Envisioning the World: Mapping and Making the Global

Abstract

Mapping and making the global through practices of observationVisions of the world and descriptions of the global are based on practices of observation. Rather than working with an account of structures and connections, or with a fixed definition of 'the global', the contributions in this book seek to identify narratives, images and models that are used in practices of observation in order to address 'the world' or 'the global' and how they come to appear as a distinct realm of the social world. In addition to considering the conditions for the 'emergence' of the global in particular practices of observation, this book is also interested in the impact of these global modes of observation on field-related discourses, processes and agents. It focuses, therefore, on the phenomenological dimension of globalization processes. The individual contributions reconstruct how specific visions of the world emerge in different social fields and how various actors throughout time have tried to map, describe and make sense of the global, thereby contributing to its constitution, that is, to its 'making'.This book brings together views from Sociology, History, Literary Theory and International Relations and takes up a range of discussions in world society/world polity as well as in global history research. Many disciplines involved in the field of globalization research are witnessing an increased interest in approaches that pursue the process of globalization at the level of local practices, discourses and strategies. Diverse as the disciplinary, theoretical and empirical backgrounds of the contributions gathered here may be, they converge in the effort to retrace 'practices of world making' (Bell 2013: 257) in various areas of society. The aim is to establish a connection between different areas in order to find underlying commonalities in observational practices that are not evident at first glance and consequently little addressed in the