Abstract
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Seeing the World by Mitchell L Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami is an empirical investigation of US university area studies programs – particularly those focused on the Middle East. It originated to confront three challenges faced by Middle East Studies: the rise of the globalization paradigm, the weak representation of social scientists, and heightened demands for accountability following 9/11 (this third agenda is not much pursued in the book). Along the way, the authors glean more general insights about the organization and production of academic knowledge. The primary data for the study come from interviews with officials at eight major US research universities: area studies center directors and associate directors; chairs of economics, political science, and sociology departments; and deans or vice-provosts of international and global affairs.
Chapter 1 sets the stage by outlining three frameworks for seeing the world: in terms of civilizations (predominant through the end of World War II), in terms of nation-states (predominant through the end of the Cold War), and in terms of globalization (predominant to the present). Chapter 2 explains that area studies originated at the outset of the Cold War – during the high nation-state period – when US philanthropies and the US state sought to build expertise in regions deemed important to national security interests. They arose with a mandate to develop deep contextual knowledge of regions, despite the tidal wave of generalizing modernization theory enveloping the social sciences. Area studies helped institutionalize a new organizational form within the university – the multidisciplinary research center, situated at the interface between the university and the US state. Centers and institutes (or ‘not-departments’ in the lingo of the book) form an increasingly thick ring around the university’s departmental core, as argued in Chapter 3. They do not control faculty lines, but their topicality and flexibility help the university assert relevance to (and justify funding from) wider society, and they insulate the academic core from the demands of external patrons. Chapter 4 explores how area studies center and institute leverage limited resources to pursue their goal of scholarly engagement with real-world problems in particular places. The master routine is co-sponsorship, requiring extensive collaboration and teamwork. Chapter 5 considers the underrepresentation of social scientists relative to historians and humanists in area studies, stressing the tension between the primacy of abstract theoretical – and often quantitative – knowledge in the social sciences and the aspiration to contextualized place-based understandings that defines area studies. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the impact of globalization on US research universities, arguing that this new framework for seeing the world shifts attention (and funding) away from particularistic area studies and perhaps also from the disciplinary social sciences, instead prioritizing general topical inquiries into health, the environment, human rights, and so on and facilitating organizational innovations such as satellite campuses abroad. Throughout the book, the main arguments are clearly articulated and persuasive, and they are well supported by the interview data.
Seeing the World has several outstanding virtues, which set it apart from many other studies in higher education. Most obviously, perhaps, the project is focused on the organization and contents of the university curriculum, especially as they evolve over time and relate to the broader social context. Despite some recent forays into the field, the sociology of the curriculum continues to be a sparsely populated domain, such that both the substantive developments described here (the mid-century rise of area studies in the form of centers, their awkward relationship with the disciplinary social sciences, and the challenges posed to them by globalization) and also the theoretical assumptions underlying their explanation (above all that the curriculum is shaped by external as much as by internal factors) represent important and original contributions.
Furthermore, the book offers substantive insights into the university curriculum. Contrary to some accounts, knowledge production is not monopolized by departments but rather increasingly also occurs within not-departments – i.e., the centers and institutes that provide organizational hubs for mainstreaming academic knowledge into everyday life (note that there are other not-departments in the university, too, including museums, laboratories, collections, performance spaces, and so on). Area studies are just the tip of the iceberg. Contemporary not-departments address an almost infinite range of issues. At some bigger US research institutions, centers and institutes number in the hundreds, and their topical variety is breathtaking. The rise of not-departments represents the mushrooming of the university’s ‘relevance’ over recent decades.
Of course, the achievement of relevance, and the integration of the university and the state, is not seamless. In August of 2019, the US Department of Education sent a letter demanding that the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies revise its activities to either comply with Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965 – which ‘authorizes grants to protect the security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States by teaching American students the foreign languages and cultural competencies required to develop a pool of experts to meet our national needs’ – or lose taxpayer funds (the letter is published in the Federal Register). In its complaint, the department registers particular concerns over the misalignment of Title VI mandates and center projects, griping, for example, about a conference on love and desire in modern Iran; papers on performance, gender-bending, and subversion in the Islamic Mystical Tradition; and an imbalance between positive portrayals of Islam and ‘an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.’ The US clearly is not a silent patron of academic knowledge; it is more than willing to assert its authority to manage, or even micromanage, the patron–client relationship generally and center activities specifically.
Naturally as is true of any good book, Seeing the World raises almost as many questions as it answers. Among others, the following linger in my mind:
The question of 9/11 looms over the book, not least because it is raised in the first chapter and presented as one of the book’s original impetuses. If the Cold War initiated the rise of Middle East area studies, did 9/11 initiate the fall? One might think of 9/11 generally as the beginning of the end for seeing the world in terms of globalization. Certainly, the optimism that attached to the upwelling of globalization in the 1990s got harder to maintain after 9/11, and harder still after the Great Recession around 2009.
Do recent resurgences of nationalism and populism in the US and around the world suggest the onset of a new way of seeing the world – beyond globalization – or do they indicate a reversion to the nation-state paradigm? The question seems important for all sorts of social and political reasons and also in its potential implications for area studies.
If area studies (along with criminology, particle accelerators, and so on) provide interface structures between the university and the state – serving as bridges between the rationalized knowledge of the university and the rationalized interests of the state – then how do they differ from the multitude of new centers and institutes that exploded during the globalization period that provide interface structures between the university and the market? Perhaps only the patrons are different. Or perhaps the distinction is artificial, with many centers and institutes feeding on both public and private sources.
The topic here is seeing the world, but how does the world see area studies? Do they diffuse outside of the US? The question seems especially relevant in the comparison and contrast with disciplinary structures, which are strikingly uniform around the world. If we are using area studies to see the world, are universities in other countries using area studies to see us?
The interview data used in the book are engaging and revealing, and they serve their purposes extremely well. I wonder, nevertheless, how organization-level data would augment or alter the story. For example, are there different founding waves for different areas? Some anecdotal evidence suggests that Far East Studies preceded Middle East Studies, which in turn preceded African Studies? Does that sequence (and others) hold true generally, and if so what does it tell us about regional inquiries in the university?
Finally, is the center phenomenon – i.e., the rise of centers and institutes as structures parallel (if subordinate) to departments for the production of knowledge – widely dispersed among the population of US colleges and universities, and more broadly throughout the world? Or is it relegated to the elite?
Needless to say, all these questions serve as spurs to future and follow-up research. And if there is any hallmark of an excellent project, it is that it catalyzes further studies.