Browsing by Subject "globalization"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Fashion Speaks: A Process Paper for WEARING JAPAN, an installation of fashion art
    (2014-12) Koster, Kelly
    Japan and the U.S. share a history of pulling in “outsider” ideas to reinvent their cultures. In the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century, Japan ushered in a market economy and American technology while the West developed an obsession with kimonos, woodblock prints, and anything "oriental." More recent cultural exports like anime, sushi, and kawaii (cute) fashion continue to shape American culture while America continues to influence Japan. Because both countries have powerful consumerist economies, their contemporary interactions produce vibrant cross-pollinations. I created an installation of fashion art to show what this looks like, and position globalized fashion as theatrical and wearable. As the world engages in international trade, and as cultural aesthetics are blended and reinterpreted, national and individual identities may shift. In an interconnected world, how do we fashion ourselves?
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    A Foreign Field No Longer: India, the IPL, and the Global Business of Cricket
    (Journal of Asian & African Studies, 2013) Agur, Colin
    In the past decade India has become the financing hub for cricket, a broadcaster in its own right, and an agenda-setter in the management of all forms of the game. What some commentators have called the ‘Indianization’ of cricket extends beyond business: it is a social, political, and cultural phenomenon. For five seasons, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has offered a glimpse of this phenomenon, prompting enthusiasm from young fans and those who stand to profit from the new league, and resistance from traditionalists. This paper discusses the material and symbolic roles the IPL has come to play in global cricket. It begins with an overview of the IPL’s history, discusses how the IPL is changing the global business of cricket, and explores how the IPL is challenging the traditional culture of the sport. The paper concludes with arguments about the IPL as a grand spectacle, and a cultural phenomenon that, despite its problems, might prove its critics wrong. Throughout, the paper treats the IPL as a useful case study not only in the business of sports, but also more widely in our theoretical and empirical studies of globalization.
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    Internationalizing the Advancement Agenda: A Multi-Case Study of Advancement Practices at Universities with Very High Research Activity
    (2014-05) Weiner, Bradley
    Institutions of higher education seek alternative revenue sources due to increasing educational costs and diminished public financing. One potential revenue stream includes philanthropic support from international alumni and donors. This multi-case study investigates the process by which two very high research activity universities, have adapted their institutional advancement strategies to engage international constituents. This study also investigates whether those processes differ by public or private institutional authority. By employing a conceptual framework based on the accumulation of Market Knowledge in for-profit firms, this study extends those concepts into the context of non-profit sphere by providing a foundation for understanding how the internationalization of the advancement agenda aligns with earlier literature on globalization, university internationalization, and institutional advancement. Market Knowledge is explored as three different knowledge domains defined as Business Knowledge, Institutional Knowledge, and Internationalization Knowledge. Each of these domains contributes meaningfully to total amount of Market Knowledge but Business Knowledge, which includes awareness of alumni names, contact information, and philanthropic history, emerged as the most important in the context of international advancement. Internationalization Knowledge, which includes the awareness of internal resources and capacity for this agenda emerged as the least important for moving toward further international commitments, but may be the most efficient in times of resource scarcity. This study also suggests that there are few differences between public and private universities with regard to the actual mechanics of building international relationships, but that public university constituents may find the agenda less defensible, even in times of waning public financing. These findings provide theoretical context for understanding an important component of the campus internationalization strategy that has been previously hidden and underexplored. Furthermore, it provides guidance to both scholars and practitioners on ways in which international partners can be engaged as lifelong supporters and prospective donors to institutions that increasingly rely on external revenue.
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    An investigation of international mindedness at two IB World Schools
    (2021-01) Condon, David
    The purpose of this study was to investigate how international mindedness is conceptualized and enacted at two International Baccalaureate World Schools, one in Hawaii and one in Japan. This study begins with the assumption that our educational systems, particularly those in preK-12 international schools, must prepare students to understand and appreciate different cultural perspectives, to assume a responsibility for the health of the planet, and to be able to interact and collaborate with people from diverse cultures in order to function as internationally minded responsible global citizens. Though international mindedness is a core concept in IB philosophy and a central aim of international education, its meaning remains complex, ambiguous and elusive. Equally unclear is how international mindedness manifests in different preK-12 school settings, i.e. what schools do that promote or hinder its development in students. By better understanding what is meant by international mindedness and identifying promising practices related to its promotion, schools may be better positioned to help develop this construct within their students and their educational programs.This qualitative study takes a social constructivist, interpretive approach to investigate the range of meanings of the term international mindedness and how it is enacted according to the perspectives of those experiencing them. Drawing on an IB-sponsored study from the University of Bath (Hacking et al., 2016), data from focus group interviews, lesson observations, school tours, and document and artifact analysis were collected. These data were then analyzed using a comparative case study approach informed by Bartlett and Vavrus’s (2017) process-oriented approach. Two broad categories of inquiry were pursued: the conceptualization of international mindedness and the enactment of international mindedness. Horizontal comparisons between stakeholders at each school were made, as well as between the two schools. Vertical comparisons of stakeholder conceptualizations with official IB definitions were also made. There are two major implications of this study. First, as stakeholder conceptualizations of international mindedness were largely similar, rather than attempting to establish precise meanings, preK-12 schools interested in developing international mindedness in their students should engage in community discussions of how the term manifests in their particular settings. Second, this study shows that the significant differences between the two schools came from their enactment of IM. The development of international mindedness is largely seen to result from direct experience with people and cultures different from one’s own. Interested schools should therefore carefully consider the kinds of experiences they are able to provide their students to develop their international mindedness.
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    Near Future Cities in Film: The Dystopic Erosion of Globalization's Rising Tides
    (2012-09-14) McGarry, Robert William IV
    Film, as a popular culture artifact, serves both as a medium for social reflection and a mechanism for provoking and predicting future changes in our increasingly interconnected global culture. In terms of cities and their social, political, and physical characteristics, cities in film serve as a means of commentary, expression, and a vehicle of experimentation with regard to possible future developments. This research project explores the topic of how near future First-World cities are projected in film with an emphasis on the consequences of globalization for future urban populations. By employing social entropy theory, the dystopian imagery and narratives of selected films are used to explain and contextualize the potential erosion of boundaries in near future cities brought about under the pressures of globalization.
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    Playing for the future: Sport and the production of healthy bodies in policy and practice
    (2014-05) Kwauk, Christina
    At the core of this dissertation is a critical examination of the disjuncture between the policy and practice of sport for development. Drawing on a vertical case study of gender, sport, and education in the Pacific Island nation of Samoa, the study illuminates how a healthy islands through sport (HITS) policy world centered around using sport to create healthier bodies for a thriving nation is discursively created in inter/national policy but effectively separate and detached from the gendered logics guiding already existing translocal practices of sport for development. This practice, as described to me by my interlocutors, observed through twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, and quantitatively surveyed, includes ideas about development centered around the translocal 'aiga (family) rather than the territorial boundaries of the nation, tautua (service) rather than health behavior change, and alofa (love) rather than one's body size. Locally imagined sport for development also intricately ties together notions of transnational mobility and globalization with shifting practices of masculinity and muscularity, raises important questions about the purpose and kind of education needed for development, and highlights a local field of action that ironically coexists with a prescribed policy world focused on using sport to recalibrate unruly bodies into virtuous bio-citizens. Contrasting etic and emic constructions of sport in development, this dissertation makes two arguments. First, it highlights how many Samoans view sport as a roundtrip ticket off island toward economic opportunity and the imagined good life. In this case, it is not necessarily the quest to produce a healthy body that attracts Samoan youth, especially men, to sport but rather its potential to move bodies into more central locations within a global economy of remittances that makes sport popular. Second, this study demonstrates how inter/national development policy does not drive local practice. Instead, development actors sustain policy through a strategic process of social interpretation and translation that serves to align practice with policy at the surface while concealing deeper disjunctures of practice below. By juxtaposing what sport for development policy in Samoa is intended to achieve with how it is actually practiced, imagined, and socially managed, this dissertation foregrounds a dialectic of development imaginations that multiply shape the ways "playing for the future" has been incorporated into the development imaginations of Samoan youth, educators, community leaders, and government officials.
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    Tobacco, Western Education, and the Japanese Army: Globalization in a Northern County in China, 1900-1950
    (2022-10) Gao, Ruchen
    My dissertation explores the relationships between state, local elites, and foreign powers in a northern county Xuchang of Henan Province during the early twentieth century. I selected three case studies and examine each case in each of my chapters. The first chapter focuses on the arrival of the British American Tobacco Company in Xuchang and its efforts to promoting a new cash crop—the bright leaf tobacco. The boom of husbanding the bright leaf tobacco in Xuchang and its nearby counties led to a series of social transformations of Xuchang, such as the urban landscape of the Xuchang county seat being remapped, the formation of a new rich group: owners of tobacco collecting agencies. With a growing body of Xuchang residents who could afford western-style education, some cultural elites in Xuchang were able to establish and maintain private western-style middle schools and high schools from the 1930s to 1940s, which I explore in my second chapter. These cultural elites overcame various hurdles, such as banditry, warfare, and lack of adequate government funding to develop these schools. As they facilitated the spread of western style education in Xuchang, these cultural elites also reinforced their social and cultural capital. The third chapter explores why Xuchang was devastated more than other counties in Henan during the 1942 famine. As the Chinese Nationalist government prioritized military survival and marginalized the livelihoods of Henan people, the social-political power of the Xuchang elites was weakened. They were unable to reduce the government grain procurement or effectively relieve the famine, could only sue the corrupt Xuchang officials whose embezzlement exacerbated the famine fatalities.
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    Updating globalization: An integrative review of technical and professional communication scholarship and geosemiotic analysis of a global u-eco-city
    (2016-05) Madson, Michael
    Few studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) have explored globalization with directness and depth—surprising, since globalization is reported to impact TPC research, teaching, and ethics. Starke-Meyerring’s (2005) global literacies model has been a rare exception. Yet, global literacies, though impressive for its time, has shown two weaknesses, selective review methods and a lack of empirical support. This dissertation therefore addresses those two weaknesses, which are endemic in TPC writ large, through a two-part project. Part I synthesizes integrative review with grounded theory, analyzing how TPC has instantiated globalization in the field’s academic journals. The analysis generates a conceptual framework to guide further empirical inquiry. Actuating the conceptual framework, Part II describes a geosemiotic analysis of a global city’s symbolic characterization. Taken together, the dissertation’s two parts update global literacies, suggesting implications for TPC research, teaching, and ethics in the urban twenty-first century.
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    What's Happening with Internationalization at Community Colleges? : Community College Presidents' Perceptions of Internationalization Actions, the Desirability and Feasibility of Internationalization Actions, and the Importance of Internationalization
    (2017-05) Bissonette, Bonita
    Internationalization of higher education is critical for United States’ citizens to be globally competent and economically competitive. With nearly 50 percent of U.S. higher education students currently enrolled at community colleges, the topic of internationalization actions at community colleges is an important one. This study examines internationalization actions taken at U.S. public community colleges, the college presidents’ perceptions of actions not yet taken as desirable or feasible, and presidents’ assessments of the importance of internationalization. Responses to a web-based survey sent to 887 presidents of public community colleges in February 2016 reveal certain personal and institutional characteristics that are significantly related to internationalization actions at community colleges. These include years as a president at any institution, number of foreign languages spoken, and number of professional international trips taken, as well as the geographic setting of the institution. These findings will be useful for understanding opportunities for and challenges to internationalization at community colleges.