Transnational Studies Working Group

Our Mission

Transnational Studies responds to a new consensus among a growing number of academics that the categories used to study social practices, identity construction (racial, queer, or otherwise) and historical causation need to be reconsidered and revised. In particular, the nation-state, while of enduring importance in our contemporary period as it has been through the modern age, does not exhaust or fully determine the reach and complexity of human interactions and movements. Even the development of nation-states themselves, particularly in the postcolonial context, has often derived sustenance from trans-territorial bonds and connections. The call to consider the relationship between state actors, international organizations, multinational actors and global regimes of capital, was a major innovation made by liberal institutionalists in the 1970s. Yet, in our time, interest has increasingly focused on social groups – be they displaced persons, unassimilated immigrants, or cosmopolitan elites – that are not represented by state policies or international institutions. To the extent that these individuals transgress the boundaries of states and challenge the powers of modern political institutions through their non-sovereign status, Transnational Studies is interested in the interactions that defy the nation-state, occurring “below” its regulatory plane among local and regional cultures, and how these assemblages interlink “above” national frameworks through interregional zones of circulation and other imagined or virtual social spaces of global scope. Yet the trans aspect of such an approach is also very much about the maneuvers “across” and “around” nation-states. Instead of a site for monolithic and homogenous formations, the nation thus becomes a potential space of hybridity, recombination, and negotiability in our new analytic frameworks.

Inspired by our shared interests in the emerging field of transnational studies, we have come together as the Transnational Studies Working Group at Tufts. Our workshop format provides a number of opportunities for scholars who work in the field of transnational studies to pursue their research agendas in close collaboration with one another. Each semester, we will purposely focus on fostering an exchange of ideas among faculty members and advanced graduate students working on transnational themes through reading groups, manuscript workshops and presentations, and a year-end conference.