Producing Knowledge on World Regions

Despite wide consensus among higher education leaders that U.S. universities are undergoing a process of "globalization," there is little agreement about just what globalization means, what propels it, or what intellectual, political, and ethical consequences it will bring for American higher education. The SSRC's Producing Knowledge on World Regions Program seeks to develop an intellectual framework and a social science agenda for assessing the globalization of higher education as well as the relationships between American universities, specific world regions, and an increasingly interconnected global higher education universe. Toward that end, we are conducting a six-year research project looking at how American universities in general, and federally-funded National Resource Centers in particular, organize research and instruction on several adjacent world regions: the Middle East, Russia/Eurasia, and South Asia.