Book Review: Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey (eds), Globalizing the Research Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 2009, 144 pp., £21.99 pbk)
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Bruno Charbonneau |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298110400011205 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
194 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1)
Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey (eds), Globalizing the Research Imagination (London and
New York: Routledge, 2009, 144 pp., £21.99 pbk).
The book Globalizing the Research Imagination is not the typical edited collection that
assembles various essays around a common theme or argumentation. Instead, it is a ser-
ies of six individual interviews with leading intellectuals who explore what it might
mean to ‘globalise the research imagination’. The interviews are preceded by a substan-
tive introduction that deploys the notion of the ‘imagination’ as a way to discuss research
methodologies, techniques and approaches in the context of ‘globalisation’ and ‘global’
research activities.
The Editors’ introduction in Chapter One (pp. 1–39) is the most interesting and chal-
lenging part of the book. They assume a fully post-positivist stance from which they
explore how intellectuals can develop more ‘imaginative power’ than others, how it
might be possible to rouse or awake the imaginative power of individual researchers, and
how the phenomena associated with ‘globalisation’ have transformed the practices and
politics of knowledge. To do so, the Editors mobilise the notion of the ‘imagination’
through the work and ideas of the Greek-French intellectual Cornelius Castoriadis. The
objective is obviously normative: to inspire new ways to develop ‘defiant’ epistemo-
logical, ontological and methodological perspectives that might challenge the hegemony
of neoliberal globalisation and knowledge.
The focus on ‘imagination’ works fairly well to encourage the development of less
predictable research questions and answers. However, there is a growing tension where
the Editors also value and emphasise experiences of travel as a way to ‘globalise’ the
research imagination. While they acknowledge that the ‘travelling intellectual subject’
must not be romanticised, that travel does not necessarily provoke ‘fresh flights of
thought’, and that travel is not always necessary to develop a ‘defiant’ research imagina-
tion (pp. 10–14), it remains unclear how one is supposed to ‘globalise the research
imagination’ without travelling when all of the interviewees are presented as influential
and privileged scholars who have had many opportunities to travel. One is left to wonder
about the relationship between travel and ‘globalising the research imagination’, and
more importantly about what is so special about this ‘globalising’. What differentiates
this call for ‘globalising’ from calls to decolonise, to relocate or to move beyond the
hegemony of Eurocentric theories and methodologies? A formal conclusion to the book
might have gone a long way to discuss these questions.
To be fair, the Editors do not seek to tell us how we are supposed to globalise our
research, and each interviewee suggests his/her own way. Indeed, the following six chap-
ters explore ‘globalisation’, research, imagination and their interrelationships through
individual interviews with leading scholars of globalisation: namely, Arjun Appadurai,
Raewyn Connell, Doreen Massey, Aihwa Ong, Fazal Rizvi and Saskia Sassen. Each
chapter follows a similar structure that begins with the interviewee’s understanding of
globalisation, followed by explorations of the interviewee’s past and present research,
location within a particular field (or fields) of research, views of the relationship between
globalisation, research and travel experiences, and experiences of teaching and super-
vising international students. To me, the discussions over student–teacher relations were
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