Framing the Global Research and Publication Project

Matthew Connelly

Matthew Connelly will be visiting IU Bloomington as a Framing the Global Visiting Scholar March 19-22, 2013. He will be meeting with the Framing Fellows, students, faculty, and staff.

Professor Connelly will give a public lecture on

Thursday, March 21, 2013

"The History and Future of Official Secrecy:
The Last Frontier of State Sovereignty"

The State Room East, Indiana Memorial Union
4:00 - 5:30 p.m.

In a world in which state sovereignty is increasingly under siege, official secrecy constitutes one of the last redoubts. In recent years, a transnational movement demanding more open government has been winning recognition of a right to information in dozens of different countries. A few spectacular cases, above all Wikileaks, appear like auguries of a future without secrets. But even as transparency becomes a new global norm, the scope of official secrecy has actually been expanding, especially in the U.S. The age of "big data," the sheer scale of the national security state, and the power that still comes from compartmentalizing information means that hundreds of millions of documents are withheld from the public even decades after they were produced. But historians are now teaming up with data scientists to analyze the millions of documents that are being released, many of them in digital form. Using techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning, we can begin to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy. But the political and ethical questions remain: what does the public need to know, and when do they need to know it?

He will also participate in the Global Studies Positioning Series at the Center.

Project Overview

Framing the Global is a five-year initiative of Indiana University Press and the Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project seeks to support scholarly research and publication that will develop and disseminate new knowledge, approaches, and methods in the field of global research.

Global Studies emerged in the 1980s as intellectuals, professionals, and practitioners began to take note of the rapidly increasing transnational flows of people, ideas, and products, and the social, political, economic, and cultural consequences of these trends. Soon thereafter undergraduate degree programs, research organizations, and academic journals emerged to support this intellectual inquiry into the global and transnational impacts of these processes of change. Now, in the 21st century, graduate degree programs, international conferences, and advanced scholarship are pursued under the umbrella of Global Studies.

Even with increasing popular and scholarly attention to global issues, however, Global Studies as an academic pursuit lacks a disciplinary home, a framework of understanding, and a set of empirical methods. Scholars and practitioners have few interdisciplinary tools at their disposal that can be profitably applied to the complexity and give-and-take of globalization. Disciplinary paradigms typically encourage either macro- or micro- considerations of globalization and provide few means and methods to empirically investigate the bi-directional linkages that connect these dimensions. It is not that astute scholars have not considered these linkages; they have, but often from disciplinary angles and for specific audiences. What remains less available for global researchers are the empirical methods and broader interdisciplinary frameworks necessary for rigorous studies of transnational linkages. In fact, it may be this lack that leads to criticism of the Global Studies field for its inability to incorporate both the universalistic and empirical, the transnational and cultural, the public and private, and the sub-state and supra-state and to fully grasp the connections between the homogeneity of the global and the heterogeneity of the local. A Global Studies that is as pertinent as it is scholarly must incorporate considerations of content and structure, the individual and the universal, and the local and global.

This project aims to fill the need for this kind of global research by developing innovative approaches that will generate new knowledge, explain global phenomena, and provide means of tracing and exploring the transnational linkages that are too often left out of Global Studies. It will produce new scholarship about how to conduct global research that is applicable to a variety of lived, political, discursive, cultural, public, private, and academic contexts.

The Initiative and its Goals

The three goals of Framing the Global are:

to identify, explore, and integrate new interdisciplinary perspectives for the study of global issues
to promote and advance research on globalization, global studies, and transnational phenomena
to facilitate the publication by Indiana University Press of innovative work generated by this research

The program's goals will be achieved through four major components:

a working group of scholars and practitioners who will generate and apply new integrative approaches to Global Studies and prepare essays and book manuscripts
a program of visiting scholars/lecturers who will give public lectures at Indiana University, meet with classes, consult with the working group, and prepare book manuscripts based on their lectures
an international conference to present and assess the findings of the working group
a book series in Global Research Studies to be published by Indiana University Press

It is anticipated that 20 new books by project participants and other researchers applying the new approaches will be contracted and/or published by the end of the five-year period.