Experiencing Globalization: Active Teaching and Learning in International Political Economy

This article explores the teaching and learning challenges for the discipline of international studies (IS) that arise from the contemporary social, economic, and political changes usually labeled "globalization." The focus is upon the challenge posed to IS by a transformation in the nature of the relationship of teachers and students to the subject matter that they study: that is, teachers and students increasingly experience and contribute to globalization in the course of their daily lives as they simultaneously teach and learn about it. Significantly for the study of globalization in IS, pedagogical debates surrounding active teaching and learning highlight the potential for strategies that actively engage students' interests and everyday experiences with the subject itself. On this basis, the article outlines some potential routes into the active teaching and learning of globalization in the field of international political economy, illustrating these with examples from classroom activities and exercises.     

Life beyond big data: governing with little analytics

Abstract

The twenty-first-century rise of big data marks a significant break with statistical notions of what is of interest or concern. The vast expansion of digital data has been closely intertwined with the development of advanced analytical algorithms with which to make sense of the data. The advent of techniques of knowledge discovery affords some capacity for the analytics to derive the object or subject of interest from clusters and patterns in large volumes of data, otherwise imperceptible to human reading. Thus, the scale of the big in big data is of less significance to contemporary forms of knowing and governing than what we will call the little analytics. Following Henri Bergson's analysis of forms of perception which ‘cut out’ a series of figures detached from the whole, we propose that analytical algorithms are instruments of perception without which the extensity of big data would not be comprehensible. The technologies of analytics focus human attention and decision on particular persons and things of interest, whilst annulling or discarding much of the material context from which they are extracted. Following the algorithmic processes of ingestion, partitioning and memory, we illuminate how the use of analytics engines has transformed the nature of analysis and knowledge and, thus, the nature of the governing of economic, social and political life.     

Risk,reward and discipline at work

This paper argues that the manufacture of specific kinds of uncertainty and risk has become central to programmes of work flexibilization. The construction of a riskuncertainty relation has underpinned a raft of managerial doctrines on the worker as entrepreneur. I outline the dominant representation of risk as an unavoidable symptom of globalization. I then explore the relationship between human capital risk management, as defined by management consultants, and the working practices restructured in their name. In contrast to the rhetoric of worker-entrepreneurs, the making of contingency and uncertainty at work is revealed to be riven by tensions. I conclude by considering how we might begin to expose the myths of individual entrepreneurship, revealing the ordinary and everyday practices that make the displacement and reallocation of risk possible.     

Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures

This article considers the specific mode of visualization that is at work in contemporary border security practices. Taking inspiration from art historian Jonathan Crary's genealogies of attention, it situates homeland security visuality in a particular economy of attention or attentiveness to the world. How is it that we come to focus on some elements of our way of life, establish them as normal and designate deviations from the norm? How does this algorithmic attentiveness break up the visual field, ‘pixelating’ sensory data so that it can be reintegrated to project a picture of a person? The pre-emptive lines of sight emerging in contemporary security practice become precisely a means of visualizing unknown futures. The article concludes with reflections on the creative artistic forms of attention that flourish even where the lines of sight of the consumer, the citizen, the border guard, the traveller, the migrant appear ever more directed and delimited. It is in these more creative modes of attention that we find one of the most important resources to contemporary political life – the capacity to question the ‘better picture’, to disrupt what we see as ordinary or out of the ordinary and confront the routines of our lives anew.     

Governance, risk and dataveillance in the war on terror

This paper critically analyses the importance of risk management techniques in the war on terror. From the protection of borders to international financial flows, from airport security to daily financial transactions, risk assessment is emerging as the most important way in which terrorist danger is made measurable and manageable. However, we argue that the risk-based approach results in the displacement of risk onto marginal groups, while its effectiveness in the war on terror remains questionable.