Global Dreams Research Articles

Returning the West to the World

(and not a North, a South, or an Easf ) and how it became Ameri can requires that we recover a history in which it was not always ours and is still not exclusively ours. By returning West to world, we recapture a history that was more international than national and far less exceptional than has often been assumed. notion that westward expansion of United States made this nation what it is and its people who they are has broad and deep roots, but it was Frederick Jackson Turner who gave this idea its most powerful and enduring scholarly spin. In his 1893 es say on The Significance of Frontier in American History, Turner boldly as serted that the advance of American settlement westward explained] American development, nurturing growth of de mocracy and nourishing spirit of indi vidualism and enterprise. Movements west held key to effective Americanization?a process that Turner limited to transformation of European into American. In short, Turner's in sisted that what was uniquely American about United States owed to its westward expansion (i). More than a century of criticism has knocked Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis from scholarly pedestal it once occupied. Few histo rians now accept that westward expansion alone explained patterns of American past. Not many argue for an American exceptionalism based exclusively on a frontier or western heritage (2). But if West and process of westward expansion no longer play such large roles in manifesting one nation's destiny, these acquire fresh significance when restored to intersection at which des tinies of many nations, peoples, and empires converged. To that end, historians must first reckon with multiple colonial enterprises that sought to expand their domains across North America. From this multi colonial perspective, history of expansionism in North America is more easily linked to imperial currents that flowed from Europe to Americas and across much of globe from sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Those connections, in turn, open up possibili ties for comparing colonialisms that evolved in North America and elsewhere during this era. Finally, in twentieth century and into twenty-first, West has retained its international position, both as a crossroads of peoples and as a terrain for global dreams.

Local Dirt, Global Dreams: Mining investment and land use change in Arizona

A central problematic for researchers working at the interface of economic and environmental change is the development of research designs and methodologies that can satisfactorily link economic processes of global reach (such as direct investment) to environmental change at local and regional scales. This article reviews recent efforts to couple economic and environmental change and finds that relatively little effort has been made to use the direct investment process as a means of linking industrial restructuring to land use change. The article argues that direct investment, when conceptualised as a political-economic process involving the assemblage of a package of rights (to land, water, pollution permits etc), can be an effective vehicle for tracing through the impacts of industrial restructuring on local environments. To develop this analytical approach, an empirical case of mineral investment in the Gila Valley of eastern Arizona is presented. The case study identifies the acquisition of land and water rights as central strategic issues for mineral firms seeking to make investment, and traces through the impact of these acquisition strategies on existing patterns of land ownership and land use.

Local Dirt, Global Dreams: mining investment and land use change in Arizona

Local Dirt, Global Dreams: mining investment and land use change in Arizona

Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: The Dynamics of Teacher Identity in the Republic of Benin

L'auteur tente d'expliquer les differences d'impacts de la mondialisation au niveau local sur les systemes educatifs par les variations de l'identite des enseignants. L'enseignant, considere en tant qu'acteur social, politique et historique d'un pays donne, peut malgre tout aider a apporter des solutions aux politiques reformatrices developpees. En effet, si les pays en voie de developpement ont des besoins similaires qui repondent a des logiques, des priorites et des attentes bien definies, les consequences des reformes engagees different selon les pays.

Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: The Dynamics of Teacher Identity in the Republic of Benin

Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: The Dynamics of Teacher Identity in the Republic of Benin

Information, communication and transformation: a South African perspective

ABSTRACT The growth of the South African information and communication technology (ICT) sector has been phenomenal in the past four years. Although the global ICT sector has suffered setbacks in the past few months because of the dramatic loss of technology stocks in world markets. South Africa's ICT is set to improve due to a still massive unmet demand for ICT services in the country. South Africa must seize the opportunity to leapfrog into an information society, while not repeating the mistakes of the developing economies. South Africa has opted for a managed liberalisation of the economy. The telecommunications sector is gradually being opened to competition while ensuring the optimum use of existing investments in the sector. This article argues that while liberalising telecommunications, it remains important that state assets such as Telkom, the telecommunications parastatal, should remain in the hands of the state in order to serve public interest. Wholesale privatisation of state assets is not the solution for South Africa, but to build global dreams needs global architects. Unless South Africa joins the global architects of the information society, the quality of life of its citizens will remain poor. This then makes privatisation a necessity as it brings huge revenue to state coffers in order to deliver much-needed services. This article also argues that the success of the implementation of South Africa's ICT policies relies mainly on the stability and viability of the sector regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).

The positioning of folklore studies in the new millennium

Folklore has always been and is still studied at secondary and tertiary school levels in a shallow manner. This paper seeks to open a debate on this issue and also discusses how and why the study of folklore must be revisited for the simple reason that at the present moment the approach that is in use, especially at the secondary school level and some tertiary institutions, leaves much to be desired. At times one is not even sure what folklore really means, and whether one is doing folklore any justice by limiting it to a mere study of the structure and contents of the condensed form of folktales, riddles, proverbs, to mention but a few. This type of approach is gradually making the study of folklore more and more complex. It is even worsened by the current thinking in governmental circles, whose focus seems to be on the production of students for a technological future only. Some other aspects like history, music and religion, are often overlooked, and even those that are included in the syllabus, most students find it difficult to relate to them (which is often form and content) to their everyday situations. Some of the same students who are studying folklore and philosophy cannot even understand that proverbs actually constitute African philosophy. The paper advocates a holistic approach towards the study of folklore, an approach that will definitely contribute towards the realization of the global dream of the African Renaissance.

Families, Children, and the Quest for a Global Ethic

Families and the problems of the world globalization and its discontents families and values the global in the local global dreams and global nighmares.

Seeking New Paradigms for Economic Development: A Review Essay of Barnet and Cavanagh's Global Dreams, Brecher and Costello's Global Village or Global Pillage, Mishel and Bernstein's the State of Working America, 1994-95, and Rifkin's the End of Work

The unraveling of traditional economic relationships-growth and income, productivity and wages, exports and employment-suggests to the author the need for a new economic development paradigm. The books reviewed in this essay contribute to this need by helping us understand the workings of the economy on a global basis and by tracing the effects of globalization on working people. By developing points of divergence and convergence among the authors, the author explores a number of themes including the nature of and role played by technology, the nature and effect of competition in a global economy, the effects of capital mobility and new global institutions, and the viability of citizen economic and environmental justice movements.

The Rhetoric of Globalization: What's in a Wor(l)d?

In their introduction to Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh attempt to discern the meaning of that over-used buzzword, globalization. 'We are all participants in one way or another in an unprecedented political and economic happening, but we cannot make sense of it. We know that we are supposed to think globally, but it is hard to wrap the mind even around a city block, much less a planet. No wonder we are at the mercy of buzzwords and sound bites. Globalization is the most fashionable word of the 1990s, so portentous and wonderfully patient as to puzzle Alice in Wonderland and thrill the Red Queen because it means precisely whatever the user says it means.'1 Barnet and Cavanagh, of course, are not wrong. Over the past decade and a half, students of international relations have been trying to come to grips with the myriad international economic and political changes which appear to characterize globalization, finding that there are perhaps as many meanings as there are analysts. Wading into the field, therefore, is an inherently risky proposition made riskier still by the attempt to draw conclusions about globalization as a political and social phenomenon rather than as merely a series of economic processes. As Francois Chesnais has argued, however, globalization is not a neutral concept; it has been used by its apol-

Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order

Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order

Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order

From Richard J. Barnet, coauthor of the groundbreaking bestseller Global Reach, and John Cavanagh comes an authoritative portrait of global corporations as they have evolved over the last twenty years - replacing national power; controlling the flow of money, goods, and information across the world; and dominating the fate of the world's economy and people. On the threshold of a new century, the world is shrinking fast, but it is not coming together. Global Dreams explores the many different ways in which the global economy shapes our lives, changing politics, work, and families in the United States and throughout the world, including: How the integrated global production system is creating a job crisis that affects every American; how a few corporations, thanks to their control of earth-spanning technologies, control a global commercial culture that can penetrate any village or neighborhood; how the clash of global commercial culture and traditional societies is unleashing fundamentalist backlash and political conflict; how great corporations have become less and less accountable to public authorities everywhere, and what this means for the environment job opportunities, and our economic future; how globalization, the business buzzword of the decade, is creating not a global village but a divided planet in the grip of global gridlock. With major profiles of five of these corporations based on hundreds of interviews on four continents, Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh reveal how a few hundred companies with worldwide connections dominate the four intersecting webs of global commercial activity that make up the new world economy. In the Global Cultural Bazaar the focus is on Sonyand Bertelsmann as they compete with Philips, Time Warner, Matsushita, Disney, and the other giants in the global market for education and entertainment. In the Global Shopping Mall, the frontrunner is Philip Morris against RJR Nabisco, Nestle, Sara Lee, and H. J. Heinz in the batt

Point of Reference

GEO-SONIC (1988) is an artwork for computer that explores sound, language and geographics. It is a collage of sounds, speech and calligraphy from around the world that leads the participant in associative global dreams and journeys. Sounds sampled by the artists are digitized and played back, juxtaposed with on-screen visual imagery (by use of a track-ball activated cursor). Visual elements include calligraphy from written language around the world and digitized historical and contemporary maps. GEO-SONIC equates geographic place with sound, language and symbols, and explores the relationship of sounds and visual symbols with people. It includes Aeolian pigeons from Bali (flutes attached to birds), the Brooklyn Bridge (before it was paved over), donkey caravans from Nepal, New York City fire sirens, Minnesota prairie tornado sirens, Thailand tribeswomen calling pigs, Indonesian frogs and Venice church bells.