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Paul James (born 1958, Melbourne) is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity at Western Sydney University, and Director of the Institute for Culture and Society where he has been since 2014. [1] He is a writer on global politics, globalization, sustainability, and social theory.
After studying politics at the University of Melbourne James was a lecturer in the Department of Politics at Monash University, Melbourne before moving to Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2002 as Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity, the first professor of globalization in Australia. [2] At RMIT he led and secured funding for several successful initiatives, including the Global Cities Institute (Director, 2006–2013); the UN Global Compact Cities Programme (Director, 2007–2014); and the Globalism Institute (Founding Director, 2002–2007; now, the Centre for Global Research) that brought scholars including Tom Nairn, Manfred Steger, Heikki Patomäki and Nevzat Soguk to RMIT. [3]
He was appointed as Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University in 2014. [4]
He was Director of the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme, a UN International Secretariat with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and New York until 2014. [5]
James is primarily known as a theorist of globalization, particularly how local and national communities alter under an emergent level of global integration. His work has been read as challenging the simple notion of 'global flows' presented by other writers such Zygmunt Bauman. [6] Using a distinctive comparative method called 'constitutive abstraction' or 'engaged theory', he has contributed to theories of political culture, the changing nature of community, and the structures and subjectivities of social formation. He is author or editor of more than 30 books, including a SAGE Publications series on globalization. The series, Central Currents in Globalization, is a collection of writings by key figures in the field of globalization. His collaborative work includes writing with other senior scholars such as Jonathan Friedman, Peter Mandaville, Tom Nairn, Heikki Patomäki, Manfred Steger and Christopher Wise, amongst others. His main contribution in the field of global studies is the book Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism. [7]
He co-edits Arena Journal (1986–present), a publication concerned with understanding the crisis-ridden transformations of our time, and is on the board of a dozen other journals. [8]
His work also contributes empirically to understanding contemporary politics and culture, particularly in Australia, East Timor, and Papua New Guinea. [9] His research on sustainable community development laid part of the foundation for the 2007 legislation that went through the PNG parliament, [10] and was developed by the Minister for Community Development at the time, Dame Carol Kidu, as the basis of community development policy in Papua New Guinea.
As Director of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme (2007-2014), James also works in the cross-over fields of urban sustainability [11] and sustainable development. [12] He argues against the mainstream view that 'smart cities' are necessarily better or more sustainable cities, suggesting instead that it is the integration of learning and practice which makes for intelligent and sustainable cities. [13] Along these lines he is quoted as saying that London used the 2012 Olympics in an intelligent way 'where the economy, politics and culture thrive, aided by good transport and a strong information technology infrastructure, all built on a platform of ecological sustainability'. [14]
Consistent with this approach, he is one of the key developers of the 'Circles of Sustainability' method used by a number of cities around the world to respond to relatively intractable or complex issues. [15] That method takes the emphasis away from economic growth and suggests that cities should rather be aiming for social sustainability, including cultural resilience, political vibrancy, economic prosperity and ecological adaptation. [16] [17] [18] Here his key contribution is Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice: Circles of Sustainability. [19]
As Research Director of Global Reconciliation (2009–present), an organization dedicated to global dialogue and community-level practice, he has (with Paul Komesaroff) contributed to redefining the concept of 'reconciliation'. Instead of an emphasis on reconciliation as an event of testimony and contrition, the Global Reconciliation Foundation treats reconciliation as an ongoing process of dialogue and practice across the boundaries of continuing difference. [20] In 2002, James, Komesaroff, and a management team led by Peter Phipps and Haris Halilovich, ran the first national reconciliation forum in Bosnia Hercegovina. In October 2012, James, Komesaroff and Suresh Sudram, together with a team in Australia and Sri Lanka ran the first national civil-society reconciliation forum in Sri Lanka since the end of the war. This followed a Reconciliation Summit on the Middle East held in Amman, Jordan in 2009, organized by Komesaroff and James. [21]
Because his work has a general reach, criticisms of James’ work tend to take the form of rebukes for what he does not do or challenges to take seriously mainstream considerations such as citizenship and social movement success. [22] For example, describing James's book written with Tom Nairn, Global Matrix, Claudia Aradau (2007, p. 371) initially writes positively that: “Contradiction remains however the structuring principle of the book and a method of analysis. It allows the authors to think alternatives from ‘the field of our own ideological determinations’ (Balibar, 2004, p. 25)". However, she then goes on to criticize the authors for failing to consider citizenship as one of the missing conceptions in the range of alternatives to the world in crisis that the authors describe.
In a similar vein, Bihku Parekh says that despite his comprehensive coverage, "James does not explore how the nation and the state are internally related such that the apparently strange idea of the nation-state was considered self-evident by many." [23]
A community is a social unit with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable good relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.
A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those features. Some nations are equated with ethnic groups and some are equated with affiliation to a social and political constitution. A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group. A nation has also been defined as a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity and particular interests.
Globalism refers to various patterns of meaning beyond the merely international. It is used by political scientists, such as Joseph Nye, to describe "attempts to understand all the interconnections of the modern world—and to highlight patterns that underlie them." While primarily associated with world-systems, it can be used to describe other global trends. The concept of globalism is also classically used to distinguish the ideologies of globalization from the processes of globalization. In this sense, globalism is to globalization what nationalism is to nationality.
The United Nations Global Compact is a non-binding United Nations pact to get businesses and firms worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies, and to report on their implementation. The organization solicits commitments to specific sustainability and social responsibility goals from CEOs and highest-level executives, and in turn offers training, peer-networks and a functional framework for responsibility.
The imaginary is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies.
Thomas Cunningham Nairn was a Scottish political theorist and academic. He was an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. He was known as an essayist and a supporter of Scottish independence.
Charles Asher Small is a Canadian intellectual, the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy the first international interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying antisemitism with a contemporary focus.
Dr Norman Kingwell Day is an architect, educator, and writer.
Paul Mees was an Australian academic, specialising in urban planning and public transport.
Leonie Sandercock is an urban planner and academic focusing on community planning and multiculturalism. Her work spans the interdisciplinary fields of urban studies, urban policy and planning and elucidates issues of difference, social justice and possibility. She has been teaching at the School of Community & Regional Planning at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, since 2001.
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, or the Geneva Graduate Institute, abbreviated IHEID, is a government-accredited postgraduate institution of higher education located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Arena is an independent Australian critical and radical publishing cooperative that has been continuously producing writings since its founding in 1963. Established by figures in Australia’s ‘New Left’, Arena is a forum to debate and develop new ideas about society and the world, occupying a unique place in Australian cultural and intellectual life ever since. Arena’s editors and authors share a commitment to creating a genuinely and fully human society for all—a society that draws on left social and political traditions and a ‘green’ revisioning of the world but goes beyond simple or entrenched versions of those ideas. Arena is especially interested in how people and communities draw on complex cultural histories and life-ways that may defy the logic of late capitalism, and on which basis the social might be understood anew.
Manfred D. Steger is a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was also Professor of Global Studies and Director of the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University in Australia until 2013.
Cultural globalisation refers to the transmission of ideas, meanings and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet, popular culture media, and international travel. This has added to processes of commodity exchange and colonization which have a longer history of carrying cultural meaning around the globe. The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social relations that cross national and regional borders. The creation and expansion of such social relations is not merely observed on a material level. Cultural globalization involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities. It brings increasing interconnectedness among different populations and cultures. The idea of cultural globalization emerged in the late 1980s, but was diffused widely by Western academics throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. For some researchers, the idea of cultural globalization is reaction to the claims made by critics of cultural imperialism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Circles of Sustainability is a method for understanding and assessing sustainability, and for project management directed towards socially sustainable outcomes. It is intended to handle 'seemingly intractable problems' such as outlined in sustainable development debates. The method is mostly used for cities and urban settlements.
Engaged theory is a methodological framework for understanding the social complexity of a society, by using social relations as the base category of study, with the social always understood as grounded in the natural, including people as embodied beings. Engaged theory progresses from detailed, empirical analysis of the people, things, and processes of the world to abstract theory about the constitution and social framing of people, things, and processes.
The RMIT Global Cities Research Institute was a major research institute of RMIT University. It was formed in 2006 as one of the four flagship research bodies at the university crossing all the disciplines from the humanities and social sciences to applied science and engineering. It has 200 staff, affiliated with seven programs.
This is a bibliography of sustainability publications.
Manfred Steger, professor of Global Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa argues that globalization has four main dimensions: economic, political, cultural, ecological, with ideological aspects of each category. David Held's book Global Transformations is organized around the same dimensions, though the ecological is not listed in the title. This set of categories relates to the four-domain approach of circles of social life, and Circles of Sustainability.
Sarah Bekessy is an Australian interdisciplinary conservation scientist with a background in conservation biology and experience in social sciences, planning, and design. Her research interests focus on the intersection between science, policy, and the design of environmental management. She is currently a professor and ARC Future Fellow at RMIT University in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. She leads the Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group.
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