Instructions for an essay enquiry into how global market forces shape your own local life
The aim of this research assignment is to investigate how your own personal life is shaped by global market forces and all the social relations that they structure. This calls for attention to the many ways macro-economic reforms such as austerity, privatization, trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and the rollback of the welfare state may have enforced and expanded norms of market rule or ‘neoliberal governance’ in your community. But it also requires analysis of how these macro-reforms come together with the more micro-management of everyday life through individualized self-making practices, including the marketized practices of self-investment, self-quantification, and self-responsibilization that theorists of biopolitics refer to as ‘neoliberal governmentality’. Rather than study the coming together of neoliberal governance and governmentality in the abstract language of social theory, though, the goal of this exercise is to examine how they come together in context-contingent ways in the world at large through empirical research. And the focus of this research work will be your own self and your own everyday life. To make the challenges of this sustained self-study more manageable we will break down the research into a series of sub-components that help focalize key areas of social life in which it is possible to track global market forces shaping local life. The main subcomponent areas of global-personal interconnection to be studied in this way are discourse, commodities, labor, money, law, governance, space, and health. For each of these sub-areas you will need to make sure each week that you:
i) demonstrate your theoretical understanding of the global-to-personal ties pertaining to
the sub-area by drawing on the week’s readings (for example, describe how theories
about money and global financialization help explain the impact of debt on the lives of
individuals);
ii) depict the main ways in which global market forces shape how your own community
experiences this sub-area of social life (for example, what have been the main impacts of
the 2008-9 financial crisis and associated foreclosures or credit access or unemployment
issues in your community); and,
iii) detail how your own life is directly shaped by the forces and choices structured by
global-to-personal ties in this sub-area (for example, how is your own life shaped by debt
– student debt, or credit card debt, car loan debt or mortgage debt – and all the associated
systems of discipline such as FICO scores).
Each of these writing demands each week is worth 10 points, adding up to a total of 30 points for each week’s worth of writing. My expectation is that you will write between 1 and 2 pages (250 – 500 words) each week, thereby putting together a roughly 10-15 page paper by the end of the quarter. If you over-shoot or under-shoot in terms of page length, that’s fine. I am much more interested to see how you use the ideas I am introducing to make sense of your life. It’s up to you how many paragraphs you use each week and how you organize them to address the 3 writing demands. You might write one paragraph demonstrating your theoretical understanding of the particular aspect of globalization that is the focus each week, another depicting the associated market forces you see at work in your community, and a third detailing the impact on your own life. But you should also feel free to experiment with other organizational formats if you prefer. Just as long as you address each of the 3 demands it will help you make the links from the theories in the readings about global market forces through the community scale to the personal level, and this in turn will provide the basis of the 30 points for each week’s work on the essay.
In the module addressing ‘Space’ the assignment is instead to create an online interactive
map of your local area showing the ways in which global ties are marked on the local
landscape. This exercise, which is described in detail in the week 8 module pages, is also worth 30 points.
In addition to the paragraphs of your paper addressing the 8 thematic areas, you must also include an introduction (15 points) and a conclusion (15 points) that make clear how your understanding of the global forces shaping your personal life has developed.
The formal grading of the essay and all the subcomponents will not happen until the end of the quarter. At this point you will additionally be awarded points out of 30 for the overall way in which you integrate the subcomponents into a single seamless essay, including the intelligent use of theoretical ideas and arguments from the course readings (all of which must be cited properly in the APA style). Grading all the components and their integration at the end means that you will be able to continue to revise all your writing as you go along, thereby benefiting from the 2 peer reviews of your evolving drafts in weeks 4 and 9 respectively. For these reasons, it is important to keep up each week with the reading, research and writing, always being sure to address the 3 demands and articulating your main points clearly with quality writing.
Lesson Prompts
Lesson 1: Introduction
Writing prompt for introductory paragraph
Using the model of the run-on sentence at the start of the preface to Introducing Globalization, write a paragraph about how globalization has shaped your own pathway into this course and course assignment. Along the way, try to capture the concerns about globalization you bring personally to the course and your research.
Research prompt
Identify one artifact from your childhood that shaped your understanding of global to local ties. It could be a book, a map, a globe, a photo, or a toy of some kind; or it may have been a particular educational or familial experience such as going to school abroad at a military base or migrating internationally with your family to escape poverty and violence; or it could just be something to do with TV, music, computer games or social media ties. Whatever the example you identify, be sure to include a photograph or image of an associated artifact in your opening paragraph (and label it Figure 1).
Lesson 2: Discourse
Writing prompt
Reflecting on your own life and community, how much do you think your views have been influenced by dominant discourses about Globalization and how much by dissident discourses; or in de Sousa Santos’s terms do you think you are more predisposed to hegemonic or counter-hegemonic views of Globalization?
Research prompt
To get a better sense of the differences between dominant and dissident discourses, use the library research tool for 323 that allows you to compare and contrast articles and reports published by institutions associated respectively with hegemonic and counterhegemonic perspectives on Globalization.
Lesson 3: Commodities
Writing prompt
If you start to look at yourself as a brand – and as a brand defined in part by all the other brands you consume as well as by how you market yourself to others – to what extent do you risk the forms of ‘corruption’ that Michael Sandel suggests are a problem with global commodification?
Research Prompt
Tom Peters of Fast Company urges individuals to self-commodify and market themselves as a brand. “Starting today,” he says. “You are a brand. You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge. Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.” So follow this advice and write down your 15-words-or-less self-branding, and then take up Michael Sandel’s questions about corruption: to what extent might the extension of commodification to yourself be corrupting? Be sure to include BOTH your 15 words and your Sandel-inspired reflections in the paragraphs you write this week.
Lesson 4: Labor
Peer review of the draft essay after 4 weeks of writing.
Writing prompt
If you think of your own labor in relation to the contingent and vulnerable positions of the global ‘precariat’ presented by Guy Standing, do you see some of the same insecurities and diminished benefits, and do you see any hope in redistribution relating to occupational citizenship (or, perhaps, some other way of linking precarity to solidarity)?
Research prompt
Choose and read one personally relevant survey from the UW career services website, and reflect on how much you yourself have seen the benefits of completing your own BA degree in terms of gaining more security and less precarity in the labor market.
Lesson 5: Money
Writing prompt
Andrew Ross describes a student and her family caught-up in the interdependencies of debt. “On one of my campus visits,” he says, “a student told me how her father had been laid off, and the family had fallen behind in its mortgage payments. A co-signer of her loans, for which the family home was collateral, her father had also been using home equity loans to pay some of her college bills. That source of credit was now closed off, and the family’s balance sheets were deep in negative territory. At the same time, her parents were landed with some of her grandmother’s hospital bills. To bring relief to a household that had been hit by what she called ‘a perfect storm of debt,’ she had considered dropping out. Instead, she had turned to her two credit cards as an alternate source for funding her degree, opening up yet an- other door for creditors to come knocking. Fading fast were the college dreams of her younger sister. Newly graduated from high school, she was about to join her mother on payroll at their local Wal Mart supercenter to help tide over the family.” Does this sounds familiar to you? And what connections can you make personally between debt and the rising costs of housing, education and health services?
Research prompt
Review recent data on student debt from the New York Fed and look up how the average debt of students in your own age group rose from 2005 to 2013, watch Brave New Films or John Oliver on student debt, check out a news story about student debt politics online, read David Graeber on the violent history of debt, and then research levels of student debt in your state using The Project on Student Debt interactive mapping tool.
Lesson 6: Law
Writing prompt
Tayyab Mahmud argues that law serves to ‘suture’ or sew together debt and discipline in ways that profoundly influence how people behave. He is interested in how new laws have both deregulated finance and re-regulated debtors’ lives. Whether you label these laws neoliberal or not, how has the resulting mix of deregulation and re-regulation shaped your own personal life?
Research prompt
Make a commitment to yourself to look-up, download or request from the library at least one article or book that interests you amongst all those cited in the 335 footnotes of Tayyab Mahmud’s article. To find articles and books from the footnotes, use the UW Libraries article lookup (link: http://guides.lib.washington.edu/databases) or Google scholar to find the full text of the articles, and use the 323 Libraries search page to find materials at UW.
Lesson 7: Governance
Writing prompt
“I treat responsibilization as a call for action… It is an ‘enabling praxis’ and a technique of government that set into action a reflexive subjectivity. … Neo-liberalism, then, actively exports the logic of the market to other social domains, extending a model of economic conduct beyond the economy itself.” Do you see such responsibilization guiding your own life? In other words, whether or not you agree with Ronen Shamir’s criticisms of market morality, do you see yourself being repeatedly enlisted into using market models of accountability and investment in conducting your daily routines, social relations and life planning. Think especially about how your life is governed by the global market relations that structure things such as insurance policies, your mortgage or student loan or auto loan contracts, and your pension plans and job benefits or the lack thereof.
Research prompt
Identify one area of your social life that has not become subject to market forces and consumer calculations of worth and responsibility.
Lesson 8: Space
Mapping prompt
In place of writing this week see the separate ‘Globalization and Me’ mapping guide.
Research prompt
Identify 5 sites where your own community’s landscape is landmarked by buildings, shops, offices, inequalities, boundaries or movements (including protest movements as well as migrant movements) that reflect the imprint of global connections, market forces and associated struggles over public and private space. As discussed in Chapter 8 of Introducing Globalization, spaces landmarked like this can include malls, arenas, and gentrified downtowns, as well as port facilities, labor centers and export processing zones. Reflect in turn on how your own movement through this landscape is guided or represented through mobile mapping and app technologies that are remaking space and selfhood simultaneously in the age of the ‘selfiecity’.
Lesson 9: Health
Peer review of the draft essay after 9 weeks of writing. Before submitting be sure to make
any changes in your introductory paragraph based on where your essay has ended up going.
Writing prompt
Deborah Lupton writes that: “The often intensely individualistic focus of quantifying the self is worthy of note. When notions of health, wellbeing, and productivity are produced via data drawn from self-monitoring, the social determinants of these attributes are hidden. Illness, emotional distress, lack of happiness, or lack of ‘productivity’ in the workplace become represented primarily as failures of individual self-control or efficiency, and therefore as requiring greater or more effective efforts, including perhaps increased intensity of self-tracking regimens, to produce a ‘better self’.” Thinking about how your own health practices may increasingly involve personal body-counts – of your weight, or calories, or blood sugar, or cholesterol or any number of other biological metrics – do you think there are social determinants of your health that
the numbers tend to obscure?
Lesson 10: Conclusion
Writing prompt
Reflecting on all the ways in which this course provides a critical perspective on the global market forces shaping your world, and thinking about the promises of online education outlined alongside the problems in the introductory lecture, write a conclusion that addresses whether your own learning online confirms or complicates Paul Chau’s account of the commodification problems associated with online higher education?
Final Essay Polish and Submission
Writing prompt
Read through your whole essay and revise with a view to linking up all the sections and articulating an overall argument about how global market forces have shaped your own local life.
Research Prompt
Review how diverse online news and magazine articles on neoliberal globalization offer alternatives (or not) to the challenges and concerns that you have identified as an online student sharing your assessment of neoliberalization in your own community and everyday life.
Here are some possible examples:
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The University in the Twenty-first Century: Toward a Democratic and
Emancipatory University Reform” (2010).
David Graeber, “Savage capitalism is back – and it will not tame itself”. The Guardian. (May 30, 2014).
Naomi Klein, “How science is telling us all to revolt”. New Statesman. (October 29, 2013).
Sam Gindin, “Unmaking Global Capitalism,” Jacobin (v 14, 2014).
