure out their own combination of scholarly learning and practical engagement, something Brown now calls “engaged learning” (http://footnote1.com/how-engaged-learning-can-invigorate-higher-education/). Of course engaged learning is very much a part of thinking the earth, quite manifest in fossil fuel divestment movements.

Many of my students have been involved substantially in these movements within universities, and in stimulating the connections that those movements have with each other and with other modes of social change within Appalachia and across the world. Katie Cohen is one of them https://brown.academia.edu/KathrynCohen. She has brought to our vocabulary a concept that helps us think about divestment better.

Divestment is not, by itself, a solution, as every divestment activist would note and every one of its opponents overlooks. It is, rather, part of what Katie would call a “resource intervention chain” that could be part of the solution that in turn stimulates other parts of the chain of solutions. Instead of asking whether divestment would solve the problem, we might ask how undertaking divestment from the fossil fuel industry would stimulate other efforts in the chain of environmental interventions.

Brown’s spokespersons say the debate is over at Brown but with challenges continuing elsewhere http://www.browndailyherald.com/2015/04/23/fossil-free-brown-makes-less-noise-than-peer-groups/ and as other leading universities divest, as Stanford has http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/may/divest-coal-trustees-050714.html , Brown might very well find reason in the future to rethink its own place in this resource intervention change around the fossil fuel economy and ecology. In Kumu Ramsay’s words, we might with that step act ourselves into new ways of thinking. But clearly, acting and thinking are not enough. At a university, scholarship is, in the end, foundational. Here again, which kind of scholarship? I was privileged enough to participate with a number of colleagues from IBES in a meeting in Iceland last August, where I learned about different kinds of “actionable knowledge on the ice edge”. While certainly there is science animating our discussion about how fast the ice edge is retreating, there are also energy companies out there, and shipping companies out there, producing actionable knowledge and looking for ways to exploit oil and natural gas from newly available sites with that ice edge retreat. Certainly Putin and Russia recognize this new wealth emerging too, and they are not only in Ukraine redefining the meaning of security in Europe, but doing their best to militarize the Arctic too. The indigenous peoples of the Arctic find themselves with actionable, and objectionable, knowledge cultures on their doorstep, threatening to undermine even further their own ways of thinking the earth, of living their lives. And with that, I am afraid, not only are first nations at risk, but so too are all nations at risk.

Ways of knowing have different kinds of authority and power associated with them. Different ways of knowing are variably respectful of the stewardship this earth deserves, our home deserves. Universities ought to be places that not only develop the

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specializations of knowledge typically associated with expertise, but places where the valuations of different ways of knowing can be explored and evaluated. It is good when universities not only seek ways of knowing that are lucrative and powerful but also those ways of knowing that are important for our global well being, and the well being of those who know the earth in the air we breath, the water that sustains us, and the spirit that connects us.

Thank you IBES, and thank you colleagues.

April 9, 2015, 5:30-7:00American University and George Washington University, “Globalizing Knowledge and the Articulation of Intellectual Responsibility, with special regard to Ukraine” held at American University 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW MGC 203/205 Washington DC 20016 – Please Register Here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/globalizing-knowledge-and-the-articulation-of-intellectual-responsibility-tickets-16056699019

Notes in Anticipation of, and Following, a talk at American University supported also by George Washington University

Globalizing Knowledge and the Articulation of Intellectual Responsibility With Special Regard to Ukraine:

A Knowledge Cultural Sociology332

Michael D. Kennedy

332 I am deeply grateful to all those who attended the presentation whose comments inspired the revision of my original remarks, including Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Daina Stukuls Eglitis, Michelle Kelso, Ryan Aiken, Lauren Rouse, and Elizabeth Worden. I also thank Kristen Surak whose visit to Brown on the preceding days to discuss her book, Making Tea, Making Japan, http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=20929 enabled conversations that substantially advanced the arguments informing my presentation, most notably around the place of fear in this presentation.

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April 9, 2015

Intellectual responsibility is notably difficult to characterize in general, especially when linked to globalizing knowledge. However, in an era when information wars through conventional and social media are as consequential to social conflict and war as are the mobilization of more material resources, that articulation becomes even more critical to cultivate within universities and across national public spheres. In this lecture, I extend the discussion of intellectual responsibility developed in my 2015 book by distinguishing between 1) disinformation and the selective use of knowledge; 2) professional expertise and contextual knowledge; and 3) analytical and normative questions while reviewing their necessary relationships in responsibility’s refinement. I develop this argument by considering existing and potential terms of debate about the meanings and consequences of the 2013-15 struggle in Ukraine.

My abiding question has been this:

How Do Intellectuals Mobilize Institutions and Networks to Engage Issues in a More Globally Responsible Fashion?

Of course the book is more than that, but today, I’m going to focus in on two particular questions that derive from the book.

a) What is intellectual responsibility, how do we recognize it, and is it sufficiently prominent for the public good?

b) Who is intellectually responsible in English language debates when it comes to the discussion of the crisis in Ukraine?

To address these questions is actually a lot harder than what you might imagine, but central, it seems to me, to a knowledge cultural sociology.

This knowledge cultural sociology is a term my students, guest Kristin Surak, and I have coined in our Brown University graduate seminar on the sociology of culture and knowledge. In a subsequent essay, I’ll work to develop its broader parameters, but now let us say that, like the difference between the sociology of culture and cultural sociology, this approach intends to focus less on explaining “high culture” knowledge with other features, as the traditional sociology of knowledge has done. Rather, this approach works to figure how claims to knowledgeability, whether legitimated or not, shape broader processes of social transformations. One of the key elements of such a knowledge cultural sociology is the question of the political responsibility of intellectuals.

The volume by Maclean, Montefiore and Winch (eds.) published in 1990 on the political intellectual responsibility of intellectuals develops this approach powerfully. I have summarized the book’s debates this way both in Globalizing Knowledge and in an earlier volume with Ron Suny on Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation:

As Plato would have it, or as Benda argued, the treason of intellectuals is to

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abandon the commitment to a superior and ever more cultivated universalistic reason (Lock 1990). Others argued that an intellectual’s primary responsibility is to the craft, a textual responsibility, and one abandons intellectual responsibility when one violates that code of textual responsibility (LeCercle 1990). Indeed, intellectual responsibility is most apparent when moral action is conducted through modes of intellectual practice, rather than in explicitly political engagement. But even with that intellectual craft, intellectuals cannot be relieved of political or moral responsibility since it can, and must, be practiced within their field (Tamas 1990). For these authors, then, intellectuals have a different kind of political responsibility, perhaps even an elevated one, but one that is to be kept separate from popular politics. Ernest Gellner (1990) however, offers caution by arguing that it is frankly difficult to recognize intellectual treason when any conclusion is reached by intellectual means; perhaps the greatest treason is to easily identify others who are guilty.

On the other hand, several of the authors emphasized that one cannot separate very easily intellectual responsibility from a more general political responsibility. For instance, the defense of truth seeking cannot be limited to intellectual affairs, since the real world impinges on those intellectual affairs, and truth seeking is not only the province of intellectuals, but of all actors (Montefiore 1990). Indeed, intellectuals have more responsibility than ever before, given that technological prowess now threatens not only human communities but the biophysical world itself (Levy 1990).

More substantive debates can, however, vary in the ease with which one can recognize intellectual responsibility. At least in popular culture if not also in most of the scientific imagination, it is easier to recognize intellectual irresponsibility when it comes to question about whether climate change has been affected by human action. At least John Oliver and Bill Nye the Science Guy would put it that way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg

I think the crisis in Ukraine is much more difficult to figure, and I will explain why. But first let me think about this question of intellectual responsibility on a global scale.

In my volume, I did not try to develop a list of what enables us to see intellectual responsibility, especially on a global scale. That may be more difficult that I present here, and I would invite you all to help me think that through, but I think it would include the following elements:

1. Commitment to figuring priorities in global transformations Climate Change is essential, but how important is Crimea’s fate?

2. Commitment to evidence-based coherent arguments But what kinds of evidence and coherence are critical?

3. Openness to reasoned challenge But when does that challenge become distraction?

4. Willingness to confront “nightmare questions” But when does that disable conviction and courage?

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5. Embrace of reason’s autonomy as ideal, But how does that fit with a commitment to public engagement?

6. Does Responsibility mean “Facing Reality?”But how does that reflect a set of norms articulating that reality?

Let me develop this set of discussions with reference to Ukraine.

First, I would argue that the crisis in Ukraine over 2013-15 has only become more difficult to figure in terms of intellectual responsibility. Why?

In the beginning, Euromaidan looked familiar: another mobilization against corruption, authoritarianism and for freedom. In my book, I illustrated many such arguments, but this is one of my favorite ones: Cyril Hovorun (2013), associated with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate, wrote something I found truthful and poetic: .

The Maidan is giving or has given birth to a community which represents a classic instance of the civil society, almost its pure substance. This community identifies itself on the basis of shared values, including dignity, honesty, non-violence, solidarity, and readiness for self-sacrifice. Civil society in the form currently present at the Maidan can hardly be found even in Europe, where for the most part people nowadays are united on the basis of common interests, but not common values. I cannot personally imagine any contemporary European country where people would be freezing and risk being beaten or even killed for 24 hours a day for weeks, for the sake of values that seem quite abstract. The Ukrainian Maidan that gathered “for the sake of Europe,” has become more European than Europe and its politicians. The Ukrainians see how the European politicians betray the European Maidan, but they do not betray the European values they stand for. The Ukrainian Maidan actually brings back to many Europeans confidence about Europe; it cures what can be called “the European fatigue.”

I also discussed in that book how those associated with the Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna, notably Slawomir Sierakowski, organized a petition among prominent intellectuals in support of Euromaidan and its wish to associate with Europe. This was not just an act of gentile solidarity, however; they argued too that the struggle offers the European Union a means by which it might return to the idealism motivating its founding.

A much more significant exercise in intellectual responsibility came, I believe, in what we found around the question of fascism or extremism on Maidan. Some who wished to diminish the movement emphasized this aspect, but experts on far right movements and fascism mobilized an information campaign to counter what they saw was pure ideology operating in opposition to Maidan itself. Interestingly, international groups seemed to have more authority in delimiting this, but Ukrainians also mobilized an intellectual responsibility in opposition to this argument. I discuss several examples of these in my book.

The place of the far right in Ukrainian transformations remains an issue that can be debated. Indeed, recently people have been debating whether the appointment of

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Right Sector leader Dmytry Jarosh to an advisory position in the Ukrainian general staff is problematic. The debate took place around whether he was national conservative, or fascist, with most Ukrainians, and experts on right wing movements, deciding the latter. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32216738 We could debate his politics and his value to the general staff, but intellectual responsibility also demands how important that question is in relation to others. After all, the invasion of Ukraine, to my mind, changes this whole debate and puts the question of Jarosh’s “real agenda” second to the question of Putin’s.

When Russia invaded Crimea, and with its support for so called People’s Republics in Luhansk and Donetsk, and with its increasingly bellicose nuclear sabre rattling (http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-tensions-with-west-rise-russia-increasingly-rattles-nuclear-saber-1428249620) the world changed. At least I think the intellectually responsible point is to consider how it changed and whether that turn is something to accept as being, simply, “realistic”.

First and foremost is the way in which the conventions of international law have been torn asunder by Russia’s invasion and abrogration of the 1994 Budapest Agreement. This is not only a violation of many terms of rules, but it is also an invitation for those with nuclear capacities to think that no international agreement can protect them when a super power decides otherwise.

Second, because Putin’s conventional forces are so much weaker than NATO’s, the threat of nuclear attack is now more prominent than it has ever been. As Graham Allison of Harvard’s Belfer Center has said, the Soviets treated nuclear forces as a last resort. Now they lead in terms of Putin’s policy. See http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-tensions-with-west-rise-russia-increasingly-rattles-nuclear-saber-1428249620.

Third, we now have a different kind of information warfare, and given the significance of intellectuals in the engagement of this warfare, I will give it pride of place in my discussion. Every war has information and propaganda alongside it, but Russian invasion has a measure of propaganda and disinformation that is truly astonishing. In this sense, it is not a matter of selective information; it is fully a matter of filling airwaves and social media with active disinformation.

Information Warfare informs this crisis, where Russia has made substantial investments in trying to get its viewpoint across e.g. https://euobserver.com/opinion/128101. But this is not just a viewpoint. This deliberately distorts information and misrepresents in order to advance a political position.

One of the most critical defensive questions becomes how one ought combat this kind of information warfare. Frankly I am most impressed with the Meduza Project (@MeduzaProject), whose approach to this reflects not only the values of independent

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and critical journalism but also the kind of humor we need in these times333 http://www.baltictimes.com/baltics_in_front_line_of_information_war/

Of course the most recent, and embarrassing example for those who wish to declare Russian media responsible is the excellent work the BBC did recently to prove that in fact Ukrainian missile attacks did not kill on the spot a 10 year old girl. Given her critical work, one ought follow @antelava http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32137302

The much more egregious example, of course, is how much systematic distortion and lies have gone into the question of whether the loss of Crimea, and the establishment of Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics were the results of Ukrainian Russians, or by Russian volunteers, or by Russian regular soldiers. Few who have access to reliable information doubt it. https://news.vice.com/article/russian-soldiers-have-given-up-pretending-they-are-not-fighting-in-ukraine?utm_source=vicenewsfb Some argue that the role of Russia’s soldiers could be changing to one of instruction http://bigstory.ap.org/article/df1222f1070a41f19dc649571a06b057/russias-role-ukraine-seen-shifting-training-rebels# but the pattern is clear. There is systematic misrepresentation of Russia’s role in providing weapons and soldiers so as to destabilize Ukraine. Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Although this is discussed in the Western press, and certainly in Ukraine, and denied in the Russian press, western governments and their spokespersons seem to feel like they cannot say this openly. In fact, it is absolutely prohibited; even the notion of “proxy” war is not allowed. Why? Because they continue to hold out for a negotiated peace, and fear that if they speak openly, they will contribute to the escalation of the crisis. This actually extends the systemic lie that is Russia’s making, making western authorities complicit in this lie’s reproduction. But are intellectuals complicit?

If intellectuals emphasize untruths, certainly they betray their calling. But what if they simply emphasize something else? For example, how do we respond to something so gross as this?

What if, as according to the new RISI director, Leonid Reshetnikov, what is happening in Ukraine is not between Ukrainians and Russians but a war of world systems? This is part of the backstory being whipped up in order to justify why Russia cannot back down. Ukraine’s sovereignty, and territorial integrity, must be sacrificed for Russian security. That is the truth that serves his larger truth which to my mind is based on a systemic distortion so great that this is, fundamentally, a lie that denies reality http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/04/novorossiya-will-never-be-part-of.html?spref=tw. However, when Europeans say that the battle for Ukraine is a battle for Europe, they also fuel the imagination that this is a battle of world systems, and one simply has to decide whether Europe is better than Russia, or vice versa. I think this is true, but at the same time, opens the intellectual debate up to ideology more than intellectuality. I’d like to suggest a way out recognizing that Russian strategists have worked

333 We should not forget the importance of humor in these times, and not just because Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show. See https://www.academia.edu/1248206/_2005_The_Ironies_of_Intellectuals_on_the_Road_to_Class_Power_Theory_and_Society_34_24-33

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to make this true.

One of the effects of this elevation, and flooding, of Kremlin perspective is to erase Ukraine as such from the picture of the debate. Consider, for example, how Foreign Affairs framed the debate (http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142345/who-is-at-fault-in-ukraine)

“The West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Russia’s near abroad by expanding NATO and the EU after the Cold War.

How much do you agree? How confident are you?”

It’s worth reviewing the whole issue, but consider just a few responses. For example Masha Gessen replies:

I am taken aback by the question, which uses Kremlin terminology. What the hell is ‘near abroad’? Ukraine is a sovereign country as separate from Russia as, say, Finland. Incidentally, if Finland chose to join NATO I bet we would be talking about it in terms of Finland’s choice, and not NATO’s expansionism . And we have the 45 million people of the sovereign state of Ukraine who sought the support and protection of Western powers, which have failed to protect them from Russian aggression.

Whether or not you agree with Masha’s position, you must see this as the one that takes the question and power of information warfare most seriously. By contrast, those who agree with the statement consider information warfare incidental and irrelevant, and in a way elevate any Russian viewpoint to a reasonable one. John Mearsheimer, a leading voice of the Realist position, has had the greatest say on this:

Russian leaders and elites made it clear from the mid 1990s forward that they viewed NATO expansion as a serious threat and a violation of a tacit bargain made at the end of the Cold War. Putin and other Russian leaders were especially exercised when NATO announce din April 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join NATO; they warned it would lead to a crisis. Indeed, it helped cause the Russia-Georgia War in August 0087. Yet Western leaders foolishly continued to pursue NATO and EU expansion, and that eventually led to the present crisis.

Foreign Affairs presents this as a simple debate, with reasonable positions distributed. That, it seems, is to be intellectually responsible, to recognized reasoned debate. I think that’s a reasonable position, but also far more limited that what a knowledge cultural sociologist like I am would accept.

First, a simple sociology of knowledge on this debate:

1. Nobody who agrees with the proposition is an expert on Ukraine. 2. Those who agree with the proposition have worked closely with American foreign policy (though not all who have so worked agree with the proposition) Those who

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identify with Putin and Russian power are “obviously” with them: Détente Logic reappears in Cold War II in the agreement with this position. 3. The range of reasons deployed to “justify” Russian reactions are few, and would apply to any country in Russia’s near abroad, and thus, likely generates a negative reaction by anyone who is not grounded in Russian logics, or in great power logics.

Ukrainianists are almost all, universally, opposed to this kind of logic. Some, like Rory Finnin, the director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, is almost funny in his advice about how to make sense of editorials (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-rory-finnin/ukraine-rebel-crisis_b_6667542.html). He writes,

1. Has the author published anything about Ukraine prior to 2013? This war is not being fought in a vacuum. Knowledge of the ‘theatre’ of conflict matters. Abstract models and theoretical systems do not wage war; people do.

2. Does the author characterise Ukraine as a country with agency, independence and sovereignty in the content of his/her analysis? That is, are Ukrainians subjects of the story? A prescriptive assessment about a war is intellectually suspect when it casts the country in which the war is taking place as a passive object or superfluous detail.

3. Does the author mention the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in his/her analysis? While not a treaty or security guarantee, the Memorandum is the political expression of a ‘commitment’ on the part of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation ‘to provide assistance to Ukraine… if Ukraine should become a victim of aggression’. Failing to cite such critical background in a debate about military ‘assistance’ is a sign of a lack of professionalism.

4. Does the author make even one mention of Russia’s forcible seizure and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in his/her analysis? The first violation of the ‘territorial integrity norm’ in Europe since the emergence of the UN Charter in 1945 is no incidental detail in a debate about an escalating war between Europe’s two largest countries. If it is nowhere to be found, caveat emptor

5. Does the author frequently use the term ‘great power’ but studiously avoid the term ‘international law’? If so, the analysis is essentially irrelevant to a debate that centres on responses to egregious and ongoing violations of international law. Similarly: does s/he refer to Russia as a ‘great power’ but at the same time describe the country as, for instance, ‘aging, depopulating, and declining… trying to cling to whatever international influence it still possesses’ (Stephen Walt)? Such formulations are confused and incoherent.

6. Has the author referred, for instance, to a present attempt to ‘march NATO and the European Union up to Russia’s doorstep’ (John Mearsheimer) without noting that NATO and the EU have been on Russia’s doorstep since 2004, when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO and the EU? If so, the analysis is uninformed.

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7. Does the author argue that the crisis in Ukraine began, for instance, ‘when the United States and European Union tried to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit’ (Walt) without appearing to know that 1) the ‘orbits’ of Russia and the EU already intersect in the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement they concluded in 1997 and that 2) the putatively ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions sought EU Association themselves?

What do we do with this debate?

One pathway I have been following, and one to which I would invite those who read this to help me explore, is to simply ask whom they feel has been “intellectually responsible” around the crisis in Ukraine. For example, following his extraordinary presentation at the Watson Institute for International Studies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bey-eDBm0k) , and of course after reading much of his work and following much of his knowledge network mobilizing, I thought Timothy Snyder’s work (http://timothysnyder.org/current-writing-on-ukraine/) exemplary. Indeed, during my stay in Poland in mid March, many of the people with whom I spoke argued that he represented just this kind of responsibility. One of the things people would also regularly say in this regard is that he really understands Ukraine, and the region. I’m not a Ukrainianist, but I do appreciate, as you would note in reading my book, the significance of contextual expertise.

I am, however, grounded in Poland more than anywhere else beyond America. I therefore follow many Polish arguments, but that should not be used to “diminish” my stance as “merely” Polish. I would rather say it gives me a refined sense of norms, a heightened attention to not only what is, but what ought to be. I am attuned to solidarity, and in solidarity’s ethic, I find intellectual responsibility. That may be one reason why I also find Snyder compelling.

However, there are some beyond East Central Europe who, upon hearing my discussion of Snyder’s nomination, find that declaration entirely inappropriate. And when, in one instance, I asked who they thought such a paragon of intellectual virtue in this debate, John Mearsheimer was the answer. His realism echoes very loudly in these debates. Indeed, realism seems to drown out solidarity in most discussions in the world today.

I want to analyze this realism, Realism, in more detail as a knowledge culture itself. Indeed, I don’t know why we wouldn’t identify Lilia Shevtsova as the ultimate realist, offering an account of Putin and power relations in Russia with both theoretical sophistication and contextual expertise (http://www.the-american-interest.com/byline/shevtsova/) However, those with the IR label in the debate leave very clear impressions with me.

The Realists know best what their models, and their assessments of Russian motivation suggest. That is their professional responsibility, but it is not grounded explicitly in any norms other than in their own reading of the distribution of power. But that reading also

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carries certain norms, even beyond questions of “stability”. To my mind, intellectual responsibility goes beyond that domain to consider not only what is, but what could be.

Simply put, The Polish Solidarity movement could not have been born if Realism ruled.

Michal Luczewski, Maria Szymborska and others are working to extend the historical and cultural meaning of Solidarity the movement, and solidarity the value (http://skarbsolidarnosci.pl/ ). I take great inspiration from their work whose publication is forthcoming. But I take their starting point here as one of my own: what does it mean to face reality? Isn’t that what the Realists are doing? I would suggest not, as they are ignoring the reality of Ukrainian suffering and its causes. And even if one is not an Ukrainianist, there are ways to learn, ways to develop both knowledge and solidarity, ways to face reality when one does not know Ukraine.

One of my favorite sources has been Euromaidan News in English, curated by William Risch, Hugo Lane, No Jones, Jennifer Carroll, Jennifer Dickinson, and Regina Goodnow, on Facebook. I trust them, and I would recognize their work as an exercise in intellectual responsibility and solidarity. I also find this project supported by Krytyka Polityczna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4JgnnyiENY also exemplary in a different way, one focused on developing a different sense of Ukrainian reality, one fueled less by learning more news, and one fired more by enhancing the imagination, through art, of what could be done otherwise.

But can’t we learn from Realists? Of course, but for me, it begins with a normative question. What affect, what normative position, lies at the foundation of this Realism? Fear.

The fear of escalation, the fear of nuclear war, the fear of Nuclear Holocaust. All real, but also manufactured and elevated and used by Putin to create a world in which his form of alternativity, his sense of decency, his vision of order, is to dominate over what the Ukrainian people seek. To accept his definition of reality is accept fear over hope, to leads one to define reality in ways that cannot be changed for the better.

And with that I propose, the moral foundation for intellectual responsibility is lost.

And with it, today’s treason of intellectuals, enabling political leaders across Europe and America to allow Ukraine to be destroyed by Russian aggression despite the wish of so many Ukrainians, despite the sacrifice of so many Ukrainians, to be in solidarity with the West.

Contrary to what Leonid Reshetnikov and others of his disposition have argued, that this Ukrainian struggle is one fueled by America, I fear it is quite the opposite. This Ukrainian struggle is a struggle for solidarity and the global public good that has been abandoned by America and the European Union.

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Russian victory in military terms has been preceded by their triumph in the information war and in the systematic diminishment of the West’s own claims to intellectual integrity, regardless of political persuasion.

The Lie Is Winning.

March 24, 2015A Book Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge at the Institute for Social Studies, Warsaw with Edwin Bendyk, Marta Bucholc, Michał Sutowski, Adam Leszczyński and Tomasz Zarycki, http://www.uw.edu.pl/events/event/spotkanie-z-prof-michaelem-kennedym/

“Globalizing Knowledge Meets in Poland: Reflections on the Symposium”Michael D. Kennedy

So wrote the invitation:

“The Institute of Social Studies of the University of Warsaw invites you for a Book Panel Discussion on Michael Kennedy’s (Brown University) new book, “Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation”.

Participants: Marta Bucholc (Instytut Socjologii UW), Edwin Bendyk (Polityka & DELab/ISS UW),334 Michał Sutowski (Krytyka Polityczna). The book will be introduced by Tomasz Zarycki (ISS UW), while the discussion will be led by Adam Leszczyński (Gazeta Wyborcza & ISP PAN).

334 In the last moment Edwin Bendyk could not participate, but I enjoyed conversation with him subsequently.

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The event itself took place in the Brudziński Hall (Sala Brudzińskiego) at the Kazimierzowski Palace (Pałac Kazimierzowski), 26/28 Krakowskie Przedmieście Street, MARCH 24 at 5:30 p.m. (http://www.uw.edu.pl/events/event/spotkanie-z-prof-michaelem-kennedym/f)

This was an extraordinary occasion for me for so many reasons; even the site was important as in this building housing the lecture hall and Rector’s office for the university I studied Polish language in August 1983. Some of the people in the audience have long been important figures for me, several of whom – including Witold Morawski, Irek Bialecki, Renata Siemienska and Joanna Kurczewska, all sociologists – have been mentors and critical interlocutors for over 30 years.

My principal host and the person who introduced me, Tomasz Zarycki, is himself is a specialist on many of the things I also care about, not least the Polish intelligentsia (http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/informacje-o-instytucie/zespol/zarycki/ https://uw.academia.edu/TomaszZarycki). His recent work resituating Bourdieu, critical thought and world systems analysis illustrates the importance of the reflexivity I discuss in my book. 335 And thus his introduction to the symposium was a special delight.

Tomek also heads up the Institute for Social Sciences in the name of Robert Zajonc at the University of Warsaw, which is, itself, an important institutional expression of globalizing knowledge. Formed in 1991 as an interdisciplinary institute and sibling institution of the Institute for Social Research at University of Michigan336 and then named, following his death, for the distinguished Polish-born psychologist Robert Zajonc, ISS itself could be considered an object of global knowledge cultural research itself.337 One thing that is clear is that it has already developed important research projects on themes ranging from gender equality and complexity, from prejudice to social sciences exploring technology’s effects. However, ISS might be itself a vehicle for and object of even further creative social scientific work, a theme with which I conclude this set of reflections.

In the end of his introduction, Tomek picked up on one of the theses with which I concluded the book: on whether, and if so how, knowledge could be considered a public good around which solidarity could and should be developed. What ISS might become could be an answer to that very question.

Adam Leszczynski, himself both a historian and journalist for the largest newspaper in Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza, organized subsequent discussion with his prompting question

335 Zarycki, Tomasz. 2014. Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe London and New York Warczok, Tomasz, and Tomasz Zarycki. 2014. “Bourdieu Recontextualized: Redefinitions of Western Critical Thought in the Periphery.” Current Sociology 62 (3): 331–51. 336 See http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/robert-zajonc/ (see also these video recordings: http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/robert-zajonc/index.php?con=presentations.html)337 Indeed, I could have considered Zajonc in the same framework as I considered Znaniecki, Slomczynski, and others in that portion of my book explaining Poland’s prominence in American social science.

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about the role and salience of the public intellectual in Poland today. What does it mean, he asked, to be an engaged and responsible intellectual in Poland now?

Marta Bucholc, a sociologist associated with Warsaw University’s Institute of Sociology https://uw.academia.edu/martabucholc, is generally and especially known for her work in extending classical sociological theory into contemporary relevance, most notably around Max Weber and Norbert Elias. She picked up on the questions asked by Tomek and Adam, but only returned to them after a masterful account of the book itself. Indeed, as is often the case with a perceptive reviewer, she was able to recognize elements of the book that were only implicit for me. Although she herself put it better, this is how I understood it, and I put her commentary in my own terms.

First, she recognizes that the book works in layers – not only how it works across geographic spaces, but across different modalities of cosmopolitan intellectuality.

She recognized that I am working across both analytical and normative layers, often presenting things not only as they are, but also as they could be. Even my language, she so perceptively noticed, illustrates this: I often would speak of how scholars “help” in the mission to extend cosmopolitan intellectuality and consequential solidarity.

There are layers in other forms too she notes: global institutions that might be considered depositories of that cosmopolitanism, and then there are networks and practices that mediate those flows of cosmopolitanism. But what she found missing in the analysis, actually, is an account of the individuals who might embody the ethos of this type. Indeed, she proposed in a most thoughtful and elegant critique that I might develop an ideal type of individual, a figuration so to speak, that would represent this disposition. She is right. I did not do this.

Of course I did mention many who were exemplary. I was explicit in my acknowledgement of Vaclav Havel, Ricardo Lagos, and Ashraf Ghani as those who exemplify intellectuals with political responsibility. And while I mentioned many other prominent intellectuals in the world today – like Michael Burawoy, Craig Calhoun, Saskia Sassen, Slavoj Zizek, and others, each with very different articulations of autonomy and social embeddedness – I did not use their exploration to develop such an expression.

Marta proposed that I could have developed the habitus of the global intellectual I am trying to elaborate. She herself draws on my account of design intellectuality (itself drawing on John Seely Brown and Ann Pendleton-Julian) being visionary/optimistic/opportunistic/independent/ironic to ask whether I would not want to put a worldview in this.

I am quite tempted to do this, now that Marta mentions it, but in the end I resist.

Were I to do this, I fear I would replicate the very problem I highlight. As someone with globalizing intentions who comes from an already privileged place, I fear that

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constructing such a habitus, even in ideal typical terms, would wind up filling the category in ways that make it difficult for those with less access to the global referent to occupy that space. If I were to do this, I fear that I would replicate the very hierarchies of worldliness that make the reconstruction of worldliness itself an exercise in definition from privilege. Indeed, it would lead me to look to those I meet and assess them in terms I already have in mind rather than look to learn from people like Marta and rethink what I ought to have had in mind when I spoke of cosmopolitan intellectuality. After all, she does embody that very intellectuality which I have in mind. Indeed, for her second layer of commentary, you can see why I think so.

Marta proposed that I remain rather conventional, I think was the term, in how I identify modes of participation that articulate various scales in modes of participation. I discuss how local problems become global, how the globally recognized intellectual becomes interested in a local idea elsewhere, how local informants become globally important, and how local informants remain localized as fact-bearers only enriching, not transforming, the globally articulated languages, metaphors and theories of the global world itself. She marked my comparison of different global knowledge networks – of the Social Science Research Council, World Economic Forum, World Social Forum, and Open Society Foundations – as perhaps approximating her question about modes of participation, but they are, I think she rightly marks, insufficiently elaborated in the very terms she discusses. Might, she properly intimated, global universities themselves do more than work to refigure their position in a hierarchy of world class excellence? Could they, rather, figure how those modes of participation might be altered? I think this is a fantastic point of departure.

It is, at least, especially important for intellectuals seeking global recognition. Marta herself made that statement clear, but she also noted such recognition typically occurs in modes of market and political space that limit that innovation, ones to which universities themselves fall prey to in their drive to gain position in various ranking schemes made elsewhere. That amble up a ladder others construct is not the kind of globalizing knowledge I seek to elevate, but it is certainly a hegemonic view of what the term is about. I am grateful to Marta for her perceptive comments here, and for how she opened for Michal who followed up his former teacher magnificently.

Michal Sutowski (http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/users/michal-s) is himself a Warsaw University graduate and part of one of the most important political intellectual networks to develop (and not just in Poland and Ukraine but with broader global consequence) in recent years – Krytyka Polityczna http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/. He marked several things that both reinforced, and extended, Marta’s commentary.

First, he marked the importance of the question figuring in Chapter 5 of my book dedicated to difference and recognition. Why, he asked, are some places recognized in world history and others not? In particular, he found my account of Kosova and its struggles over the 1980s and on to be especially important to mark, and to consider the implications of the world’s relative ignorance of that history. I was very pleased with that recognition, but especially for how he linked it to Solidarity.

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After all, he noted, the Solidarity movement of 1980-81 was itself globally recognized, appreciated for its universal significance even if variously interpreted by those in different political and global positions across the world. I agree, of course, given how that movement inspired my first book.338 And those intellectuals associated with Solidarity might, he suggested, illustrate the conditions under which critical change can happen. That, however, raised a more general question: how to elaborate the theory and practice of the engaged intellectual.

Michal took the conversation here to another level that was itself quite provocative and insightful. He wondered why I didn’t, given my investment in Polish history and its intellectuals, think to mention the Research Institute for Developing Countries and the important work done there by Michal Kalecki, Kazimierz Laski, and Ignacy Sachs in the early 1960s. That was a good question, and one we ought to consider. For the most part, I did not consider cosmopolitan intellectuality and consequential solidarity developed by those associated with communist regimes. Indeed, he proposed that we consider how their work and approach to development and socialism had even greater consequence because of their clear association with a Marxist (and not communist) tradition. This clearly deserves more consideration, something I cannot manage here.339 Michal did, however, appreciate my invocation of Trotsky as an exemplar, (as I drew Trotsky out through Burawoy’s contrast of Skocpol and Trotsky in his methodological commentary on revolution’s explanation). Wasn’t, Michal proposed, what Alain Touraine did around the Solidarity movement of 1980-81 illustrative of this kind of theory and practice of the engaged intellectual? And might we say that Manuel Castells now illustrates that with his engagement of the Indignados in Spain? I think Michal is right, and indeed, I return to Chapter4 and 8 of my book in thinking about the intellectuals and movements on which I focused. I discussed the Occupy movement in Chapter 4 of my book, in Chapter 8 I focused on Europe and the articulation of critical intellectuals and movements that developed in 2011-13 there. In fact, in the spirit of Burawoy, I developed an all-too-simple chart to prompt discussion beyond the book. Indeed, each of these intellectuals has responded to the crisis and transformation facing the world in different ways.

Intellectualities in TransformationTheory Practice Rearticulation

System/Policy Habermas Gusenbauer KaldorMovement/Ideology

Zizek Graeber Gitlin

338 Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland: A Critical Sociology of Soviet-type Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 339 A volume dedicated to their work is readily available here: http://digamo.free.fr/kalecki2day.pdf Indeed, this might be a fascinating comparison to the other work done on east European economists from a later period . See Johanna Bockmann and Gil Eyal, “Eastern Europe as a Laboratory of Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neo-liberalism,” AJS Vol.108, No.2 (September 2002), 310-352. Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism Stanford University Press, 2013. http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21002

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I wrote this in the book following the table to prompt this kind of comparison and discussion:

In the exercise of intellectual responsibility, individuals do need to take on the task of understanding the meaning of the crises and transformations through which we live. They must figure pathways beyond them. Habermas and Žižek are theorists in this moment, reflecting the different addresses—in systems and in subjectivities—toward which critical intellectuals need channel their energies. But this, in the end, is a most traditional kind of intellectuality: the scholar explaining what is really going on and what really needs to be done.

Not all intellectuals stand on the theoretical sidelines, of course. Gusenbauer and Graeber are both enmeshed in moving their intellectualities to practice, albeit with very different accents. Graeber can write massive tomes of scholarly wisdom about debt, but he is also very much embedded in the movements of transformation themselves. He refines our sense of anarchism as he goes. Gusenbauer is embedded in the social democratic side of things. His intellectual practice is far more institutionalized and far more attentive to making the system work better through different policies. Like Graeber, he searches for how to mobilize knowledge and practice in the transformation of foundational ideas and modes of political change. They exemplify sense-making from their own relatively clear political locations just as Habermas and Žižek illustrate it from their own relatively coherent intellectual positions.

Žižek and Graeber have many more affinities politically speaking, for they stand with the revolutions in progress even while they each have clear ideas about which ideas and practices extend the revolutions. Habermas and Gusenbauer also recognize systemic problems but search within the constraints of the system the best paths to move ahead. They might seek, in Andre Gorz’s (1967, 6) old terms, non reformist reforms.

Todd Gitlin (2012), whose work I discussed extensively in Chapter 4, and Mary Kaldor represent something different, that rearticulation of intellectuality in cultural formation to which I previously referred. They are much more the analysts of others’ actions. They systematize the movements’ contradictions, anomalies, and potentials with a sympathetic eye toward including alienated voices into a process of systemic change. They look for points of and barriers to connection within, and beyond, the social and political landscape. In analyzing others’ actions, and in finding potential articulations systems and subjectivities might repress, they create new sensibilities for what is possible, enabling others to refigure what is newly feasible in change. They are also different from each other.

Gitlin engages a movement that more or less coheres and, in this, stands with Žižek and Graeber in his relatively clear identification with the revolution. However, his intellectuality does not stand so far above the movement but in dialogue with it, questioning more than explaining the alternative futures that face

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Occupy. Kaldor and colleagues work to identify an emergent identification now grounded in systemic alienation but potentially, through mutual recognition, something else entirely. Nevertheless, Kaldor and Gitlin share a common commitment to rearticulation in both theory and practice, facilitated by their method and focus on transformation.

I also find rearticulation powerful, and critical in these times when intellectualities are as emergent as they are traditional or organic in the Gramscian sense. However, different moments of transformation suggest different kinds of dialogues among the six qualities of intellectuality described earlier.

However, Michal’s question leads me to rethink this question of embeddedness I parse above. I wonder ever more critically about what it means for an intellectual to be embedded in a movement, and more significantly, I wonder what it means for an intellectual to be responsible in social and systemic change. I discuss this question further on April 9, 2015, in Washington where I focus particularly on that responsibility vis-à-vis Ukraine (a theme I have pursued additionally in discussion with colleagues during my week in Poland).

I turned in response to Michal away from a discussion of specific intellectuals to a discussion of moments and movements of transformation. In particular, as I do in the book, I identified the anti-ACTA movement in 2012 as an especially propitious moment for intellectuals to make a difference not only in the development of a movement but in the creation of a new system of property rights and social relations that ACTA promised to snuff. ACTA’s defeat in the European parliament could be taken as a sign of an emergent kind of knowledgeability based on civic empowerment, but it also stopped short of a more positive system of social reconstruction. In the book, I lamented intellectuals’ insufficient engagement of the question of ACTA. Of course that is not the case in Poland, given the substantial discussion of it, some of which I did not mark in the book. 340 Reading these additional texts do not, I think, change my point.

While intellectuals might debate and discuss the importance of ACTA, the far more critical intellectuality would have been to develop its political potential into a set of institutional reforms and practices that would not have allowed ACTA’s most problematic intellectual property regulations to reappear in international trade agreements.341 But that then moves us away from intellectuals as such into thinking about the ways in which we can develop knowledge cultures that are themselves embedded in transformation. And that is why I was especially taken by the last comment in the session offered from the audience.

340 Consider http://zbiory.ecs.gda.pl/images/elfinder/publikacje/ECS_Seria-RAPORT_Obywatele-ACTA.pdf and http://antymatrix.blog.polityka.pl/2014/06/02/obywatele-acta-raport-z-badan/ for example. Edwin Bendyk Bunt Sieci (Warsaw: Biblioteka Polityka 2012) is the only monograph account. 341 see Michael D. Kennedy, “Class in Trade: TTIP, ISDS and the Cultural Politics of the Next Left” in Ania Skrzypek and Ernst Stetter (eds.) Next Left: A Progressive Answer to the Global Social Question. FEPS Belgium, 2015.

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Maria Rogaczewska (http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/informacje-o-instytucie/zespol/maria-rogaczewska/) from the Institute for Social Studies “Social Challenges Unit” http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/en/research-centers/social-challenges-unit/ raised a question about how one might think about the research agenda associated with social innovation in this discussion of knowledgeable change. I frankly find it one of the most promising areas for social research – thinking not only about how one might theorize change from outside, but how one might theorize change from within transformational practices. Indeed, the work of the Center for Deliberative Democracy within Warsaw University’s Institute for Sociology might be considered within that same approach http://cd.uw.edu.pl/images/PROJECTS_of_the_CD_in_2011.pdf Such an approach to social science and intellectuality is something I see across the world, but it seems to me that it is insufficiently developed in global projects and in global knowledge networks, especially with tenure stream university faculty powering these networks. At least much more could be done. And in this, along with others, I have much to learn from what the team in this Social Challenges unit develops.

I followed up on Maria’s question in subsequent conversation with her, her colleague Maria Szymborska and their Institute director Tomek Zarycki.

In some ways, this team’s work resembles many efforts at my home university in the Howard Swearer Center for Public Service. http://brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/ Although I have not been so involved in this center as I might, it’s clear to me that this Brown University/Warsaw University dialogue would be most productive. In particular, the very explicit transformative sociology in theory and practice the Social Challenges unit develops could inform our own partnership between Brown University Sociology and the Swearer Center at Brown in addressing modes and practices of social change.

Our Warsaw colleagues envision their own work in terms of engagement (much as I entitle my own chapter on public sociology).

Developed in anticipation of UEFA http://www.uefa.com/ EURO 2012 event, where Europe’s football championships took place in Poland and Ukraine, the team worked to understand, and facilitate, the preparation process for this huge event across several layers – from the institutional and managerial to the civic and social self-image. They have continued this work in a number of areas, and with especially notable success in the area of sport.

They have helped those engaged in various levels of athletic endeavor in Poland to move their own sense of accomplishment toward a vision of “sport for all” – where it’s not only a matter of athletic excellence but of using sport to extend education and public health. Indeed, in very specific ways I see this as resembling a smaller initiative associated with Brown’s Swearer Center – Beat the Streets, a wrestling initiative designed to extend engagement and self esteem among youth in disadvantaged educational institutions and life circumstances http://www.beatthestreets-pvd.org/ But the focus on sport is only one level of mutual engagement between Warsaw and Brown. The underlying theory and method of this project also inspires.

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In particular, this kind of sociology invites us to rethink the relationship between research and its “subjects”. In particular, it builds on the broader shift worldwide to think about sociological research in terms of publics, and those publics as partners rather than objects of research. Indeed, in Chapter 4 of my book, I proposed that we think about universities having this very dilemma before them as they consider how to imagine their publics. I introduced this table:

Proximate Public Articulations of University Value

Individual Goods Public Goods

Economic Values 1. Value of Degree 2. Contributions tofor Career Local Economy

Justice Values 3. Accessibility 4. Contributions to to Disadvantaged Local Public Good

Symbolic Values 5. Status by 6. Public Goods Made Association Through Partnership

As I wrote in the book, these distinctions are not so simple, but they do signal.

In the first cell, we see the most common notion of university value: how it contributes to an individual’s career: what is a degree “worth”? In the second cell, we move toward a more collective articulation of that point by asking how the institution as such contributes to the economic well being of its local context.

In the third and four cells, we move beyond economic questions to broader notions of public goods. In the third cell, we can consider the degrees to which individuals of limited means, having faced difficult circumstances, are able to gain access to and succeed in that university… On a more collective level, one can also consider how a university’s presence in a community contributes to the qualities of life for those beyond it – in health, cultural opportunities, and other public goods.

In the fifth and sixth cells, we consider more active engagements. I have in mind the value of sports teams for the fifth cell: while they have economic benefits to a locale, and they might offer some public goods, their significance for the public goes beyond consumption into a powerful public (sports fan) identification with the university…. The sixth cell invites consideration of another identification that can also take place through partnership in the making of public goods – and here, will be a major focus of my discussion below. And that is why I refigured public to distinguish public as context and as partner, a vital distinction of consequence,

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Although I discuss various university partnerships with publics in my book, I am especially interested to learn more about the academic partnerships the Social Challenges unit is developing. Their work becomes especially important as the team has a refined sense of “solidarity” underlying their work.342 That, as I argue in Chapter 8, might complement notions of cosmopolitanism in important and powerful ways.

Regardless of explicit global connections, this kind of public sociology represents a new approach to knowledge and change. This approach might, just as the design thinking I associate with John Seely Brown and Ann Pendleton-Julian – put itself in the center of both social and systemic change, clarifying the unacknowledged conditions and especially unexpected outcomes of changes that seem inevitable. This would propel that knowledge production into a relatively unambiguous status of public good, something Tomek considered in his introduction to our session And ISS seems, in fact, ideally situated for that kind of work not only within Poland, but in globalizing knowledge itself.

In the end, it seems like Poland is itself a site for globalizing knowledge on the cutting edge. At least I have found that again, with all I have learned from a new generation of scholars, public intellectuals, and activists on this seminar’s day and in the week surrounding it, just as I found it for the first time in 1983-84.

342 While solidarity was not born in Poland, it has a special place, both for the movement in 1980-81 under that name that transformed the country and the world, and for the Catholic social doctrine that moves many to consider how bearing the burden of others might serve as guiding force in public engagement. My Polish colleagues recognize the power of these principles, and are working to develop them for broader consideration, and engagement, to globalize solidarity. Colleagues associated with the Centre for Thought of John Paul II are developing a very powerful analysis of the solidarity realized manifestly in Poland 1980-81 http://www.centrumjp2.pl/aktualnosci/centre-for-thought-of-john-paul-ii/

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Crossing Borders 2015 Annual MeetingEASTERN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY Millennium Broadway HotelNew York, New York February 26-March 1, 2015

February 27, 2015: 147. Paper Session: Boundary Making and Border Crossing in Global Higher Education: Studies from America and Britain Friday Feb 27 | 12:00 PM-1:30 PM Organizer: Jonathan Z. Friedman, New York University Presider: Jonathan Z. Friedman, New York University

Representing the World: Three Logics of Academic Internationalism in the U.S. University Cynthia Miller-Idriss — American University, Mitchell Stevens — Stanford University, Seteney Shami — Arab Council for Social Sciences

What Merit Means: Admissions, Diversity, and Inequality at Elite Universities in the United States and Britain Natasha Warikoo — Harvard University

Internationalization as Boundary Reinforcement: The National Imaginary of American and British University Administrators Jonathan Z. Friedman — New York University

Transnational Intellectuals’ Strategies for Educating US Audiences in NYC Liz Knauer — New York University

Discussant: Michael D. Kennedy

Eastern Sociological Society Meeting Comments

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Michael D. Kennedy

I am really pleased and honored to be the discussant for today’s panel for many reasons, not least of which is something to which Cynthia referenced today on twitter: that this is a panel of three generations. I’m also here to show that I am the scientific sociologist par excellence – I am here to falsify the hypothesis that there is a strong correlation between age and wisdom.

The less affective and more cognitive reason I am delighted to be here is because these papers address matters about which I intimately care, and have devoted a fair amount of time thinking and writing about. It’s eerie that that my just published book343 might speak to the various themes on this panel – to how US universities articulate internationalism, what a world class university means, how race and inequality work among the publics of elite universities, and how transnational intellectuals establish their distinction. Of course that’s how I would describe the work of each of our panelists, but they characterized it better themselves in their terrific presentations.

In my discussant role, I’ll mention a few things I like about each paper, and some of the principal challenges each paper raises for me. But let me begin with a general theme that we collectively need to figure.

Each of these papers develops their arguments around certain scripts, but I’d like to think about these scripts in much more sustained cultural political fashion, and in ways that diverge from the scripts world society folks typically address. In particular, I want to think about these scripts less as expressions of internal states of mind, and differently from organizational rules that universities and intellectuals approximate in their practice. I would suggest that we think about these scripts as resources strategic actors use to position themselves in particular contexts that are variably apparent to researchers, and to public discussion, and perhaps, even, to the strategic actors themselves. I would propose that by doing so, we actually get closer to the value of all of these papers, and even my book’s arguments. At least for me, I offered my account of globalizing knowledge less to explain how it’s done, and more to inform how it could be done better. We can globalize knowledge better, we can develop higher education better, if we are also attentive to the ways in which the scripts of our commitment to higher learning are given as much serious treatment as we give the performances of all of those folks claiming to do that job.

Let me begin with Cynthia (http://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/cynthia.cfm)

Representing the World: Three Logics of Academic Internationalism in the U.S. University Cynthia Miller-Idriss — American University, Mitchell Stevens — Stanford University, Seteney Shami — Arab Council for Social Sciences

As one might imagine, I love anything that thinks about the logics of internationalism in US universities. That it is done by 2 people I know well, and a third I feel I must get to

343 http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24607

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know better, is even more endearing. That they develop these logics in historical but generalizable fashion is additionally powerful. Their argument really “feels right”, which doesn’t surprise me given how much I have learned from them in the past about globalizing knowledge.

At the same time, I’d like to push harder on what the connotation of logics means (in presentation, Cynthia used schemata, which is, I think, a better choice. But I’ll leave logics for now so that we can think about the extent to which the change in terms obviates the concerns I have).

In particular, I’m curious: to what extent are the logics you identify apparent to the practitioners about whom you theorize? In some ways, of course, the civilizers, the nationally responsible, and the globally cognizant academics are aware of these logics, for it’s in their words and deeds that you find evidence of these logics’ expressions, and cumulations. But I wonder: are they variably understood, recognized, seen? Do those different awarenesses vary by position, by age, by power, by epoch and by time in epoch?

For example, I have certainly over time become more aware of the logics of which you wrote. Indeed, because University of Michigan developed an international institute, each area studies director became more aware of the broader logic of internationalism than what they would have known had they been in their old isolated area studies units. And I would propose, as a consequence, that their greater awareness of how that logic functioned made them more effective actors within the university because they could mobilize that logic for their more specific ends. That is, however, only when the logics of internationalism held sway.

Logics of internationalism are only one part of a university story. For Michigan during my time as VPIA, it was an important expression, but how Michigan was going to manage its budgets, how Michigan was going to manage its publics and diversity, how Michigan was going to manage its football team, and so on, were all present and shaping logics. Nobody understood well enough how these things went together. I’m still trying to figure it out.

And your book will help, but it will be important, it seems to me, to figure out how these other logics fit with the book. Are you “controlling” for them? For example, consider financial health. To build a global approach in an era of austerity is much different than to build it in an era of relative plenty.

One other angle: in this paper at least Middle Eastern Studies is the key case, and Russian and East European studies is relatively in the dark. We can talk about how MES shapes the logic of the book, but what do you do now with the return of Cold War II and something possibly worse? Does that alter the logic of internationalism? Could it? Under what circumstances? Last question: what place does the opposition to these logics occupy? What is C. Wright Mills et al in these logics of universities? And by extension, is he the same or different to

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the heterodox today? For example, there are many different kinds of challenges to methodological nationalism that are by no means meaningfully similar.

Internationalization as Boundary Reinforcement: The National Imaginary of American and British University Administrators Jonathan Z. Friedman — New York University

Jonathan (http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/humsocsci/international/phdprogram/jonathanfriedman ) has written a really nice paper, and it obviously reflects an incredibly fine dissertation in progress. Cynthia’s good influence is also apparent, and conceptually, this flows most readily from the first paper we discussed. In fact, the paper’s methodological self-consciousness and bibliographic conscientiousness inspires me to think more rigorously and exhaustively about my own work too.

Your main classification actually feels right to me: I have worked with, and seen, these very types you describe – patriotic nationalists, reluctant nationalists, and practical nationalists. That’s really good. I am also really intrigued by how they are apparently so randomly distributed across other attributes that we think might explain. That, however, begs a deeper analysis of patterning. One obvious thing comes to mind: most former Peace Corps folks are reluctant nationalists. Just my theory you can falsify.

I also really appreciate how the world class university is so exhaustively and thoughtfully developed. And I really appreciate how distinctive this methodological approach is: to check in with key actors across the leading global universities in Britain and America to see how they wrestle with the national/global articulation. You present this well (as here: “Whereas some see the globalization of higher education, and by extension, the emergence of a tier of world-class universities, as something taking place uniformly within the world’s nation-states, others see it as something more, a shift whereby universities have begun to de-link from national parochialism in favor of global universalism.”) but at the same time, I would be curious for you to be more explicit about the theory of history or of change underlying. In fact, I think reading Bill Sewell’s “theory of the event” could inform your approach and make more specific the assumptions you bring. And let me given one example to highlight.

I wrote this in the wake of 9/11’s attacks on America. It was never published, though I intended it to be part of an op-ed in the week that followed.

We find greatness in our diversity, evident in the faiths represented at the National Cathedral on Friday. With solidarity and diversity bound together, America shows its place in and with the world. But this greatness can also produce unintended and hurtful consequences.

With this attack occurring on American soil, it is easy to forget that the victims were not only American citizens. Men and women with passports from around the globe were in the World Trade Towers and in the planes. This attack on America has consequences beyond our nation. Perhaps our ribbons should not only be red,

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white and blue, but also black, to signify our grief for all those who died. We might also wear yellow, to symbolize hope for a new world of solidarity.

I wore black and yellow that week. I tried to give those ribbons out to my colleagues. But it could not be worn. Despite the ways in which red, white, and blue marked who suffered in both appropriate and inappropriate ways, nobody could perform the global/national articulation simply as they wished, as they thought. Of course we don’t only have to look to this century. Look at the time around WWI – Jill Lepore’s Secret History of Wonder Woman has a marvelous account of the politics of national identification for a German psychologist in a very American Harvard University.344 In the end, though, just like I asked of Cynthia, I ask of you in a different fashion. You evince these different logics of national practice in the global university, but how are they themselves variably related to practice? The patriotic and reluctant nationalists have thought their positions through more than the pragmatic, for example, which means that the last is differently bound to disposition than are the former two. And the first is more likely to find institutional resources that the second. The reluctant must likely find those resources in more informal and networked fashion.

Finally, just one tidbit that extends my point but also deepens it: You said,

China was also a common target for these critiques, by both the British and Americans alike. These centered on the idea that the Chinese model of education does not foster critical thought, being too oriented to rote learning, with the result that “as brilliant as their students are in the sciences, they don’t know how to think, particularly around innovation”.

That’s a familiar script, and I think is genuinely rehearsed in everyday practice. But while rehearsed, it’s also, I would propose, laced with anxiety that celebrations of tradition have in different measure. Too, the reluctant nationalists might also articulate this, for they are often more “critical” intellectuals, finding all institutional expressions of higher education distant from an ideal of the cultural of critical discourse. So, thinking about this statement, we could readily see how different schema are variably used to push certain arguments.

Lastly, I’d be curious to pose to you the same question I posed to Cynthia on the variable sophistication of the people you interview. Clearly some people not only know more about internationalism than others, but they are also more aware of how to perform correctly before your inquiring mind.

And now to the second of the third generation on the panel.

“LEARNING AND TEACHING THE EMPIRE: Transnational intellectuals impressions and ideals in teaching US audiences” Author Liz Knauer (New York University)

344 http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/publications/secret-history-wonder-woman

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I love this paper too because it brings me back both to my own origins in studying sociology and wanting to develop a critical sociology of the world and of my own intellectual role in it, and to my chapter on intellectuals in this current book, where I am really working not only to figure variable articulations of intellectual responsibility but also of recognition.

First, let me mark something I have not thought about previously, but is something Liz does as a great contribution to the general literature on intellectuals. She makes a really good argument about the “fallacy of the debate about the salience of self-concept on the one hand, and strategic contextual concerns on the other.” Those who have more skin in that game ought to take that on, but I was convinced by her saying that this is the wrong debate to be having. Let me then focus on others.

Liz’s methodology is fantastic, actually, for New York City is the center of the universe, the global city par excellence, the heart of the imperialist beast, the most diverse city in the world. And we could go further, not least to mention its cost, its spread, its neighborhoods, its universities, and so on. And I would imagine in Liz’s dissertation that the qualities of New York City as site for her fieldwork are elaborated as such, for we all know that intellectuals are not free-floating, but grounded in certain practices, in certain places.

Second, I think Liz has really honed what many of us might recognize intuitively, but of which we are unlikely to be sufficiently aware. And therefore Liz’s discursive explicitness is great: these transnational intellectuals work in a number of places, not least the classroom, to develop counter hegemonic work and to diminish the “privileged centrality” of US culture. I think that is, frankly, generally right on. But here my more ethnographic and practice-based mind comes in.

This is a good and resonant general script that could and should elicit many assenting nods. But like the postcolonial script, it only works to mark the problem of the US hegemon. Like the Global South, it is defined by what it is not, but at the same time, implicitly favors some kinds of articulations of counter-hegemony, or global southness, more than others. Or does it?

Liz is marvelous at juxtaposing, and developing, terrific quotes from these exceptionally articulate intellectuals from across the world – Asia, Europe Africa, the Middle East, Latin America. In this, Liz evinces her own theoretical sophistication, her own important contribution to counterhegemonic thinking. But as I was being swept up into the grand Gramscian counter narrative, I was wondering more and more what bumps in the road were being smoothed out in order to facilitate the transnational intellectual alliance. And I wonder whether this is a hegemonic move at the same time. And whether critical intellectuality that is relentless in its search for the implicit assumptions intellectual positions embody can survive the test of political consequence.

So, let me pose some complicating questions: does a transnational intellectual’s disposition on the critical questions facing us vary by a) whether they see America as an ally in their homeland’s struggle (say Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia) or the principal problem

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(say Central America)? b) whether their nation is potentially a hegemon (say China) or whether their homelands are the object of hegemons’ rivalries (from Africa to the Caucasus); c) whether there is a substantial diaspora within NYC of that person’s background, and whether that diaspora can be present in that professor’s classroom (say Poles or Chinese) or not; and d) whether their nation has a significant knowledge network that American universities just don’t get, or whether there is no substantial intellectual network that could potentially challenge America on its academic ethnocentrism. Here, I’d love to think about that question more deeply, but I would dare not offer a simple ranking of those knowledge network capacities. I would say, however, that they exist and would exist in part by virtue of how complete another language’s intellectual culture is, and how accessible that second language is in the American academy. Spanish is, after all, quite different from Chinese and both quite different from Armenian in this regard.

But I could only imagine these questions because of how Liz inspired me to return to a question that has moved me from my earliest days, now codified in the talks I give about Globalizing Knowledge.345 And now, to a question that occupies me in my elder days. How do excellence and equity articulate in elite universities?

What Merit Means: Admissions, Diversity, and Inequality at Elite Universities in the United States and Britain Natasha Warikoo — Harvard University

As Natasha (http://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/natasha-warikoo) herself, I care about this issue not only because of its important intellectual and practical dimensions, but also because I teach at a university about which Natasha writes, just as she has ties to institutions about which she writes.346 And she sets up the problem magnificently.

We know that students can be incredibly critical of university policies --- she cites the movements “I too am Harvard, I too am Oxford”. She mentions the Brown Divest Coal movement, and so on. Students are, and ought to be, critical of power, and of the powers most proximate. But are they so critical of the admissions policies that brought them in? That’s a great question, especially when considered a subset of a more general question I would say.

That general question is this: which university policies and practices are students most likely to be critical of? And how does that vary over time and student position?

I am ashamed to say that I never really thought about this question explicitly, and I am therefore profoundly indebted to Natasha for helping me consider it.

I do find the question on which Natasha focuses, this matter of admissions criteria, a little trickier than others I might imagine, however, for some of the white students she interviewed could be concerned for charges of hypocrisy in their stances, especially if

345 In preparation for a talk in Singapore about the book, Hiro Saito helped me recognize a more adequate, if less parsimonious, question for my life’s work: “How do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion?”346 Natasha presented only a small portion of a book forthcoming on the subject.

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they are liberals. If they are critical of the racism in university admissions, and yet they say that the admissions process is fair, are they being racist?

With that in mind, I wonder if their evocations of familiar scripts their universities offer, scripts that they no doubt carefully studied in order to replicate in order to gain admission, is something more than, or different from, an expression of an interior mental state. Could it be that they are treating those scripts as resources to enable them to manage a very complicated cultural political position?

The second question is one I also offered to Jonathan. Can we put these interviews in a kind of theory of history, or of time?347 Although the greatest strength of Natasha’s argument is her ability to compare the UK and US and show how students reflect their national scripts in articulating general university questions, let me offer a set of very simple-minded, and insufficiently informed, hypotheses about Brown University’s racial consciousness over time.

a) The racial sensibilities of students of color have changed very little over decades, in part because the same practices of white privilege, despite their recurring criticisms of that white privilege, abide.

b) The racial sensibilities of white students varies terrifically by period, because it is possible, given the whiteness of Brown’s institutions and practices, for white students to completely forget about race. But when provoked, celebrate the fact that they once had an African American woman as president, and now develop a center for slavery and justice.

c) However, in these times, especially following the so called “Ray Kelly affair”,348 it is difficult if not impossible for white students to have developed a more rigorously practiced racial sensibility, which should lead them to more elaborate justifications of their position than they would otherwise have had. To interview students before the Ray Kelly incident, as Natasha did, and after the Ray Kelly incident, should have produced very different sensibilities of race at Brown.

d) At the same time, the scripts are there to protect white folks against occasionally transgressive statements. Although Brown is working hard to develop “transformative conversations” around this issue and others,349 the reproduction of white privilege occurs even in the discussion of white privilege itself.350

347 On this point, both Liz and Jon recommended after session that I read Michelle Lamont and Ann Swidler, “Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing” Qualitative Sociology 37:2(2014):253-71. Their advice was good, and thus I extend the recommendation here. 348 Report of the Committee on the Events of October 29, 2013, February 2014http://brown.edu/about/administration/president/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.president/files/uploads/Report-on-Events-of-Oct-29-2013.pdfSecond Report of the Committee on the Events of October 29, 2013, May 20, 2014http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/president/Events-of-Oct292014Committee.pdf349 http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-diversity/transformative-conversations 350 http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/10/16/panelists-check-white-privilege-dialogue-race/

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e) By circulating scripts among universities, there are greater chances for challenging that white privilege, however. “I, too, am Harvard”351 has been embraced at Brown as an exemplar, even as the discussion about microagressions at Brown proceeds apace. 352 Indeed, because Natasha compares the infrastructures of diversity at different universities, her book is likely to be an invaluable resource for institutional change across them.

Lastly, can we think about the coded speech at work in many of these conversations? For example, diversity itself is a very complex coded speech implying different things to variously positioned actors. Even talking about sports teams is coded – I have had so many athletes at Brown speak to me about the discrimination they suffer at Brown because of the relative hostility of Brown students, at least in comparison to Michigan students, for the athletes on campus. At the same time, students beyond athletics could see the athletes as part of a larger national culture that grants athletics inappropriate latitudes, with scandals at Penn State University and elsewhere informing that general script.

Nevertheless, at Brown discrimination can be, in fact, quite coded language for those who many not have the right class backgrounds, or racial backgrounds, to suggest what it means to be a Brown student. Indeed, there are many students in sociology who are working on these various dimensions of coded speech.353

With these various questions – about coded speech, about the eventfulness of racism for whites and its durability for people of color, and the question about what university scripts offer to people in difficult cultural political moments – I wonder about how we think about the general rules of difference and merit that guide us in thinking about student identifications in university. What would happen to our analysis here, and in general, if we thought less about coherent logics and consistent ideological positions and more about contradictory structures of meaning, strategic practices, and eventful and contingent practices, in the transformational knowledge politics of our time?

That, however, is a question for us all and a good place for me to end and open this up for discussion.

351 https://www.facebook.com/iTooAmHarvard 352 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brown-University-MicroAggressions/462419500533489 353 last year’s conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKTkrSghaKs I will include this year’s after its production in April.

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February 25, 2015

Notes in Anticipation of, and Following, A Lecture at the University of Michigan Center for Russian and East European Studies“Globalizing Knowledge with Michigan, Polish, Kosovar and Ukrainian Accents” http://www.ii.umich.edu/ii/events/ci.creesnoonlectureglobalizingknowledgewithmichiganpolishkosovarandukrainianaccentswed25feb2015_ci.detail Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0BtG3RIhhM&feature=youtu.be

As I write in Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation, “globalizing knowledge refers to the process by which distant regions’ knowledgeabilities are implicated in the particular cultures fusing those understandings. The form of globalizing knowledge will vary given the different historical and institutional contexts that shape such learning. Globalizing knowledge is, therefore, relationally composed. The sociology of globalizing knowledge concerns the conditions, manners, and implications of that fusion.”

Poland, Kosova, and Ukraine, and the University of Michigan itself figure prominently in that book. In this presentation, I consider the ways in which their presence shapes the particular fusion of horizons apparent in my approach to globalizing knowledge. In particular, I link my approaches to solidarity, difference, knowledge networks and public engagement to my learning in these four contexts.

This discussion is motivated by my book’s foundational question: “Who is intellectually responsible and why?” (p. xviii). In preparation for a talk in Singapore about the book, Hiro Saito helped me recognize a more adequate, if less parsimonious, question for my

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life’s work: “How do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion?”

At Michigan I think it important to reverse the priority of that question, and consider what enables an intellectual to develop consequence, and how do institutions, especially universities, create a collective capacity for intellectuality of consequence. At least the University of Michigan developed my capacities considerably during my tenure as a sociologist and scholar of international affairs there. But any institution, or place, imparts its own accent on its locals.

This is not an argument made only for my home of 23 years (1986-2009), but is rather embedded in the definition of globalizing knowledge (p. 9). Given the relationality with which globalizing knowledge ought to be conceived, we should expect varying accents to abound.

I began with Michigan’s accent, for that was shared by most people in the room. And here I don’t refer to the flat vowels, but rather to the air of distinction the people who work at Michigan breathe. Consider, for example, that Michigan is exceptionally strong across the board. Its graduate education regularly ranks in the top 10 of US universities in health care management, social work, library/information sciences, psychology, political science, sociology, public health, (anthropology, as a field, is not ranked in this report but should be there), nursing, history, pharmacy, education, engineering, earth sciences, medicine, math, and law.354

In global rankings, too, Michigan fares very well, identified as among the top 30 universities in one commonly used ranking.355 When it comes to area studies, however, it’s not on the map, but that is an artifact of QS methodology. Linking area studies to geography, Michigan can’t compete because it axed geography in the early 1980s in an unfortunate budget-cutting move. Because QS links international studies to political science, however, Michigan fares well, finishing #30 in that ranking too. However, where UM really shines is in the social sciences overall, especially linked with public health. It is surprising, in fact, that public health, given its distinction, is not already endowed and named. But that should only be a matter of time before a philanthropist recognizes an incredible opportunity for extending excellence.

Endowments and rankings are not everything, and in fact mean little unless they reflect and even augment collective intellectual capacities. I certainly saw that in my time at Michigan, where the terrific social science across the board strengthened each social science department, where interdisciplinarity was a matter of fact and not of convenience or ideology. Too, that broad strength across the human sciences and professions combined in making international and area studies much broader than at many universities; in most places, political science and history dominate that international infrastructure of knowledge production. Michigan, however, has had much wider ranges of capacities.

354 http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-michigan-ann-arbor-170976/overall-rankings355 http://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings

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One of those capacities has been its commitment to innovative design. Indeed, someday I hope someone would consider the ways in which the International Institute itself, founded by David William Cohen (whose presence in the room was much appreciated), was itself a reflection of the kind of design thinking Anne Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown, whose work I reflect upon in Globalizing Knowledge, elaborate in their own forthcoming Design Unbound.

Another of Michigan’s abiding distinctions is its enduring commitment to diversity. In an earlier publication, I elaborated how that worked at both local, state, national, and international levels.356 Indeed, Michigan’s commitment to diversity, expressed in its support for affirmative action and for area studies both, is evident in Chapter 5 of my book. In that presentation, I began by drawing on Table 4 from that chapter.

Table 4: Relative Attention to Places by Knowledge Cultures in 2002-2009

Anthropology International Relations SociologyIndia France FranceFrance Germany GermanySouth Africa USSR South AfricaMexico China JapanChina Russia IndiaGermany India ChinaAustralia Yugoslavia/Kosovo/

AlbaniaMexico

Japan Japan USSRItaly Korea BrazilBrazil Afghanistan RussiaRussia South Africa TurkeyIreland Turkey ItalyNigeria Mexico PolandUSSR Italy AustraliaTurkey Australia HungaryPoland Brazil KoreaKorea Ireland IrelandYugoslavia/Kosovo/Albania

Poland Afghanistan

Afghanistan Hungary NigeriaHungary Ukraine Yugoslavia/Kosovo/

AlbaniaUkraine Nigeria Ukraine

356 (2011) “Cultural Formations of the Public University: Globalization, Diversity, and the State at the University of Michigan” pp. 457-99 in Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun (eds.) Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University New York: Columbia University Press.

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For a more complete discussion of this table, one should review the book, but for the purposes of these notes, I might simply mark that there is a quite substantial durability of recognition/attention in journals of anthropology and sociology to particular places. India has risen in the ranks over the last decade in anthropology, but Ukraine has remained at the bottom of these three disciplines in terms of attention. Notably, International Relations is much more likely to to shift place foci depending on the wars of the day, and so we should expect Ukraine to assume pride of place in the coming years. But for those disciplines that require contextual expertise, i.e. some parts of sociology and especially anthropology, regional foci are remarkably durable in their positions of attention and recognition.

However, if we understood the mechanisms that produce this attention, one might be better able to change that measure of attention. Given the significance of Ukraine in the world today, I begin with Ukraine’s prominence, and substance, in social science discussion.

I was finishing my book as Maidan was being occupied in Kyiv. That protest, that social movement, certainly reinvigorated our theories and sensibilities of democracy, civil society, and the rule of law. However, that was a relatively smooth extension of previous theories of civil society and democracy. By contrast, Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and of Ukraine, is a much more discontinuous development in our theories of global transformations. It has redefined our sense of war, peace, and international law. Or at least it ought to. It is a good sign when universities take up this question; indeed, the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies is organizing a conference on sovereignty in light of this invasion. (http://www.ii.umich.edu/wced/events/ci.wcedconferencesovereigntyunderthreatfri8may2015_ci.detail) It ought to move our conversation ahead. I will also try to move this conversation ahead with my lecture on April 9 at American University when I talk about intellectual responsibility in these times, especially with regard to Ukraine. But intellectual responsibility is not only a matter of what is foremost in the news.

In my book, I talk at length about all that I learned from my colleagues and those I met in Kosova over the 4 years I regularly visited it. Indeed, for many of the same reasons I went to Poland initially, I should expect many social scientists engaging Kosova – a fascinating society filled with contradictions, an amazing community of scholars working to illuminate those contradictions, and social movements promising genuinely transformative politics. However, unlike Ukraine or Poland, Kosova is not in the global news, or global scholarship, like it ought to be. There are many reasons for that – many of which I explore in my book – but I am reminded of that lack recurrently when I try to learn about recent developments. Consider, for example, the protests in late January (http://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/article/1547/ove-nedelje-na-kosovu) . They deserve to be understood far more deeply than a lens of nationalism can offer, and rather understood in reference, among other things, to the struggle against corruption and the theft of property in transition culture.

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Of course I began my own work in Poland back in the 1980s, and in 2004 I sought to explain why so many Americans have engaged Poland. I introduced that analysis first with a presentation to the Polish Sociological Association in 2004357 but continued the study in my book. Poland has achieved a prominence in world culture – through its arts, film, music – like few other societies in its similar world system position. Of course its 1980-81 Solidarity movement, as perhaps the 20th century’s most important social movement, drew much attention. But Poland’s prominence also draws, among other things, on its significant diaspora and the ways in which its analysis and self-understanding has stimulated much more global focus on Poland than would otherwise be. Drawing lessons from how Poland realized its prominence in scholarly and public and political recognition could inform other nations and places and their address.

It is doubtful, however, that any other nation similarly positioned in the world system, or any other place outside Poland, might ever realize the concentration of expertise and excellence that Michigan has developed in Polish studies. http://www.ii.umich.edu/crees/aboutus/regionalprograms/polishstudies Michigan is most fortunate to have a scholar at the helm like Genevieve Zubrzycki (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/soc/people/faculty/ci.zubrzyckigenevive_ci.detail -- another sociologist by gosh!) and Marysia Ostafin (http://www.ii.umich.edu/ii/aboutus/people/ces/ci.ostafinmarysia_ci.detail) whose dedication not only to the International Institute, WCEE, and CREES, but especially to Polish Studies over more than 30 years has been an essential element to UM’s institutional excellence.

Nevertheless, to figure how different nations might develop more extensive intellectual recognition beyond their nation we need the right vocabulary. As I argue in my book, but as Ron Suny (whose presence in the room I much appreciated) and I argued in our edited volume Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Articulation-Nation-Ronald-Grigor/dp/0472088289), articulation is the keyword with which we might rethink how different cultural formations are connected variably, and across contexts; that concept also helps us see how intellectuals, and intellectual responsibility, might be found in the development of those conjunctions.

But intellectual responsibility and articulation are not enough; we need strong research universities in order to move the consequence of intellectual rigor ahead. For that to be feasible, however, these institutions need a measure of reflexivity that the era of external rankings and declining budgets make difficult. If any place might develop that kind of institutional reflexivity, it certainly seems Michigan might, at least if its legacy in scholarly excellence, commitment to diversity, and international awareness is any promise of its future. Certainly the discussion following my talk indicated that legacy is not at all the leading vector for establishing confidence in the future.

357 (2004) “Poland in the American Sociological Imagination” Polish Sociological Review 4(148) ’04 361-83 and in Wlodzimierz Wesolowski and Jan Wlodarek (eds.) Polska, Europa, Swiat (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe SCHOLAR)

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Michigan has been fortunate to have distinguished scholars who established their eminence already in other world regions before coming to Ann Arbor and Michigan to teach and research. Elena Gapova http://wmich.edu/sociology/directory/gapova, now in sociology at Western Michigan University, contributed powerfully during my time at Michigan given her theory and practice around intellectual and social transformation in east Europe, especially in her original Belarus. She was proper to invite me to consider the possibilities, but also the limits, of real intellectual solidarity. With her own example in my mind, I proposed that among the most consequential places for intellectual solidarity to be extended was around gender’s study, and public engagement. Indeed, I discuss the work of several gender scholars in my book in this regard – including Joanna Regulska http://dga.rutgers.edu/index.php/faculty/member/joanna-regulska/, Nita Luci http://www.aukonline.org/web/academics/faculty/82-faculty/310-nita-luci.html and Linda Gusia http://www.iksweb.org/en-us/iks-friends/Linda-Gusia-239. But I agree with Elena’s concern: the post-communist world’s gender politics does not resonate so readily with feminist sensibilities as other global feminisms, most notably in India and China. Whether this is true, and if so, what might be done to transform that limit on globalizing knowledge, deserves far more engagement than it has to date, and that engagement has, in fact, been considerable. It shows, however, how deep the problem, and opportunity, is.

Michigan is also fortunate to have a substantial network of scholars in residence who have long been engaged in Ukrainian affairs, and I have worked with many of them. Oksana Malanchuk (http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/garp/researchers.htm) initiated a wave of survey research, begun in 1994 and continuing through this day, comparing Lviv and Donetsk (and other cities). Greta Uehling http://www.ii.umich.edu/pics/aboutus/people/faculty/ci.uehlinggreta_ci.detail, an anthropologist long engaged in working with and elaborating the conditions facing Crimean Tatars, also teaches at Michigan. I had the pleasure of working with both these colleagues in a grant from the Ford Foundation in the mid 1990s, one that informed my last book (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cultural-formations-of-postcommunism) I was very pleased to see both of these enduring colleagues in my lecture and following.

Michigan, however, enjoys scholars beyond the social sciences who are deeply engaged with Ukraine, one of the most eminent of which is Assya Humesky http://www.lsa.umich.edu/slavic/people/faculty/ci.humeskyassya_ci.detail. She offered very thoughtful commentary on Ukraine’s present, which I took as opportunity to ruminate further on intellectual responsibility in these times, noting Tim Snyder’s work as an exemplar in this matter. He spoke at Brown not long ago and those interested in why I would give him that credit can see it in this video recording. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bey-eDBm0k) However, my attribution of intellectual responsibility to him can appear, to some, political.

My dear and most enduring colleague Ron Suny http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/people/faculty/ci.sunyronaldg_ci.detail has a very different interpretation of the crisis in Ukraine than Tim has, and likely that I have, but one that Ron shares with, among others, including his erstwhile Chicago colleague John Mearsheimer. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/dont-arm-ukraine.html Ron

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is likely elaborating his own position following our post-lecture discussion, and I look forward to it. Indeed, given the intensity of debate following Ron’s articulation, we need to develop deeper understandings of how such intellectually rigorous people as Tim and Ron can find such different grounds for understanding the crisis in Ukraine.358

Michigan can be the site of this kind of work. After all, it hosted a series of workshops in the beginning of this century on the events of 1915, the genocide of 1915 against Armenians,that has profoundly transformed the historiography of this time. That both Ron, one of the founding interlocutors, and Muge Gocek http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gocek/ another, contributed to our discussion on this day signals just how well an institution can combine scholarship with world historically consequential work.

Of course other friends and colleagues contributed much to that discussion on that day, and in the conversations beyond the lecture hall itself. I was quite grateful to be able to return to this home of 23 years to discuss Globalizing Knowledge, and to discover that, while I may have lost my flat vowels during these last 6 years in Rhode Island, some of the best parts of my book clearly owe much to my rearticulation of the University of Michigan’s fine culture of critical discourse.

358 Their different accounts will inform my 4/9 lecture at American University on globalizing knowledge and intellectual responsibility.

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January 30, 2015

A Book Panel at the Watson Institute for International Studies (with simultaneous webcast and subsequent video) What are the principal knowledge contradictions, challenges, and opportunities facing intellectuals, universities and publics in our world defined by crisis and transformation? Leela Gandhi, Keith Brown and Lina Fruzzetti, scholars from various disciplines with different regional foci, engage Michael D. Kennedy's new book, Globalizing Knowledge. The session concludes with Kennedy's response to them and audience comments.http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/globalizing-knowledge-intellectuals-universities-and-publics-transformation

Reflections on the Panel Discussion of Globalizing Knowledge at the Watson Institute Michael D. Kennedy February 5, 2015 for an event on January 30, 2015 with Lina Fruzzetti (https://vivo.brown.edu/display/lfruzzet) Keith Brown http://watson.brown.edu/people/faculty/brown and Leela Gandhi https://vivo.brown.edu/display/lgandhi

I offer the following reflections mainly as an invitation to you all to view the video of the event itself (https://mediacapture.brown.edu:8443/ess/echo/presentation/3d1efedf-7844-4ad4-ac1b-e34b527fa1fb). I know that time can be short, and thus watching the 90

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minutes might exceed what you have available. I hope my remarks below can signal where, on a tight time budget, you might focus.

In this, I do go beyond what I had time to say in the session itself, but I do not elaborate too much beyond, for their remarks were so rich that a week or so is not enough time to think through their implications sufficiently. But then that was the intention of the book. I am less interested in consolidating a position on globalizing knowledge than I am interested in opening up multiple dialogues.

Hiro Saito has recognized that quality of my work, and recently wrote to me to suggest that I could be following a relatively Latour-like approach to globalizing knowledge. Maybe. But I would rather think that I am following his own synthesis of Latour and Beck with a performative edge. I do wish I had read that essay before finishing my book, for certainly its direction is one consistent with what I would embrace.359

I so appreciated Lina Fruzzetti’s introduction of our colleagues and of the panel, but that appreciation goes far beyond that moment. I not only acknowledge the long time I have recognized her leadership at Brown and beyond, not only in South Asian studies and anthropology, but in areas we all need to work. Her commitment to diversity and integrity at Brown University, and scholarship generally, inspires. Her typical generosity was also apparent in the introduction, not least for her mentioning other projects I have undertaken with different colleagues, on the environment with Timmons Roberts and Nancy Jacobs (http://www.luceenvironment.org/) and with Shiva Balaghi on Afghanistan (http://www.engagingafghanistan.org/ ). She also offered her own take on my book, Globalizing Knowledge http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24607

Lina was right to ask how we sift the knowledge we acquire, especially when in claims to globalize we implicitly suggest our capacity to absorb it all. As an anthropologist, Lina properly identifies that eerie feeling that such unbounded terms as globalizing knowledge suggest. And yet, she also acknowledges that global world does acquire a kind of real feel. What to do?

I think Lina raises a real problem I have not addressed adequately yet: what mechanisms do universities use, do departments use, do individuals use, to identifythe important and to decide what we can ignore. And what ought we use.

I think Lina is right to suggest that in the mission to globalize, we might actually be overlooking alternative knowledges, and evading local knowledges both, especially around diversity.

This is of course not a problem peculiar to me. I was recently drawn to read Isaac Reed’s Interpretation and Social Knowledge (2011). Indeed, it helps me think about the interpretive and normative elements of my own book, and my normatively based acknowledgement of how power works in setting up our problems. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see how, without a serious account of how power works in our world, that we can

359 Hiro Saito, “Cosmopolitics: Toward a New Articulation of Politics, Science, and Critique” British Journal of Sociology (forthcoming)

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justify our foci. Indeed, one might say the same of Reed, for while he offers a wonderful account of how landscapes of meaning work in all epistemic modes, he does not seriously address how we choose which landscapes of meaning capture our attention. Globalizing Knowledge is, in part, an invitation to think through how and why we make those choices, and its implications for the worlds in which we live.

I appreciate especially Lina’s raising the debate about the Ray Kelly Affair at Brown University; she was a member of the committee that wrestled with its implications (http://www.brown.edu/web/documents/president/Events-of-Oct292014Committee.pdf ). I found that report to be a terrific exercise of intellectual and institutional responsibility, in fact. Many concerned for the articulation of academic freedom and institutional responsibility ought read that report, and that is why I discuss the report briefly in Globalizing Knowledge.

It is very clear that my book is no roadmap, and I think Lina is right to flag these issues. I might look to where I suggest such directions throughout the book, but I think that is less important than inviting us all to figure how these issues might be brought to the fore on our own campuses, in our own knowledge networks. My suggestion that we should ask “who is intellectually responsible, and why?” does suggest an opening. But I am not sure that it suffices. Subsequent discussions will help me figure my own comfort with that question.

Keith Brown knows me intellectually just about as well as anyone might. He is an anthropologist with interests in global connections and flows, he is an east Europeanist with contextual expertise adjoining mine, and he is an administrator who has overseen BIARI http://watson.brown.edu/biari/about , an attempt to go global together for young academics from across the world.

Keith is so very eloquent, evident in the way he can link so many different modes of scholarship. I especially like how he uses metaphors, especially ones that are appropriate for this most challenging winter we all now suffer in New England. In many ways, I would hold up Keith as an exemplar of many different kinds of intellectuality we need and that I in particular admire. His humility is apparent, his vision inspiring. Indeed, everyone committed to the value of language learning should heed his mantra: “the best pathway for students to think globally is for students to have extended exposure to more than one language or cultural thought style”. Every area studies scholar ought repeat that at least 30 times so that it flows readily off the lips in each meeting where somebody wants to explore the world.

Keith also challenges nicely, profoundly but respectfully.

He invokes Syriza and Podemas, and indeed even that week’s strikes and protests in the Macedonia he knows so well, and the Kosova adjoining, to indicate that cultural politics and social movements are not so easy to understand as those who globalize from airports might think. I agree. But he takes it a step further, and invites us to think whether, especially in the first examples, we might move beyond the cult of individual genius

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when we think about the qualities of intellectuality we need in this world of crisis and transformation. I most agree. Indeed, while Alfred Gusenbauer was critical to the formation of the Next Left I analyze, it was the network that Gusenbauer inspired that carries forward so much more hope than any text he might write, any speech he might give.

Keith also challenges when he asks about the gendering of my exemplars, why I hold up Ashraf Ghani, Ricardo Lagos, and Vaclav Havel, to illuminate the qualities of prominenci. Why don’t I use Arundhati Roy, Angela Merkel, and Martha Nussbaum as examples here? He’s right. And I saw the problem as I was writing.

I decided not to tweak it, to try to fix it cosmetically. I think the gendering of intellectuality deserves far more attention than my redirection of examples might allow. Of course I mention many women in the book, from Melissa Harris-Perry and Saskia Sassen to Nita Luci and Linda Gusia. But counting representations is not enough. The book demands a much more thoughtful gendered critique, and it might even begin by thinking about how different world regions themselves allow for very different kinds of prominenci, and their recognitions in the English-speaking world.

Keith also raises another really difficult issue, one that our friends and colleagues in southeast Europe especially face: the “tyranny of the urgent” and the ways in which that shapes the qualities of networked intellectualities. That requires much thought, something I can’t do now, or by myself. But that’s food for thought, food for public knowledge.

Keith’s leadership of BIARI, and his concern for the unequal access to networks that young scholars from the global south suffer, was quite apparent in his commentary. He rightly raises Aaron Schwartz’s example, and the struggle to make knowledge landscapes more open, and at the very least, differently lumpy.

My book is not a handbook, but a wake up call, Keith says. That seems right to me. And we all ought to wake up, especially so that we don’t rely on university endowments to define distinction in the world, and rather think about how we use our wealth to generate useful and consequential knowledge.

But one ought listen to Keith himself.

In great contrast to Keith, I never met Leela Gandhi before the day of our panel, and that made her willingness to participate even more generous. But of course I knew her work well.

I dare not say how unusual it is for an English Department scholar to say that sociology – from George Steinmetz to Isaac Reed - figures prominently in her discipline’s recent transformations. However, I can say that it would surprise most sociologists. And it should delight them, and invite us to rethink the conversations between humanities and social science that Leela herself leads. I doubt that so many others, however, could enjoy the surprise I had.

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Leela found C. Wright Mills kinship in my text. At least she found its spirit, for I did not cite him anywhere. But his was the sociology, discovered in the classes of Davidson College’s Ernest F. Patterson, that moved me to attend graduate school in my ultimate discipline. I’m so glad that Patterson, and Mills, continue to animate me even if they are not quoted. (I should say, parenthetically, that C. Wright Mills is being “rediscovered” lately – I was delighted by this article most recently in Theory, Culture and Society (http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/29/7-8/399.abstract and this podcast with Les Back, Nicolas Gane and Marc Carrigan https://soundcloud.com/mark-carrigan/the-promise-of-sociology-in-2015 ).

Leela proposes that I am actually arguing that “thinking can save the world”, and develops that from the perspectives of humanities and postcolonial studies. She suggests we consider Homi Bhabha’s (1989) “The Commitment to Theory” in reading my book. Is theory the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged? Great question that Leela evokes, inviting us to rethink the binarisms of theory and politics. She is generous to say that my book might have helped thinking about the politics of theory. But of course it is Leela who figures how the book might be enhanced by linking it to radical phenomenology, to pure theory as a kind of prophylaxis against instrumentalizing the world, as a way of saving the world.

The first new left of 1956 extended this pure theory further, struggling against Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez Crisis both. The realm of pure thought, perversely Leela argues, was central to the texture of the new socialism. Her link to my book, with invoking that old journal “Universities and Left Review”, especially made me smile. Iris Murdoch’s call for “a House for Theory”, made her point. Thinking can save the world, especially after imperialism. Leela sees me in this light, and I am honored, especially with the invitation to further conversation.

But am I thinking on behalf of the world, or caring for the world that we have wrought? Leela’s question is such a profound challenge, and while she put it most generously, it is most discomforting. Indeed, those who have most been wronged are thinking on behalf of the world, but certainly don’t think their own thinking marginal. Do I get that? I don’t know.

Leela develops this point much further, drawing on others. You must listen to her, but here I only want to recognize her point, or at least one point I hear.

I am not among the wretched of the earth. Far from it. I don’t evoke a globalizing knowledge that relies on globalizing the home knowledge culture of which I am a part. Leela poses here, again, a question I can’t really address adequately now, or especially there on the spot. But I do want to think more about that, and I suggest a few pathways here.

In many points in the book, I point to the theorizing that goes on in locales insufficiently recognized, and certainly not understood, by those places deemed most distinguished in various hierarchies of globalizing knowledge. I celebrate the profound insights already

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existing, and still to be realized, among individuals in the institutions and struggles of Kosova, in the public square of Maidan in articulation with its intellectuals, all of whom struggle to find their place in the war for Ukraine’s sovereignty. I wonder about how adequate our sense of “public” is when we treat it as an object to be addressed, as only a context that benefits from a university’s proximity, rather than as a partner in developing questions of not only cutting edge but consequential learning. Our colleagues at Brown University’s Swearer Center like now to talk about “engaged scholars” and work to figure how to embed it more at Brown itself (http://www.brown.edu/academics/college/special-programs/public-service/engaged-scholars-program).

And there is more.

At the same time, Leela is quite right to suggest that I write “on behalf of” the world, not for the world from my position. In fact, only in 2014 did I publish something about my home (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/biography/v037/37.1.kennedy.html) but that address was so much less of the earth, and so much more about a sense of home / lost, a sense that has been so much inspired by Karida Brown and her work on east Kentucky African American migration (www.ekaamp.web.unc.edu). But maybe that’s only because I’ve been away from home for so long that it looms so much larger in my soul than does the world.

And yet it is the world that I know that needs to be saved if my home is to remain. And that is one reason why I so very much treasure what Leela, Keith, and Lina offered in their remarks, as others did in the discussion that follows.

To hear that, however, you must tune in.

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January 16, 2015Notes in preparation for, and following, A Presentation at Singapore Management University http://socsc.smu.edu.sg/events/2015/01/16/globalizing-knowledge-meets-singapore

Globalizing Knowledge Meets in SingaporeMichael D. Kennedy

January 22, 2015

Executive Summary

The last thing I intend to do in my presentation, or with these notes, is to presume that I could guide Singapore’s knowledge networks much less claim to understand the knowledge institutions and practices underlying. However, the first thing that I learned from my all too brief time in Singapore is that those who care about globalizing knowledge in general have much to learn from what Singapore has done, and might still do, in figuring its particular answer to my abiding question: “How do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion?” I consider this question in my book, Globalizing Knowledge, but I consider in this piece its possible connections to Singapore.

Singapore has made incredible strides in developing world class universities according to the world’s conventional indicators. Indeed, even for those more nuanced indicators, ones that take into account, for example, the access to network resources that knowledge institutional concentration allows, Singapore has achieved much very quickly. But with that infrastructure laid, Singapore might also escape the tyranny of others’ indicators and figure its own expression of intellectual and institutional responsibility. That distinction

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could be found in recognizing the real value added of public engagements, interdisciplinarity and international outlooks.

Public engagement, internationality and interdisciplinarity should not be thought of in terms of indicators or as ladders on a rung. They ought to be considered as relational terms, ones that enable new combinations of insight to be generated for a purpose: to fill critical knowledge cultural holes. That means, then, that when thinking about globalizing knowledge one ought to view Singapore’s knowledge network capacity in terms less of rank, and more in terms of a globally recognized niche: how does it contribute to the global knowledge we need in order to thrive, and survive, in this world?

There are three obvious terrains on which I could see such development, based on the knowledge institutional and network capacities I see in Singapore.

First, a different kind of area studies might be developed, one that reflects Asian grounding but at the same time is far more sophisticated in theoretical and methodological terms than most expressions of contextual expertise. In particular, this kind of area studies could engage other knowledge cultures, from performance studies to engineering, in order to understand better the function of contextual expertise in engaging the world.

Second, a new kind of public social science could be developed, one that would take advantage of Singapore’s place as a particularly global city without a national hinterland. On the one hand, this could consider how universities might extend global connections among communities, but as well to figure how local public needs and goods can be addressed when global ties potentially overwhelm the sensibilities of national citizenship and interests.

Finally, given Singapore’s location as a critical node in a world of global flows, it could develop a kind of interdisciplinarity that is difficult to cultivate elsewhere given the density of knowledge cultures around each global flow. In particular, Singapore’s ability to figure the variable articulations of the flows of knowledge, people, wealth and weapons might not only lead to increasing recognition in higher education, but to the delivery of critical scholarship essential to their understanding.

Developing not just the right recruitment and retention strategies for individuals able to extend Singapore’s place in the world of learning is but one dimension of globalizing knowledge in practice. Figuring the right organizational expression and culture of critical discourse for delivering collective and networked accomplishment among Singapore’s scholars may be the most critical step in realizing the kind of world class universities Singapore deserves.

Globalizing Knowledge Meets in SingaporeMichael D. Kennedy

January 22, 2015

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"Globalizing knowledge refers to the process by which distant regions’ knowledgeabilities are implicated in the particular cultures fusing those understandings. The form of globalizing knowledge will vary given the different historical and institutional contexts that shape such learning. Globalizing knowledge is, therefore, relationally composed. The sociology of globalizing knowledge concerns the conditions, manners, and implications of that fusion.” (Kennedy 2015:9) 

The challenges of American universities figure prominently in my book's project, but how do those American issues travel globally?  Much of my work has been defined in relation to Europe and Eurasia, but it could speak to issues I understand to be prominent in Singapore.360 But meaningful elaborations require that those not only with good theory but also contextual expertise and research on the conditions of knowledge production in Singapore develop responses to the questions and issues I pose below.

In what follows, I consider how interdisciplinarity, public engagement, and regional references shape the mission, and contradictions, of the quest to be recognized as world class universities.  I am especially interested to consider how Singapore might develop additional distinction around knowledge cultural holes, especially in the comparative analysis of global flows, theoretically rich area studies and global public knowledge.

This discussion is motivated by my book’s foundational question: “Who is intellectually responsible and why?” (p. xviii). In preparation for the talk accompanying these notes, Hiro Saito helped me recognize a more adequate, if less parsimonious, question for my life’s work: “How do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion?”

We can begin that answer by thinking about universities of the world.

Universities of the World

Leading US universities presume to be universities of the world. By that they mean to distinguish themselves from those universities focused, primarily, on local or even national issues and concerns. But this is nothing new. One of those universities, the University of Michigan, already celebrated the global diversity of its students in the beginning of the 20th century, believing that it would “cure students of narrow provincialism” (Kennedy 2015:88). To this day, globalizing universities in America like

360 I ought to begin these notes prepared to accompany, and then follow, my presentation (http://socsc.smu.edu.sg/events/2015/01/16/globalizing-knowledge-meets-singapore) with my acknowledgements, and indebtedness, to Hiro Saito whose introduction of me to Singaporean knowledge cultures moved my exploration. That relationship developed profoundly during my visit to Singapore Management University and during visits to other institutions and with colleagues from National University of Singapore. I am grateful to all who helped me recognize additional contours of globalizing knowledge in Singapore, including Miki Saito, Chung Wai Keung, Gao Yang, Ijlal Naqvi, Puk Teerawichitchainan, Forrest Zhang, Jake Ricks, Ann Florini, Anju Pau, Xiaohong Xu, Zheng Mu, Margaret Chan, James Tang, Christie Scollon, Paul Evans, Bilahari Kausikan and Linda Lim. This is, of course, but the beginning of my own explorations, and I hope, of additional dialogues with colleagues expert on Singapore and its knowledge networks. I invite additional comments – please write to me at Michael_Kennedy@brown.edu.

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to think about how they engender a certain global awareness or citizenship among its students, and presumably, its faculty (Kennedy 2015:114-16).361

In its own presentation of institutional self, Singapore Management University extends that rich tradition of cosmopolitan learning by invoking the global diversity of its faculty and student body: 61% of its full time faculty are non-Singapore citizens of 30 different nationalities, 50% of the postgraduates are citizens abroad from 34 countries, and 11% of the undergraduates are from 25 countries abroad (http://www.smu.edu.sg/smu/about/university-information/quick-facts). These figures help to establish not only SMU’s growing eminence but also the achievement of Singapore itself in terms of knowledge production.

Global professional and public media recognize Singapore’s higher education for its growing excellence (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/no-sleep-for-singapores-universities/2009064.article; http://www.smu.edu.sg/news/2014/11/19/smu-business-school-gains-top-spot-eduniversal-business-schools-ranking-2014. Its Research Centers for Excellence – the Earth Observatory of Singapore, the Centre for Quantum Technologies, the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, the Mechanobiology Institute and the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering – are themselves exemplars of this very achievement. SMU recently reported results of EDUniversal Business School Rankings to reflect their own advances http://www.smu.edu.sg/news/2014/11/19/smu-business-school-gains-top-spot-eduniversal-business-schools-ranking-2014. These last results are all the more remarkable for how recently SMU has been established.

These criteria denoting excellence are no different from those that leading US research universities typically trumpet362. Consider, for example, the book on the “great American university” by Columbia University’s former provost (Cole 2009). Although he is a sociologist, he is best able to celebrate the university’s distinction by identifying advances made in science and engineering (Kennedy 2015: 82-83). In the process, however, he also misses something about great American universities that those in Singapore might be able to articulate with even greater distinction: what it means to globalize knowledge.

Singapore’s “international outlook” (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2012-13/world-ranking/institution/national-university-of-singapore) is regularly identified as one of those things elevating the nation’s university distinctions. Indeed, even for its research centers for excellence, markers of distinction are marked with their foreign partners and scholars from elsewhere (http://www.nrf.gov.sg/about-

361 Global connections not only reflect excellence, but also help to establish it. In anticipation of coming to Singapore Management University, I reviewed its history http://www.smu.edu.sg/smu/about/university-information/history and was especially delighted to discover its connections to the University of Pennsylvania and especially its Wharton School. In my book I recognize Penn’s business school as one of the trailblazers in thinking about how to international business education in combination with the best of the liberal arts and area studies (Kennedy 2015, Chapter 3). 362 As I discuss (Kennedy 2015: 235-36) here are many beyond the US who worry about how performing to these indicators of excellence distort the function and value of universities for different local and national publics (e.g. Hotson 2011).

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nrf/programmes/research-centres-of-excellence). What might one do with that beyond using it to climb someone else’s ladder of recognition?

International outlooks are not just data for ranking; they suggest relationships that could be transformative, and certainly deserve to be an object of reflection and discussion in a culture of critical discourse characterizing institutions elevating intellectual distinction.363

With that recognition, we need to develop a relational sense of global universities rather than a categorical, or even ranked set, of those universities. And this, it seems to me, is a terrific opportunity for Singaporean higher education and intellectuality. I develop this alternative way of thinking in these steps.

Following an immanent critique of “ranking” and the treatment of interdisciplinarity as an indicator of excellence, I rather propose one search for distinction among knowledge networks by fixing on methods to recognize, and fill, knowledge cultural holes. As a starting point, I believe Singapore is uniquely situated to contribute around

a) the comparative study of flows;b) articulated with a theoretically rich sense of area studies;c) developed with a new sense of global public responsibility.

That, however, is something for those of Singapore to figure. I only mean to contribute to that process with the following discussion.

Ranking and Recognition

Of course ranking predominates in our sense of world universities. Why? One can’t be a distinguished university without being recognized as relevant. Rankings help to establish that relevance. US universities dominate those rankings, and therefore one can see why certain aspects of American universities might shape visions of academic futures elsewhere, most notably in Singapore. Singapore’s “World Class Universities” program leads in this global formulation.

Kris Olds (2007) develops this idea nicely, noting in the start of his essay how Singapore sought to become the “Boston of the East”, a knowledge hub that could remake its nation as a knowledge-based economy. That ambition could redefine Singapore’s distinction in the world through its mobilization of knowledge. I especially appreciate how Olds characterizes this investment as not only economic but discursive: “Singapore seeks to become credibly known, in selective academic, industry, and media circles as a cosmopolitan and creative space, a vibrant and diverse global city integrating into the lattice under girding the global network economy”.

That clustering of knowledge-intensive institutions could lead us to focus on different kinds of rankings to establish relevance. I know from living in Rhode Island, slightly

363 Alvin Gouldner (1979) used the term “culture of critical discourse” to distinguish the practice of intellectuals as a group from others. Open and critical discussion of knowledge practices is the foundation for the legitimation of universities, as I discuss in chapters 2 and 3 in Kennedy 2015.

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outside the Boston area, that this kind of regional clustering matters. Scholars from Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University and my own Brown University regularly and easily interact. This makes individual university rankings somehow less appropriate for recognizing distinction. Regional clustering of knowledge institutions matters.

Universitas 21 recognizes this, and has itself helped to reorder knowledge recognition in the world (http://www.universitas21.com/news/details/61/u21–rankings-of-national-higher-education-systems-2012.) As I write (Kennedy 2015: 238)

U21 challenged the practice of ranking from within the logic of the ranking system itself. It focused on national educational systems rather than on universities in U21’s work to affect students’ school choices. In so doing, the United States does not look so obviously dominant. Finland, Norway, and Denmark are ranked better when one considers government funding of higher education as percentage of GDP. Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland have the greatest investment in research and development. Sweden also leads on research journal articles if one views it as a percentage of articles per capita. Singapore and Japan join Scandinavia in having a higher ratio of researchers in the economy. International collaboration is also greater in Indonesia, Switzerland, Hong Kong, SAR, Denmark, Belgium, and Austria, while the United States, China, India, and Japan are at the bottom in this category (Williams et al. 2012).

U21’s most recent ranking reinforces Singapore’s distinction in the world of knowledge institutions:

Singapore is ranked 10th overall, which combines a ranking of 9 for Resources, 11 for Environment, 5 for Connectivity and 19 for Output. It ranks second for expenditure per student and third for R&D expenditure by universities deflated by population. It loses some points for Environment because of its low proportion of female academic staff and some deficiencies in data. In the Connectivity category, it ranks first for the relative importance of international students. It ranks 10th for the relative importance of joint publications with international authors, 22nd on joint publications with industry, and is rated 11th on degree of knowledge transfer with firms. Singapore is ranked 32nd on total publications, which rises to 11th when deflated by population. The average impact of articles is ranked seventh. Its best rank in the Output category is third for the number of researchers in the country per head of population. Singapore has the highest level of GDP per capita in our sample so it is inevitable its ranking must fall when we allow for national levels of income: it drops to rank 31. The caveat is that our methodology is less robust for endpoints on the income scale (http://www.universitas21.com/ranking/map)

This U21 approach to knowledge production, consumption, and distribution could change the way we think about world class universities. Instead of thinking about the great university as Cole (2009) describes it, we might think, instead, about varieties of knowledge networks that universities create, and that might restructure universities

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themselves. That seems especially true in Singapore.

Instead of trying to ascend a ladder of educational institutional distinction made with American universities in mind, Singapore might imagine how it can realize its own knowledge distinction by emphasizing its position as a global node in knowledge networks.

Each scholar might find a different node, but three dimensions of globalizing knowledge seem especially appropriate in recognizing Singaporean distinction in knowledge production, consumption, and distribution. But one needs to rethink interdisciplinarity as such before one reconsiders distinctive articulations of globalizing knowledge.

Variations of Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity does not even merit a mention in my book’s index because it is central to my book’s conception. While I am a sociologist, and therefore my disciplinary accent is apparent, the book is conceived in terms of intellectual and knowledge institutional responsibility. Those notions demand thinking beyond disciplines. Interdisciplinarity does not always address responsibility, however.

Intellectuals have their own cultures, varying to be sure, but anchored in questions that demand returns to foundational questions all the time. Interdisciplinarity by contrast, only expects dialogues across knowledge cultures, often times eluding foundational questions by finding convenient bridges to link sometimes distant fields of learning. That’s why we need to refine our notions of interdisciplinarity with two concepts.

First, rather than approach knowledge cultures as if they exist in a world of categorical variables, we should see them as living in a world of continuous variables. There are, then, degrees of interdisciplinarity that vary along different dimensions – in terms of degrees and qualities of discovery.

For example, the distance between rational choice political science and economics is much smaller than the distance between rational choice political science and cultural studies. Why? In the former, methodological agreement facilitates dialogue across disciplines. In the latter, both fields might be interested in publics, but the ways in which each conceives the constitution of publics varies so much as to make dialogue not only difficult but likely unproductive, except when between the most generous of intellectuals in each camp.

The distance between engineering and sociology is even greater than for either of the former dialogues, but it is not so challenging as between cultural studies and formal modeling. The former conjunction does not depend on competing claims to competence; it depends rather on a search for complementary knowledge.

This small exercise leads us to a much more interesting search than one of measuring degrees of interdisciplinarity. Why, after all, do we launch these searches beyond discipline anyway?

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Interdisciplinarity can be used to refine answers to existing questions, or to search for questions that more disciplined knowledge cultures have repressed in their own self-regulation. Thus, instead of discussing interdisciplinarity as if it is a virtue in and of itself, we ought to consider whether it enables us to discover new questions that need address. I have an example in mind, a new project on which I am working.

Together with climate scientists and different kinds of social scientists across various nations, I am working to understand “the confluence of change, opportunity, risk and sacrifice” as the retreating Arctic ice edge moves different communities of interest and knowledge into new relationships of learning and action. In particular, we intend to identify existing knowledge cultural holes (Vilhena et al. 2014) as potential locations for strategic knowledgeable interventions.364

Such a literature-based approach to discovering knowledge cultural holes might also be complemented by more interactive searches. Given that SMI enjoys expertise on performance and cultural studies, one might consider ways in which this competence might be brought to bear on the development of interdisciplinary studies. At least in my experience, to have performance studies in one’s interdisciplinary mix significantly extends the sense both of intellectual responsibility and creativity (Kennedy 2015, Chapter 3). But this is best done when there is a problem or question animating the concern.

In my newest collaboration with an Arctic focus that concerns the retreating ice edge. What might such inspired questions be in Singapore? One thing seems extraordinarily propitious to me, but it would require some additional reflection and concentration. And that different question requires rethinking the significance of area studies in the conception of problems. Rethinking Contextual Expertise

Area studies as such has no obvious place in Singapore Management University. At the same time, it appears to be all over it. When I review the list of distinguished faculty in the social sciences at Singapore Management University, a significant number of scholars identify “contemporary Asian society” as a specialization (http://socsc.smu.edu.sg/faculty?updated=##region-page-top). That’s incredibly exciting, but what does that mean?

That labeling without institutional augmentation may reflect an anachronistic sense of area studies. After all, in the 1990s, in the glare of globalization’s utopia, the sense of place was being replaced by a sense of connection. This, however, is being rethought across the world, not only within universities but also in foundations and knowledge

364 This research team is led by Brown University’s Amanda Lynch, including too Siri Veland, Todd Arbetter, Babson’s Michael Goldstein and from Norway, Grete Hovelsrud and Brigt Dale and from Canada, Toddi Steelman.

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networks.365 Indeed, one of the most exciting efforts undertaken by the Social Science Research Council has been its work around “Inter-Asia”, a project supported by the Mellon Foundation (http://www.ssrc.org/programs/interasia-Program/). I would like to think that the University of Michigan’s work around area studies might have contributed to this revival.

I have worked very much in the area studies tradition, and as the University of Michigan’s first vice provost for international affairs, I worked with my colleagues in the field to elevate its relative place within the university’s knowledge culture hierarchy, and in its national recognition.

One of the people with whom I worked most closely was, herself, originally from Singapore. Linda Lim’s expertise in Southeast Asian studies has led the University of Michigan’s approach to area studies, and especially in articulation with business, for some time. Indeed, I refer to one of her critiques of university globalizations in my book (Kennedy 2015:6). She wrote in 2001,

In this view, “globalization” of the American university may mean simply offering American programs and teaching American models to foreigners at home or abroad—as in “We have a campus in Singapore” or “We offer programs in London” or “International students are 30 percent of our class,” ergo, we are “global.” Or it may be taken to mean sending our own students or faculty abroad on “exchanges” for training, internship and research collaboration, many of which involve merely replicating or extending in “their” territory what we already do here, and conducted in our language, not theirs. . . . Importing non- U.S. faculty and students . . . may actually undermine the globalization of the American intellectual universe if it results in institutionalization of the belief that “The rest of the world comes to us, so we don’t have to learn about the rest of the world.”. . . It is not surprising, then, that so many around the world dismiss “globalization” as a smokescreen for “American domination,” and are beginning to resist the spread or at least question the superiority of the “American gospel” of free markets and even of democracy. . . . The hegemonic U.S. university’s ethnocentric and parochial misidentification of the intellectual challenge of

365 WEF’s 2015 Forum, in fact, extends some of the themes of my book and indeed raises the importance of area studies without the name. They characterize it as “contextual intelligence”, which is, of course, just how I named area studies in the book.

Complexity, fragility and uncertainty are potentially ending an era of economic integration and international partnership that began in 1989. What is clear is that we are confronted by profound political, economic, social and, above all, technological transformations. They are altering long-standing assumptions about our prospects, resulting in an entirely “new global context” for decision-making.

Leaders are looking to strengthen their situation awareness and contextual intelligence. The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting convenes global leaders from across business, government, international organizations, academia and civil society in Davos for strategic dialogues which map the key transformations reshaping the world (http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2015).

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globalization could actually diminish our capacity to understand, interact with, and enrich the “globalized” world in which we live. Only rarely does it acknowledge the importance of globalization in the intellectual content of what its members research, study, teach and learn—the language, culture, business or scientific practices of the “other.” (Lim 2001).

I believe Linda’s commitment to area studies has given her a critical foundation with which to interpret those flatter notions of globalization that seem to anchor those who view the process from within airport cultures. At the same time, area studies as such needs intellectual rearticulation, and Singapore seems especially well suited for a number of reasons to do it.

Area studies is not a discipline; indeed, it is not even an interdisciplinary formation as such. Particular area studies – Southeast Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, European Studies, and so on – are of course interdisciplinary knowledge clusters, animated by concern over how particular cultures and histories might be understood simultaneously from “within” and in translation. But in general, we have no explicit theoretical and methodological tools across these domains. We should develop them, because the significance of contextual expertise is far too great to be left underdeveloped and under-resourced and only implied in our scholarship, or even in our claims to distinction.

While directing Michigan’s International Institute, I proposed that we think about our common capacity around “expertise in the languages, cultures, histories, and institutions of particular nations and world regions” and to refine the “epistemological foundations and research competencies associated with contextual expertise and its relationship to other kinds of scholarship” (Kennedy 2015: 94). That helped.

It helped because we could mark area studies as a distinctive kind of expertise, one that might develop alongside the world of flows and those transnational epistemic communities that were animated by minimizing the challenge of difference in national expressions. But it demanded more than a name. It demanded exemplars.

One example I might share here is one developed in combination with a professor of engineering. Deba Dutta, now Provost at Purdue University, taught a course on design to students at Michigan, Seoul National University and Delft University. One project was to design a common coffee pot that might sell across these very different beverage cultures. Students were so focused on that problem that they began to trivialize the differences in national cultures as they sought a way to homogenize the product. And then a Norwegian student from Delft reframed the question: shouldn’t a pot be designed that might help to express and refine local tastes? (Kennedy 2015: 104). That suggests the value of rearticulating area studies and design, but it invites even more substantial rethinking about the role of area studies in conceptualizing the global, the general, and the theoretical.

Hiro Saito has developed the theoretical relevance of various national groundings in

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most powerful ways. One of my favorite examples of his work comes in a book review essay he developed for the American Sociological Association’s leading journal reviewing books, Contemporary Sociology (Saito 2015). Hiro does many things in that article, but what I especially like is his emphasis on the exploration of what kind of theory goes with area studies. Far too often, there is no, or only implicit, theory attached to these works. And that is where opportunity radiates.

As Hiro rightly points out, area studies scholars develop well the empirical complexities of non-American places, but they also ought to develop a theory and method for case selection/justification. Indeed, as I point out in my book, there is a pretty systematic hierarchy of place engagement in the social sciences, one that distorts how theory is built (Kennedy 2015, Chapter 5).

Colleagues and I at Michigan proposed that we might develop this theory more around notions of grounding and translation, but frankly that project never developed as far as it ought. I think it could develop in new and exciting ways in Singapore. At least I already saw a terrific evidence of that rethinking already when Bilihari Kausikan (http://socsc.smu.edu.sg/faculty/profile/90966/Bilahari-KAUSIKAN) joined Paul Evans’ workshop on diplomacy to talk about Singapore’s place in the world. (http://socsc.smu.edu.sg/newsletter/118356) On the one hand, this Ambassador at Large did as most diplomats do, and made quite matter of fact some of the greatest challenges facing his nation and the world. He characterized Singapore quite simply a small country within Southeast Asia. But as he spoke further, the complexity of adjectives and regional referents became apparent.

Much more might be said,366 but I took this as a small subset of the issues that deserve more reflection. First, Singapore is a global city, defined in part by its centrality to channeling global financial flows and trade and hosting expatriate workers from around the world in substantial numbers. Singapore is also uniquely tied to Britain and America, but also to China. While it is obviously within Southeast Asia, it is also, therefore, quite far beyond the region given its place in the world of flows. Given that place, Singaporean authorities can agonize over sovereignty but can, unlike other nations, deny the importance of independence in establishing its centrality to the world.

Unlike other diplomats, Ambassador Kausikan seemed to me to conjure a kind of presentation of Singapore that is something more than a small nation within Southeast Asia.367 Indeed, I had just read a volume on war magic, where former Singaporean resident DS Farrell discussed the ways in which illusions were essential accompaniments to real martial powers.368 The Ambassador struck me, here, as an

366 Indeed, Kausikan’s essay, “Playing Chess: Mr. Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought” could be one intriguing foundation for just such reflection. 367 Indeed, Singapore must become something different in order to recruit its world accomplished diaspora back. For one particularly insightful account of this effort, see Cheryl Narumi Naruse (2014)368 See DS Farrer “Introduction: Cross-Cultural Articulations of War Magic and Warrior Religion”, an introduction to a special issue of Social Analysis 58:1(2014). SMU’s Margaret Chan offers the lead

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exemplar – for on the one hand, he spoke directly and quite matter-of-factly about the nation and its national interest. On the other hand, to stabilize what Singapore is, as a global city without a nation, is something beyond global sense. There is no place like Singapore, and therefore its influence might be subject to maneuvering powers of perception even more than other places. As such, Singapore might help us recognize, as well, what is possible, and what is not, in reconfiguring a world increasingly defined by flows. There is especially great opportunity in that around public social science.

Hiro Saito’s (2015) essay on area studies not only encourages us to rethink our area studies theory, but also the ways in which area studies engages its publics. Indeed, Hiro notes that area studies projects have a deeply ambivalent relationship to the publics about which they write. Although they may take their “issues” from the places they engage, they don’t often talk back to those publics who might be interested in those issues. Even more, those publics, and even their scholars, don’t often talk back. Hiro himself wonders, too, about his ability to engage his original public. And that, it seems, is the opportunity for a place like Singapore for transforming area studies, at least Asian studies.

Following multiple visits to the National Museum of Singapore with my colleagues from Singapore Management University, I appreciate even more what an Asian studies sensibility articulated through this nation’s context might be. After all, Singapore’s sense of nation making and regional reference defies most expectations, not only for its global reference and lack of some ancient past that informs modern political experiments, but also for its conscious articulation of various diasporic Asian populations as well as Europeans in its representation of the nation. I welcome learning further about this, and even more, seeing how a Singaporean approach to Asian studies might develop through its universities.

Higher education is not only about autonomy and creativity, but also about intellectual and institutional responsibility combined. Hiro’s (2015) vision of public social science, one that helps publics to “become more reflexive and move toward more democratic and effective governance of their collective lives” seems critical to that mission.

Public Social Science

I focus on different kinds of publics in Chapter 4 of my book, two of which bear mention.

One tension I elaborate rests in the distinction between the visions of public sociology articulated by Michael Burawoy on the one hand and Craig Calhoun on the other. In the former, Burawoy locates the public in an oppositional stance vis-à-vis authorities and powers of all sorts, while Calhoun locates it more as a disposition. For Burawoy, it is about empowering civil society, for Calhoun it is also about a kind of institutional responsibility enhanced by a critical social theoretical disposition that engages publics. Calhoun’s does not simply reflect public wishes as a more organic sociology might.

essay, “Tangki War Magic: The Virtuality of Spirit Warfare and the Actuality of Peace” is the lead substantive essay in that fine collection.

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I can see both sensibilities of public at work in Singapore, but the diversity of those publics extends beyond that simplified opposition. I develop another set of distinctions in Kennedy (2015) which can help.

TABLE 4: UNIVERSITY PUBLICS, PROXIMITY, AND ARTICULATIONS

ACADEMIC VALUES PUBLIC AS CONTEXT PUBLIC AS PARTNER

PROXIMATE AND OBVIOUS

1. CORE PUBLICS AMONG 2. UNIVERSITY AS 3. SERVICE LEARNING, CAMPUS FACULTY, EMPLOYER, INVESTOR SCHOLARSHIP IN STUDENTS, STAFF, AND CULTURE PROVIDER CIVIC ENGAGEMENTALUMNI CONTRACTOR

DISTANT REQUIRING JUSTIFICATION

4. GLOBAL EXCELLENCE 5. GLOBAL PROBLEMS 6. PARTNERSHIPS W/GLOBAL RANKINGS & POLICY MAKING PUBLICS OF CHOICE

Universities themselves engage publics. Sometimes those publics are proximate and obvious, as the neighborhood or city in which that university operates, or even the faculty, students, staff and alumni of the university itself. Increasingly, world universities like to identify distant publics as their audience or partner, obvious in both global rankings of excellence or in claims to problem solving elsewhere. Sometimes, in fact, global universities see publics not only as audience or beneficiary but as partner in knowledge work and development. I develop that range of alternatives in a table (Kennedy 2015:151), one that I reproduce in Table 4 from that chapter.

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Both sets of distinctions – around the relationship of publics to authority, and of universities to publics, can help move the discussion around Singapore’s knowledgeable publics. Let me illustrate. If it would have been launched by a university, the project referenced in the National Museum of Singapore on Diverscity http://www.sif.org.sg/story_details-346 suggests a kind of global public engagement that seems to fit best in the sixth cell in the table.

SIF’s third edition of DiverseCity celebrates 127 Singaporean artists as citizen ambassadors in connecting, promoting understanding and building relationships with communities in 146 cities across 40 countries. It is also a celebration of the diversity and global reach of Singapore’s culture. Presented in three parts, viz. Connecting Cultures, Collaborating for Change and Engaging Communities, it showcases the partnerships between SIF and artists and cultural leaders for connecting and building friendships between Singaporeans and world communities in the last two years.

Minister Grace Fu, who launched DiverseCity 2014 and its related publication on 9 December 2014 affirmed the role of artists as citizen ambassadors. According to the minister, “…in today’s world where physical boundaries are removed and we are more inter-connected than ever, new invisible walls are created because of our perception and because of our biasness. We therefore need artists like you as citizens ambassadors to break down these walls through artistic expressions and exchanges”. She then thanked artists for being “our ambassadors to further the understanding of Singapore around the world.” (http://www.sif.org.sg/story_details-346#sthash.CnVYYraU.dpuf)

I was struck by the worldliness of the exhibition, but various sociological questions resonated, the first prompted by my own sighting of my first homeland abroad, Poland, on the list of 40 countries participating. Why Poland? Even more, why this 40? Do the international networks in this connection of communities represent something more than an accidental tourist?

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Of course the sociological imagination does more than wonder about the representativeness of samples. Indeed, the narrative of this connection was inspired, and intriguing, with its emphasis on the ways in which artists celebrated the power of culture for connecting the world’s communities (publics?), and the dangers of militarism for destroying it. Consider the dark side at bottom.

The dark side is, however, much less elaborate than the forces of good embodied in cultural expression. We can readily see notions of community empowerment alongside universal values in harmonious development across the world, without any clear opposition articulated. In this, actually, one might find terrific resonance with the kinds of knowledge networks, cultures and public sensibilities associated with the World Economic Forum. I address WEF as one of several different kinds of knowledge networks in Chapter 7 of my book.

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As Diversecity, WEF is concerned for the representation of difference, and the importance of values in figuring out global connections in the face of major global challenges. I especially appreciated what one of its members wrote.

“In one of its blogs, Tim Leberecht (2012), chief marketing officer of Frog, a global design and innovation firm, argues that dialogue based on a new social covenant across various layers of difference in the world is critical. He writes,

In light of the financial crisis, growing social divides in many countries and deepening mistrust in business, a multistakeholder dialogue on values is more important than ever. In our hyperconnected world, the consequences of our actions are more transparent and dramatically amplified, and the gap between values and behaviour is increasingly open to public scrutiny and subject to systemic effects. . . . Consumers and citizens demand more transparent, collaborative and inclusive models of value creation that produce well-being, happiness and meaning as much as profits. However, it appears that even well-articulated and broadly supported moral principles are difficult to translate into day-to-day decision-making.

Critical to that gap is, in fact, to move beyond the common and recognize the challenge of difference. Leberecht develops the point:

Identifying and promoting shared values is important, but the real litmus test for a moral economy is the respect it can afford for the values of others. This is particularly true for our ever more connected world where the other is just one click away and we are all neighbours.

If the Global Agenda Council on Values can help articulate what we have in common while appreciating what distinguishes us, then we will have made a small but meaningful contribution to improving the state of the world.

The humility is striking, even while the ambition is remarkable. The quality of members on that particular subgroup of the council was impressive, including prominent scholars like Homi Bhabha, Anthony Appiah, and Jim Wallis.36 The problematic they take up depends on the assumption that differences mainly need respect and that transcendence can be realized through dialogue rather than transformations of power. Not all global knowledge networks presume such potential consensus as starting points.” (Kennedy 2015: 248-49).

Not all engagements of the public in Singapore presume such harmonious expression. Daniel Goh’s more critical sociology is an indicator of the kind of intellectual vitality around Singapore marking the further realization of Singapore’s quest to develop world class universities.

For example, Daniel Goh’s account of Singapore’s walking tours moves the sociological imagination. In his 2014 account, Singaporean authorities have managed a striking balance of cosmopolitan multiculturalism and national project implicated in a development endeavor embracing transnational corporations. A key element of that

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project is a kind of cultural management that recognizes and elevates difference, but in a way that distracts from inequalities in the moment to appreciate monumentalities to that diversity in the past. At the same time, performance artists and others can find ways to develop an alternative way of experiencing their city, a way of walking it, that enables a distance from the managed cosmopolitan culture associated with Singapore’s increase in wealth (Goh 2014). I find this a terrific piece to read alongside DiverseCity which attends relatively little to power relations as such.

Although he develops a sophisticated account of Singapore’s power relations, Goh also enhances Singapore’s place in global scholarship. A Singaporean scholar from a Singaporean university publishing in the world’s leading journals about Singapore itself, Goh also helps to refashion the relative significance of Singapore’s study in the world.

Individual authors can do much, but when they mobilize their knowledge networks to enhance that place, Singapore’s recognition grows simultaneously. For example, when I went to read Goh’s work on “Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel,” I discovered an entire issue of a distinguished journal dedicated to Singapore as nation and place (Oswin and Yeoh 2010). Individual knowledge capital in articulation with the power generated by knowledge networks extends globalizing knowledge powerfully, and practically, much more than, or at least in different ways from, the credentialing process associated with indicators of university excellence.

With Goh’s example, then, we can see it’s not just a matter of whether faculty inside Singapore’s universities enhance those university rankings on metrics designed elsewhere. It’s about whether Singapore itself is recognized in that global scholarship. As I discuss in chapter 5 of my book, places are located in a hierarchy of global recognition. Goh’s work moves Singapore up. But Goh becomes prominent in other forms of global recognition too, one that seems to reflect a sense of public more in keeping with Burawoy’s notion of public social science.

There are quite critical debates in Singapore today about the representation of Singaporean citizens in Singapore’s universities. To some, the particular method taken to globalize universities has led to an exclusion of Singaporeans themselves from higher education’s faculty. Some even see discrimination at work, where those abroad are favored over Singaporean citizens themselves. One can see grounds for such anxiety in the numbers. One of those figures regularly bandied about is the low number of citizens in “context-sensitive” departments like the political science department of National University of Singapore, where only 7 of its 25 faculty are the nation’s citizens (Yong and Ong 2014).

There are many more reasons than discrimination to explain this kind of result, of course. Indeed, it’s important to think about all the possible reasons for this measure of representation in order to consider its possible remedies. But the debate itself also offers an opportunity for extending public social science in a quite meaningful fashion, to extend the culture of critical discourse that legitimates universities as distinctive institutions. Here again, I find Daniel Goh’s comments in this Straits Times story most interesting.

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Goh reiterates the importance of maintaining university autonomy, and finds the focus on percentages of Singaporeans on the faculty to be a kind of “superficial nationalism”. He argues further: “Our universities have the mission to become world universities so as to keep Singapore bright and strong. That is deep nationalism.” (Yong and Ong 2014).

In this sense, Goh rechannels public debate away from a question of representation alone to thinking about how universities’ empowerment might enhance the public good facing the nation. This, it seems to me, is a powerful blend of intellectual and institutional responsibility, one that not only meets the state’s desired aim of producing world class universities, but in a way, as well, that enhances Singaporean public goods. That public good requires a thoughtful discussion of Singaporean citizens’ representation in its universities, but it also invites discussion about the public goods universities are themselves able to produce not only for proximate publics, but global publics too. And that goes alongside Singapore’s distinctive location in the world of flows.

The Comparative Study of Global Flows

More than in any other place, Singapore could be poised to realize what I proposed in the volume as the next stage of globalizing knowledge: to compare and study the interactions among the uneven flows of knowledge, people, wealth and weapons that characterize increasingly the world in which we live (p. 198). We need, however, to consider the variety of these global flows from the start:

Global flows vary not only in terms of their materiality and virtuality and the qualities of the knowledge cultures accompanying. They also vary in terms of the cultural landscapes in which they are embedded. Those landscapes vary, too, in terms of their articulation with emancipation and sustainability. To some extent, knowledge networks help to establish those landscapes with their own expertise. They also should be recognized within the cultural politics that form them, and the social interventions that might rearticulate them (p. 227).

Where might we find that kind of comparative and interactive study of flows in Singapore? What might it take to establish Singapore’s leadership in that very study? In my book, I think of two principal intellectual traditions for this.

For example, Saskia Sassen (2007) has developed her own complex approach to global formations for a broader public by articulating treatments of global institutions and processes and elements of globalization fixed in place. The World Trade Organization exemplifies the first; global commodity chains, the second; and global cities like New York, London, and Tokyo, the third. In general, however, the location of different global flows is critical for understanding the restructuration of space and the various authorities associated with those different scales of operation (Sassen 2008). Understanding the variety of those flows is important not only for analytical purposes, Sassen argues, but also for those who would seek to regulate them in various emergent global formations…..

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Manuel Castells (2009) moves that along powerfully. He argues that societies are today fundamentally different from what they were before the microelectronics revolution. While societies have always been composed of networks, the significance of networks has grown dramatically with the development of digital communications in what he calls the information age. For Castells, networks are communicative structures that process flows of information (20). With the digitalization of those flows, networks become global if nonetheless selective in their distribution (25). They also produce new forms of space and time.

The space of flows refers to the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity without contiguity. It also refers to the possibility of asynchronous interaction in chosen time at a distance. Most dominant functions in the network society (financial markets, transnational production networks, media networks, networked forms of global governance, global social movements) are organized around the space of flows. (34–35).

Although we can think of communication in normative terms that bracket power, it is more useful to figure how this space of flows made through communication changes our conceptions of power and the rules that validate or delegitimate it. Intellectuals as such are not the agents of this cultural work. Those with the capacities to constitute networks with particular goals, what Castells calls “programmers,” are. Their power rests less in ideas or knowledge and more in coordinating the network’s action.

Although I like Castells’ ideas about programmers, I’m more intrigued by his notion of switcher. Switchers can rearticulate those network cultures because they control connections among them. Castells’s (2009, 45–47) “switchers” are both critical for reproducing what exists and potentially transformative, depending on the articulation of these networks and flows. In this, then, I might suggest we think of the transformative power of universities resting in their role not only as knowledge creators, but as network switchers. But which networks does one switch?

To be at the node of many different global flows and to live in an interdisciplinary world does not necessarily mean that one will find the best questions to address. Indeed, to the extent one is governed by metrics of excellence designed elsewhere, one might even be discouraged from discovering great questions in order to be published in those journals already identified as excellent, but also already confident that those in the most privileged knowledge sites have identified the most critical questions. Given Singapore’s renewed emphasis on creativity, this could be a propitious time to focus on knowledge cultural holes.

Vilhena et al. 2014 discuss the difference between qualities of knowledge network ties and ‘cultural holes’ or the absence of common referents, meanings, and approaches. I think it’s appropriate to identify these as knowledge cultural holes more than cultural holes, for a variety of reasons. My leading reason is that in

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everyday life, cultural holes may not be problematic. In intellectual life, they might be ok too, but we should not leave them unexamined. We should know why those spaces exist, especially if someone might be able to see value in that connection. That then, requires, an investment in not only individual scholarly reflexivity, but institutional reflexivity as well.

Discovering new and critical questions is something that requires an imagination born in creativity, in a kind of education that embraces humanities and social sciences. Indeed, my own Brown University has long been so invested, but only considered its potential address in business when it developed its partnership with IE Business School (http://www.brown.edu/academics/professional/iebrown-mba/). Indeed, in the conception of that alliance, much work was devoted to figuring the place of “reflexivity” in higher education, especially in that devoted to business. But Singapore, and especially Singapore Management University, might do even more.

I discuss reflexivity at length in Globalizing Knowledge, especially a reflexivity that is born through international engagements. I write,

The reflexivity of each disciplinarity and national scholarly tradition is enhanced when it has partners sufficiently distant to make problematic presumptions visible and critical questions central. Reflexivity is thus realized not only through the scientific analysis of the rules, resources, and strategies of scholarship and its fields of practice. It is also developed in practice through collaboration with others beyond, but familiar with, one’s presumptions (192-93).

Singapore’s “international outlook” seems, then, to be ideal for generating the kind of institutional reflexivity critical for identifying the knowledge cultural holes that produce genuine distinction in the world of higher education. But that means recognizing that outlook as something more than an indicator of excellence, and rather a network capacity that allows Singaporean intellectuals and their networks and institutions to find real distinction in globalizing knowledge.

In this, then, I would propose that Singapore’s globalizing knowledge capacity could be significantly enhanced by focusing more on figuring the distinctive niche and network capacity its concentration of knowledge capital allows. It needs to figure institutional mechanisms and resource allocations that generate the kind of creativity that not only allows Singaporean universities to climb reputational ladders made elsewhere, but rather draws attention to what Singapore enables in its own elaboration of intellectual and institutional responsibility.

(In the earlier version of this paper, I had not yet read Lily Kong’s (2014) review essay on how creative cities might rearticulate global flows. However, her account of how the normative policy script of creative cities has embedded in it flows of ideas, people, technology, finances and images is an exceptionally useful contribution to this discussion. I especially appreciate how she cautions us on the articulation of context and creative economy discourses, the distinction of creative class geographic mobility, and

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the vagaries of creative clusters. There is terrific value in comparing the articulation of these flows across such cosmopolitan spaces.)

Conclusions The last thing I intend to do in my presentation, or with these notes, is to presume that I could guide Singapore’s knowledge networks much less claim to understand the knowledge institutions and practices underlying. However, the first thing that I learned from my all too brief time in Singapore is that those who care about globalizing knowledge in general have much to learn from what Singapore has done, and might still do, in figuring its particular answer to my abiding question: “How do intellectuals mobilize institutions and networks to engage issues in a more globally responsible fashion?” I consider this question in my book, Globalizing Knowledge, but I have considered in this piece its possible connections to Singapore.

Singapore has made incredible strides in developing world class universities according to the world’s conventional indicators. Indeed, even for those more nuanced indicators, ones that take into account, for example, the access to network resources that knowledge institutional concentration allows, Singapore has achieved much very quickly. But with that infrastructure laid, Singapore might also escape the tyranny of others’ indicators and figure its own expression of intellectual and institutional responsibility. That distinction could be found in recognizing the real value added of public engagements, interdisciplinarity and international outlooks.

Public engagement, internationality and interdisciplinarity should not be thought of in terms of indicators or as ladders on a rung. They ought to be considered as relational terms, ones that enable new combinations of insight to be generated for a purpose: to fill critical knowledge cultural holes. That means, then, when thinking about globalizing knowledge one ought to view Singapore’s knowledge network capacity in terms less of rank, and more in terms of a globally recognized niche: how does it contribute to the global knowledge we need in order to thrive, and survive, in this world?

There are three obvious terrains on which I could see such development, based on the knowledge institutional and network capacities I see in Singapore.

First, a different kind of area studies might be developed, one that reflects Asian grounding but at the same time is far more sophisticated in theoretical and methodological terms than most expressions of contextual expertise. In particular, this kind of area studies could engage other knowledge cultures, from performance studies to engineering, in order to understand better the function of contextual expertise in engaging the world.

Second, a new kind of public social science could be developed, one that would take advantage of Singapore’s place as a particularly global city without a national hinterland. On the one hand, this could consider how universities might extend global connections among communities, but as well to figure how local public needs and goods can be

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addressed when global ties potentially overwhelm the sensibilities of national citizenship and interests.

Finally, given Singapore’s location as a critical node in a world of global flows, it could develop a kind of interdisciplinarity that is difficult to cultivate elsewhere given the density of knowledge cultures around each global flow. In particular, Singapore’s ability to figure the variable articulations of the flows of knowledge, people, wealth and weapons might not only lead to increasing recognition in higher education, but to the delivery of critical scholarship essential to their understanding.

Developing not just the right recruitment and retention strategies for individuals able to extend Singapore’s place in the world of learning is but one dimension of globalizing knowledge in practice. Figuring the right organizational expression and culture of critical discourse for delivering collective and networked accomplishment among Singapore’s scholars may be the most critical step in realizing the kind of world class universities Singapore deserves.

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i The USA has been at war, somewhere, more than it has not in the last century. The challenges this poses for recognizing academic freedom are considerable. For one particularly poignant case, see de Genova (2014).ii Isaac (2019) has signaled a particularly dangerous development at Indiana University. iii June Jordan, “Moving towards home”.