The Global Turn in the Study of Art and Architecture

Session will present: On location

Academia’s concern with global turn results from a changing world order that began in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War and a growing interdependence of the world’s economies brought about by multi-national agreements, such as NAFTA in 1994 and the Eurozone in 1999, that fostered the flow of goods, services, technology, information, and peoples across nation-state borders. A globalized world where geographic boundaries are crossed with ease has put into question the value of the nation-state as an analytical category and tool to interpret history. Notably, historian Sebastian Conrad makes us aware that the global turn addresses two “defects” of historical research. The first is the presupposition that the nation-state is the fundamental unit of research, and thus the filter for scholarly investigation and the writing of history. The second is the placement of Europe and European developments as the progenitors of a history. If global history is not nationalistic or Eurocentric, then what is it? As a practice of research, the global turn is a mode of critical reflection and problematization that offers a method to investigate the global connections of local objects. Open to any geographic location and period, this panel examines the global turn’s value for scholarly inquiry, for history writing, and knowledge production in the study of art and architecture via case studies, analysis of its methods, or propositions about its theoretical framework.

Keywords:
Topics: Global
Topics: Art History
Topics: Architecture/Architectural History
Topics: Methodologies
Topics: Theory

Chair:
John Lopez

Abstract Submissions Closed