Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
- Isaac Kamola, Trinity College
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Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In this webinar, drawing on his 2019 book, Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.
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Isaac is an associate professor at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His teaching and research interest focus on the political economy of higher education, African anticolonial theory, and critical globalization studies. His Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (with Ralph Wilson, 2021), examines the dark money behind the so-called campus free speech crisis. Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke, 2019; ToC and Intro), examines how relationships between universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial organizations shape the reproduction of academic knowledge about the world as global.
