This semester is going to be quite interesting.  In addition to the classes I am taking, I am teaching a course called Gender and Ethnicity and the Rhetoric of Science and Technology.  I have taught gender studies courses in the past at the University of Utah, but never from the standpoint/perspective of science and technology.  Today in class, I had my students evaluate the NY Times piece which summarized this week’s hearings by the Oversight/Government Reform committee on governmental interference during the Bush administration into climate science.  I asked my students to examine whether or not this represents an instance of science being shaped by policy and political agendas.  It was a lively discussion.  One that makes teaching “worth it.”

In addition, I am taking an incredibly amazing class on feminist theory and methods by a scholar who I know will “change” my life.  This particular professor has done extensive work on transnational feminisms, the politics of positionality, collaborative scholarship, and identity politics.  Her latest book is co-authored with an Indian women’s collective; it is called Playing with Fire.

In one of the assigned readings for the week dealing with globalization, the authors Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan look at the issues inherent in the global-local binary (meaning when the global Euro-North-American-centric world meets developing worlds).  In other words, how does this binary operate within the context that condemns globalization as “cultural homogenization” of others by the West?  One interesting quote from this essay:

For many critics in the United states…the global-local binary opposition seems to make perfect sense because it corresponds to “reality”; that is, the relationship between “federal” and “local” governments in the United States.  Yet for people in many other parts of the world such a division makes no sense at all.  What is lost in an uncritical acceptance of this binary division is precisely the fact that the parameters of the local and global are often indefinable or indistinct—they are permeable constructs.  How one separates the local from the global is difficult to decide when each thoroughly infiltrates the other. …Both center-periphery and global-local share a point of view that has been characterized as ethnocentric … [they] result in an overemphasis on local relations with global power brokers that ignores the complex class divisions and tensions on the local level.

I don’t have an answer to this; I just wanted to put it out there so I’m not the only one among 16 other people in my graduate seminar thinking about issues of globalization, etc.