Frictions – The Blog of the Regensburg Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World
“Friction”, writes social anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “makes global connection powerful and effective.” At the same time, “friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power” (Tsing 2005, 6). Inspired by this insight, this blogjournal aims to explore the dual nature of globalization: it produces connections while dissolving other relations. Global capitalism and the international systems of politics and culture link some places together, but also cause de-linkages of others. These systems produce resistances, ambiguities and dissonances – thus: frictions. They keep things moving while transforming the vectors of intersecting global, regional and localized processes.
Europe and the Americas offer fertile ground for exploring frictions and the multiscalar transformations they produce. Through their economic and military power, Europe and North America regions have shaped the emergence of globality in the modern period. At the same time, they Europe and the Americas taken more broadly are diverse regions, marked by diversity and multiple, multiscalar centre-periphery relations. Contacts, exchanges and relations between these regions are, in our approach, marked by multidirectional encounters and movements of ideas, practices and people.
The Global North through structures of colonization, empire, expansion and extraction sought to dominate much of the Global South, with these asymmetrical relations also transforming Europe and America. However, it seems that the tectonic plates of a bipolar world are shifting: China is global actor, other BRICS countries have emerged as regional powers, while Trump’s politics, Brexit and populism demonstrate that US and parts of Europe are capable of undermining their claims to represent a democratic order in the world. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the post-World War II global order, rupturing established alliances.
Frictions thus adopts a multipolar and multiscalar perspective to critically explore the political, economic and epistemological premises of the Global North as the paradigm of globality
As the established international order of the modern age increasingly finds itself in flux, we consider how connections between Europe and North America, as well as those regions’ relations with the rest of the world, are being reconfigured. What can be learned from examining historical transformations of transatlantic entanglements? How do domestic frictions and regional differences relate to the way places are connected to different parts of the world? Which languages, cultural forms and systems of knowledge are pertinent to the articulation of frictions in the duality between globality and locality, between future and past, between expansion and retraction, between stasis and movement?
Frictions is part of efforts to develop a multiscalar, interdisciplinary, comparative and transregional perspective on the place of Europe and America in world, historically, in the present and in future.
These questions and approaches lie at the heart of the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America in the Modern World”, a cooperation between the University of Regensburg and the Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies. This project, funded by the Leibniz Association and the two partners, aims at strengthening Area Studies in Regensburg.
Our particular focus is on Europe and the Americas, in terms of both their global connections and their intraregional diversity, which in itself is a productive friction that dehomogenizes the regions. The aim is to compare local manifestations of globality in these areas while exploring how diverse areas are linked. This multiscalar and multisited perspective gives rise to an approach that we call trans-comparative. At the ScienceCampus we employ it in pursuing research in broad, interdisciplinary thematic fields:
- transatlantic political transformations, in/security and sovereignty
- migration, refugee worldmaking, and senses of belonging
- trade, institutions, supply chains and economic flows
- media systems, discourses and technologies (working towards augmented area studies)
- legal and cultural hierarchies and translations
Empirical reflections are supplemented at the ScienceCampus by the conceptual lenses of multiscalarity, multipolarity, and critical reflexiveness
These are all fields of social action where the globalizing forces of capitalism (and historically state-socialism), technology and international politics intersect with localizing dynamics. Sensitivity towards historical contexts and temporalities, alongside a spatiality shaped by multi-polarity and multi-scalarity characterizes our methodology. It is also multidisciplinary, welcoming methods from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as creative inputs inspired by the arts and reportage.
As a platform for critical explorations of the European-American nexus and global transformations, Frictions welcomes a diversity of voices from Regensburg and around the world. While showcasing research and exchanges taking place in Regensburg, we equally welcome contributions from scholars, policymakers, journalists, artists and others who engage with the themes, concepts or approaches outlined here.
We invite contributions in a range of formats:
- Essays: fully-referenced, peer-reviewed articles of around 3000-4000 words.
- Research Notes: outlines of ongoing and developing research projects, including methodological, conceptual and theoretical explorations as well as findings from empirical and field research. Length: Around 1000 words.
- Current Debates: comment and opinion pieces on salient current events; interviews, conference reports, reviews of exhibitions, films and other cultural works, and discussions of recent publications. Length: no minimum, max. 2000 words.
For contributions in the form of Research Notes and Current Debates we also welcome more experimental formats including photo-reportages or video-reportages. Interviews can be transcribed, published as podcasts or as videos. Find out more about how to contribute here.
Frictions publishes material in English or German.
All contributions will be reviewed by the Editorial Board and, in the cae of Essays, by peers knowledgeable of the subject matter at hand. All published Blog posts will receive a doi number and will be stored on the IOS publication servers. The Editorial Board is guided by principles of open-mindedness, equality, creativity and a critical mind. We hope that our readers will find the Blogjournal posts reflect these principles. Thus we encourage contributions that go beyond the types of frictions, methodological premises and themes outlined above. The formats are deliberately open and multimedia to encourage experimental forms of cooperation and presentation.
References
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
