Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global: An Introduction

While Global Studies has been pursued for research and teaching purposes for a few decades, there is little agreement on what substantiates the field. The Framing the Global project tackles this question by arguing for a renewed engagement with the empirical. It asks global scholars to step back from the analytic, to return to a space where pre-conceived methods, theories, and disciplines do not guide our findings. In this way, scholars must engage in a pre-analytic un-framing before they can define the particularities of their global. Each author in this forum enters into the global through an entry point, a point of specific empirical significance – whether a diaspora, a classroom, a biennale circuit, the AIDS regime, or plastic buckets and masks – that guides the way they trace what is global. In addition to exploring the need for un-framing Global Studies, Kahn and Gille also explain how un-framing and re-framing might help us understand global pedagogies and pandemics, by demonstrating how critical an engagement with the empirical is for contemporary global challenges that require us to excavate our understandings and shatter concepts that predominate rather than engage.