1.3: How Global Studies Thinks

I just can't be contained

Global problems have an annoying habit of refusing to stay inside academic departments. Climate change is not only an environmental problem. It is also an economic problem, a political problem, a health problem, a technological problem, a migration problem, and a justice problem. Food insecurity is not simply the result of whether enough food exists. It also involves prices, land ownership, transportation systems, climate, conflict, household income, gender, public policy, labor, history, and political power, all of which interact in ways that can turn a local shortage into a regional crisis or a global price shock. Migration is not only about borders. It is also about jobs, families, war, identity, climate, colonial histories, inequality, culture, law, and the very uneven ability of people to move. This is why Global Studies is interdisciplinary. It borrows ideas, methods, and questions from many fields in order to understand problems that refuse to fit neatly into one of them. Scholars use several related terms to describe different degrees of collaboration across academic fields. Choi and Pak (2006), whose framework has been applied well beyond health research, distinguish among multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches.

Multidisciplinary: Put Several Perspectives at the Table

A multidisciplinary approach brings different academic perspectives to the same problem.

Imagine studying a burrito.

A historian might ask how ingredients such as maize, rice, beans, beef, spices, or dairy arrived in the regions where they are now eaten. An economist might investigate food prices, agricultural production, restaurant labor, wages, transportation, or supply chains. An anthropologist might ask what the meal means culturally and how cuisine changes through migration. An environmental scientist might examine water use, fertilizer, cattle production, packaging, or greenhouse-gas emissions. A political scientist might investigate agricultural subsidies, immigration law, food safety rules, labor regulations, or trade agreements. Each discipline notices something different, and because each begins from its own concepts, assumptions, and methods, several useful explanations may emerge from the same object. A multidisciplinary approach allows those perspectives to sit beside one another.

Interdisciplinary: Study the Relationships Between the Perspectives

An interdisciplinary approach goes further. Instead of simply collecting perspectives, it asks how they interact. How does immigration policy affect agricultural labor? How does climate change affect crop prices? How have colonial histories shaped land ownership? How do agricultural subsidies influence which foods become inexpensive? How does migration transform cuisine? How does consumer demand affect environmental practices? The object has not changed. The analysis has deepened. Interdisciplinary thinking begins when we stop treating economic, political, cultural, historical, and environmental explanations as separate stories and begin asking how one story reshapes another.

Transdisciplinary: Build New Ways of Understanding the Problem

A transdisciplinary approach moves across or beyond conventional academic boundaries, especially when the problem being studied is too complex to be adequately understood through the assumptions or methods of existing disciplines alone. Sometimes a problem becomes important enough that scholars, practitioners, communities, and institutions develop new fields or frameworks specifically to understand it. Global health is one example. Climate justice is another. Food systems studies, sustainability studies, migration studies, and development studies similarly combine knowledge from many traditional disciplines. In some cases, people outside universities also become essential knowledge producers. Farmers, community organizers, Indigenous knowledge holders, public-health workers, migrants, engineers, artists, or local governments may understand aspects of a problem that cannot be discovered from academic research alone, particularly when lived experience, local ecological knowledge, or community memory reveals relationships that formal data does not capture. That matters because knowledge itself has a geography. Not every useful answer comes from the same kind of institution.

Global Studies Is Not Intellectual Pokémon

The point is not to “catch” as many disciplines as possible. A complicated answer is not automatically a good answer. The goal is to identify which perspectives actually help us understand the problem and then examine how those perspectives connect, reinforce one another, contradict one another, or expose something another field has overlooked. Sometimes economics will explain a great deal. Sometimes history changes everything. Sometimes a cultural practice makes no sense until we understand religion, identity, or colonialism. Sometimes environmental change becomes the missing piece. The Global Studies task is to decide what we need to see.

Intersectionality: Connections Exist Inside People Too

Global systems do not affect everyone within a category in the same way. “The experience of migrants” is not one experience. Neither is “the experience of women,” “the experience of workers,” “the Global South,” or “young people.” Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality in her analysis of the ways antidiscrimination law could fail to account for experiences shaped simultaneously by race and gender (Crenshaw, 1989). The framework has since become influential across numerous fields for examining how systems of power and inequality interact. A person's experiences may be shaped simultaneously by race, class, gender, nationality, language, legal status, disability, religion, sexuality, geography, or other dimensions of social position. Those factors do not simply stack on top of one another like separate layers. They interact.

Consider refugees. People displaced by war may share the legal condition of seeking safety outside their country, but their experiences can differ dramatically depending on nationality, ethnicity, gender, wealth, language, disability, age, religion, family status, and the policies of the country where they seek refuge. Two people may flee the same conflict and encounter radically different opportunities, restrictions, risks, or forms of public sympathy once they cross a border.

Applying an Intersectional Perspective 

Key Questions of Intersectionality

Intersectionality gives Global Studies one of its most important questions:

• Which people are we actually talking about?
• What disappears when we speak too generally?

Try it!

One Problem, Many Questions

Choose one topic:

• TikTok.
• Chocolate.
• Climate migration.
• Sneakers.
• COVID-19.
• Bottled water.

Write one historical question about it. Then one economic question. One political question. One cultural question. One social question. One environmental question. (You should have 6 questions in total).

Now identify the two questions that seem most connected. That connection is where interdisciplinary thinking begins.