Wonder or Wander

Hannah Arendt. (1968). NY: Harcourt, Brace & World. "People remembered everything, but forgot what mattered," the author wrote somewhere in her essays about Rosa Luxemburg or Bretolt Brecht. I also like a quote from Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), "I have a cursed longing for happiness and am ready to haggle for my daily portion of happiness with all the stubbornness of a mule," in a letter designated to Jogiches, her cursed husband, which shows her natural force of a temperament, according to Arendt. Luxemburg, non-orthodox Marxist, was not so dogmatic to see the world based upon the dialectic theory and saw torture of negros in South Africa, the author argues. Arendt differentiates Luxemburg from Bolsheviks in that she preferred an unsuccessful revolution to a deformed one, where the people hold neither power nor voice. Arendt brings Sartre's shockingly precise description of after-WW II into the context where Bretolt Brecht (1898-1956), "gifted with a ...

Written as preface for the conference (globalization and transfer of knowledge), but excluded from the text. But I spelled out my standpoints here. Globalization is commonly discussed in the context of worldwide economic integration and borderless free markets and free movements. While this discourse is mainly driven by a strong globalization thesis in that globalization is an inevitable worldwide phenomenon, Keck and Sikkink (1998) conversely argue that the current globalization is only the composite of decisions purposefully made and suggest that a different globalization could be possible. Whether favors or not the current trend of globalization, however, it seems generally agreed that technology advance and distributed networks have made the globalization possible and changed the way we live and act upon it. In particular, Hardt and Negri (2004) asserts that a global network power, which consists of dominant nation-states as its primary node along with supranational institutions an...

King, Roger. (2004). In King. (Ed.), The University in the Global Age. pp.45-66. NY: Palgrave MacMillan Globalization, as a process destined to move toward global age or global society, is being adapted to local cultures and structures rather than bringing standards. While internationalism generally emphasizes cross-border exchange of knowledge and people for public goods, the recent notion of borderless education tints the internationalism with a commercial force. However, university system remains the least globalized sector nowadays . The globalization practically refers to increasing worldwide integration of economies driven by liberal capitalism and is deployed in a complicated way in the higher education system. Globalization is best considered as a compression of time and space (Harvey, 1989; Scholte, 2000; p.50) and rationalism in knowlede production system facilitates globalization because both intrinsically proclaim to produce universally objective truth. " Rationalist,...

Altbach, Philip. (1998). Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing. The university has been always a global institution since the medieval period (all the modern universities stem from the European model in the medieval epoch and the universities in the medieval were more international and taught in Latin students all around Europe until nationalism swept around the continent in the 19th century. p. xviii), and now with the global economy and communication technology advance, increasing internationalism among universities has become a main operating engine of knowledge based society and created an international knowledge system. (However, access to knowledge is limited by the availability of resources, such as books and the Internet.) Market forces--ideas are as important as products--of the institutions of industrialized nations and local demands--academic degrees from the 'center' is useful at the 'periphery'-- of developing nations have pushed greater internationalism in high...

Keck, M. & Sikkink, K. (1998). Cornell University Press. The authors focused on networks in order to conceive transformative and mobilizing actions to the international political system and named networks of activists formed on the basis of common values and discourse--notably human rights, women right, and enviromental issues--'transnational advocacy networks'. The core of the relations among actors in the network is information exchange. The quickness and accuracy of generaing information and the effectiveness of the deployment are the most important factor for the network. The network works such that boundaries between domestic social/political struggles and those at the international level are blurred through colletive pressure applied at a domestic level. This mechanism is called boomerang effect, "which curves around local state indifference and repression to put foreign pressure on local policy elites"(p.200). In other words, when state repression is too st...

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004). NY: The Penguin Press. Empire is referred to as a new global sovereignty ruled by a network power, which consists of dominant nation-states as its primary nodes along with supranational institutions, major capital corporations and other smaller powers, just like the Internet, a distributed network. The combination of these elements constitutes a global order, which is characterized with unequal participation at all levels and a global state of war. Multitude, an alternative concept to this, preserves differences while seeking to communicate and act in common. Here the authors suggest two faces to globalization. One is the spread of hierarchy and conflicts spread by Empire and the other is the creation of networks for cooperation that preserves both difference and commonality (Preface). [Thus, globalization is a contemporary Janus , which has two faces looking at two different directions.] WAR By the global state of war, the authors mean that war is be...

Giroux, H. (2008). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Neoliberalism is "an ideology that subordinates the art of democratic politics to the rapacious laws of a market economy"(p.10) and corporates deploy its power freed from political constraints through the educational force of the dominant culture to the extent that democracy is hardly conceived as a public good (p.9). Against the corporate-centered globalization which stemmed from the neolibralism, global public sphere should be acknowledged to extend local resistance to a global scale, as solving global problems need global approaches (p.13).