Globalization and the Impacts of Emergent Commodity Networks on Local Economic and Cultural Geographies

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate the rapid globalization of emergent economic markets over the last fifteen years. The research will examine both the primary drivers of this process and the impacts on local economies, communities and individuals. The project complements and extends existing scholarship on globalization in three key ways. First, the project moves beyond a traditional focus on major global north corporations as key economic drivers of globalization to analyze the operations of small to mid-sized manufacturers, traders, and consumers based in the global south. Second, the project focuses on emerging ties between countries that are largely independent of Western Europe and North America. Third, the project develops an innovative and transferable methodological framework for analyzing the ties between transnational macro economic and political processes and everyday experiences, actions and reactions. Project results will be disseminated in field site locations in the Gulf and East Africa, and in the US. These findings may be used in local, regional and international government economic policy planning, by actors in the small, mid-sized and larger private sector, and by the wider public. The project may thus support future development of the entrepreneurial sector in these locales, promoting partnerships between academia and industry and improving socio-economic well being. The project also develops and strengthens ties between educational establishments, students and faculty based in the US, the Gulf Region and East Africa, promoting US-International institutional collaboration. The research engages US-based minority undergraduate and graduate students currently underrepresented in STEM disciplines in collaborative research and co-authorship, enhancing efforts to diversify geographical education and research. Given the grounded focus of the project, it also has potential to promote increased public engagement in the geographical sciences and draw minorities and women into the field. The project has three objectives: 1. to examine the spatial, socio-cultural, economic and ideological transformations in and drivers of African-Middle Eastern ties over the last 15 years; 2. to interrogate the poorly understood "social life" of commodities globally traded outside of Western Europe and North America, including the way these new circuits of global connection are shaped by varied power relations; and 3. to better understand the social-cultural and economic impacts of heightened market integration on local and regional economic markets, communities and individuals. An innovative transnational, relational methodology is utilized in this project. This brings feminist and postcolonial perspectives to bear on traditional commodity chain analyses in economic geography, revealing macro-micro power-laden operations of globalization that are often overlooked. Through a mixture of interviews, observation, surveys, and both visual-textual and material object-based analysis, and an empirical focus on Dubai and Uganda, key sites of African-Gulf connection, the project will shed new light on the significant role of the global south in contemporary processes of globalization.