About
the Program
The Regional
Worlds program at the University of Chicago (and the larger Globalization
Project of which it was a part) was committed to the development and
implementation of a conceptual, strategic and practical means for a new
approach to
area
studies. Its main intellectual goal was to develop a critical discussion
of how research and teaching in area studies might be transformed and
how changing curricular form, content and pedagogic approach in area
studies
may have the broadest possible impact on institutions of higher education
in the Midwest. Building on the results of the Ford Foundation funded
pilot year (1996), which considered new approaches to the study of South
Asia, the Regional Worlds project received further funding from the Ford
Foundation to organize a three year project around the rethinking of
Latin
America and East Asia as additional "anchor regions," to culminate in
a one-year focus on "Diasporas, Minorities and Counter-Geographies."
The Project was concerned with the ways in which long-term patterns of
human action and organization produce changing cultural geographies.
Much
traditional thinking about "areas" has been driven by conceptions of
geographical, civilizational and cultural coherence which rely on some
sort of trait
list -- of values, of languages, of material practices, of ecological
adaptations, of marriage patterns and the like. However sophisticated
these approaches, they all tend to see "areas" as relatively immobile
aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries
and with a unity comprised of more or less enduring properties. In contrast
Regional Worlds explores an architecture for area studies which is based
on process geographies, and sees significant areas of human organization
as precipitates for various kinds of action, interaction and motion
--
trade, travel, marriage, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytization, colonization,
exile and so on. Regional Worlds was built up of a series of annual
regional
anchors, on the model of traditional area studies, which are examined
in the context of themes based on the thinking of process geography.
Each year focused on current global processes -- Environmental
Relations (Latin America) and Regional
Modernisms (East Asia) -- that exemplify the value of process geographies.
In this new vision of area studies, such vital processes could be
examined
with an eye to the specific "areas," cultures and the histories they
imply, in preference to the previous approach, which takes certain physical
spaces
for granted and asks what histories, languages and cultural formations
they contain and exemplify. Regions, in our project, were explored as
themes which generate geographies, rather than as geographies which contain
themes.
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