What advice do you have for graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty regarding pursuing, and trying to publish, this kind of GATS-related (global and transnational) work?

HZ: I am still very much learning about and navigating this space. I think it’s important to caveat that I’m offering this advice from a position in which I am not facing precarities around the job market in the way I did a few years ago, and am also speaking from a position of privilege regarding my citizenship status and access to income, housing, and other resources and rights. I say this because I think how graduate students and junior scholars can or cannot engage with this advice is deeply shaped by where they are situated vis-a-vis these structures of power.

I think that the production of global and transnational scholarship is incredibly relevant in this moment because it offers an understanding of why and how historically different experiences of marginalization are interrelated. For example, some of my work has looked at how Australian border control policies are becoming increasingly globalized – how the discourses, material technologies, and policies are being shared with other countries in the global North at conferences and security summits across borders. Beyond that, I’m also working on a project that looks at how Afghan American and Afghan Australian diasporic activism are historically related and currently being influenced by global movements for refugee rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and the Movement for Black Lives. Creating a relational history of social movements is important because it allows us to trace how technologies of power tied to seemingly separate issues (i.e. border control and Indigenous rights as one example) are actually quite related (and not just in a discursive way, but materially as well). I would also encourage anyone who is involved in collective organizing and/or advocacy to continue to do this important work, as those are the spaces where the connections between these issues emerge (of course, time, energy, and labor are huge considerations here). I have found that continuing to go to area studies conferences and events that facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration are important. I also think that while working on something to publish, it could be useful to get a sense of what other scholars outside the US academy think of these issues by joining global list-serves or international working groups. This helps me to defamiliarize my own approaches even if I end up returning to them—just knowing that there are multiple approaches is important.

NM: The decision of the organizers in this ASA series to commune multidisciplinary scholars is one model for GATS research. I thank the organizers for inviting me into this conversation, as someone who is not a sociologist but rather an interdisciplinary scholar of race, religion, gender, and sexuality. In that spirit, my advice is that we follow our questions rather than our disciplines.

As a junior scholar who is learning, I’ll share my own relationships to interdisciplinary and GATS research. I was trained in US-based ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies with research on Muslims/Islam that put me in conversation with religious/Islamic Studies. Simultaneously training in transnational feminist methods helped me to interrogate not only the global reproduction of US power but also the limits of the US and Euro-American epistemes. I study both the governance and cultural politics of Muslims/Islam within the US and its empire as a way to analyze the longer relationships between race, religion, sexuality, capital, and the state—as well as resistant formations therein. For instance, my dissertation used interdisciplinary methods to examine the formal production and transnational markets of so-called “Muslim American” popular cultures as contested subjects of global capital in the GWoT era—circulating various conceptions of race, religion, secularism, and sexuality through markets and genre traditions.

Pragmatically, I’d add that depending on one’s archives, transnational research can be expensive. During grad school, I financially needed to work multiple jobs at a time and didn’t have the kind of travel grants that would also support basic needs during long research trips. As such, I used media archives and virtual conversations with interlocutors (who, ultimately, were my co-analysts) in addition to traveling for on-site research. These methods, particularly the use of interviews (which are relatively less common in humanities approaches to cultural studies as compared with social sciences), also critically informed the kinds of questions I asked about the uneven economies of transnational cultural production. In addition to archives, I understand GATS research to constitute multiple reading practices and reflexive analytics—including reading beyond our regional, disciplinary, or linguistic bounds.

Finally, the most profound lessons I learned from critical race and transnational feminist methods was critically situating myself in relation to disciplines and practices of research: Often, that means betraying the discipline. Research in many of our disciplines have extractive legacies, which are ongoing. Ethical research practices should begin by asking what kinds of knowledge we are re/producing and to whom we are responsible.