Bringing the Global Home: Students Research Local Areas through Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

This article describes a class that draws on postcolonial insights to create a global sociological imagination. Postcolonial approaches can make visible how global connections have shaped our local environments even if these relations are not always immediately visible. Specifically, students in this class highlight how global relations, such as the slave trade, settler colonialism, racial formations, or migrations, constitute the local. If we start to reconnect global ties, how do we interpret local inequalities differently? Whose voices do we fail to listen to, and why are these global linkages and histories silenced or forgotten? The article describes the development of the curriculum and local student research projects as the main class assignment. It then discusses how students grapple to understand how global ties are and always have been crucial to our everyday lives and think critically about giving voice to perspectives that have conventionally been marginalized.