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Canadian Universities Unique in North America in Redefining Global Studies --New Director of Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University
Peck, of Georgetown University in Washington D.C., asserts that the new global environment is both more accessible and more treacherous as political and cultural boundaries are realigned and reconceptualized, accelerated by the new speed of capital and information flow. He notes that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, watched by millions around the world, was a seminal event in this transformation. "And now, we are all struggling to keep up with global rearrangements and turmoil that seem to have been instigated by the ëmere' local affairs of a divided Germany."
"Canadian universities can play a unique role in redefining international and global studies in North America," said Peck, noting that the Canadian Centre for studying Germany in its European context is bi-provincial, trilingual and multidisciplinary, located in the two major cosmopolitan centres in Canada. He says this is what drew him to Canada to pursue his interests in the impact of globalization and technology on cultural identity and educational policy.
"This Centre is not going to be merely a ëCanadian' version of other Centres in the U.S. and the U.K., but a distinctive global intellectual site that takes advantage of the Canadian experience," said Peck. The Centre is a cooperative initiative of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), l'UniversitÈ de MontrÈal, and York, and was established in 1997 after a nationwide competition among Canada's foremost universities. Peck, a scholar in the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies and anthropology, helped build the German and European Studies Centre at Georgetown. He was chosen to lead Canada's Centre this year following an international search by a committee of experts from four Canadian universities.
Peck will deliver his address in the Senate Chamber, on the 9th floor north of the Ross Building, on Tuesday, September 14, at 4 p.m. An excerpt of the address is attached.
For more information, please contact:
Sine MacKinnon
Prof. Jeffrey Peck
Susan Bigelow
by Prof. Jeffrey Peck, Director of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies/Le Centre canadien d'Ètudes allemandes et europÈennes at York University and the UniversitÈ de MontrÈal
Excerpts
...There is no question that these realignments result in an intense ambivalence about globalization that is reflected in all of the literature on the subject and, more importantly, in the hearts and minds of all of us who try to make our way in this newly constructed world. I want to talk today about the exciting and, above all, unique situation of this particular Centre for German and European Studies in Canada--what it can do and what it can be in this setting.
...The question I am asking is: How does a Centre for German and European Studies, initiated and paid for in large part by Germany, located in bilingual and multicultural Canada, so geographically and culturally near to the United States, develop an identity in a global society where such national distinctions are both being dissolved and reinstated in often such inexplicable ways? Moreover, and this is our particular angle, how does a university, a centre concerned with what traditionally has been called "area studies" fit into and help change academic relations and intellectual environments? Above all, what kinds of new knowledge and angles of vision can be produced in such an international setting in a global environment? Borders have clearly been of significance for both the Germans and Canadians as they marked off relations with enemies-die Mauer (the Wall) to the East-- in the first case, and friends- - below the 49th-- in the second; now such divisions are more confusing, even as far as differentiating friends from enemies.
...Migration is the most salient topic for me today since, as part of what has been often humorously called the reverse brain drain, I have migrated here from the United States to become part of this transnational flow of capital. As a foreign worker, a migrant laborer, to exaggerate the metaphor, I am also part of a global movement of goods, services, and people across borders from place to place. I purposefully emphasize location and space here. It is the dominant metaphor for thinking about area or international studies since I believe that our work in a particular intellectual or geographical location is always political,--even in a postnational environment-- insofar that how we conceptualize, organize, and practice our "intellectual labor" shapes knowledge which is informed by questions of ideology and power. Since area studies programs were a product of the Cold War, and at least that war is over, the last ten years have just begun to bring about rethinking of the intellectual, administrative, and institutional structures that represent our study and knowledge of those areas. The end of the Soviet Union, for example, has meant the end of Soviet Studies Programs and universities are accommodating themselves accordingly to these changes that bring a host of new foci, such as studies of former Soviet republics which were invisible before. The explosion of programs in cultural studies, and more recently, communication, culture, and technology illustrates the institutional necessity of accommodating new areas of knowledge production that better reflect the global academic marketplace. In fact, the entire notion of innovation has been reinvented and, needless to say, critiqued on the left and the right, especially when the subject of cultural studies emerges.
It is necessary to look at this innovation--the new and potential iterations of German and European Studies at the university-- precisely in this altered global order. In this partly material and partly virtual environment, it may even be possible--precisely because our Centre in Canada has come "late," almost ten years after those in the United States, to imagine (and this word takes on new meaning) a Centre that is both international and global, attuned to the exigencies of both paradigms. The challenge is: how do the international area studies Centres and individual disciplines, such as language, culture and literature, political science, economics, history, sociology, philosophy, and so on fit in as notions of "areas" shift, and as each of these fields continues to evolve and respond to global imperatives pushing and shoving these disciplines and their practitioners in all directions. It feels a little like riding on a ferris wheel during an earthquake.
As all scholars know, individual fields in which we work are always both local, i.e university, and global, i.e. professional at the same time. This is not new, but interdisciplinarity, or as some prefer trans-disciplinarity, and the transformation of knowledge fields are increasing at an ever more rapid pace causing the excitement of intellectual potential, but also the intensified dislocation of scholars who cannot find an academic home. They can become academic migrants or refugees, lost in the interdisciplinary terrain of what the well-known literary critic, J. Hillis Miller, calls the "transnational university". I am asking how do we take advantage of this transformation without succumbing to the homogenizing tendencies of globalization, what has been so indelicately termed McDonaldization, to draw attention to Benjamin Barber's popular book, Jihad vs. McWorld. How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World. As teachers, we have to ask how we maintain a critical edge for ourselves and above all for our students in this environment, since globalization processes can quickly reappropriate even our sharpest critique into a benign consumerist ideology, even of once critical trends.
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