The Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle at the University of Wisconsin-Madison addresses issues of intercultural contact and cultural practices in global and historical perspective. Founded in 1996 as Border Studies to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among faculty and students, the group has hosted six conferences and a number of lectures, panels, and informal get-togethers. Programs have stimulated exciting discussions of cultural studies in comparative and global contexts. They have initiated the formation of cross-campus networks of people working on related issues in different historical periods and geographical areas. As part of the University's "cluster" hiring initiative, BTCS has spearheaded the hiring of four faculty in the cluster on Cultural Studies in Global Context. In addition to conferences and potluck/discussions, our future plans include continued collaboration with other research circles, study groups, and clusters on campus. We also hope to develop a graduate certificate or Ph.D. minor in Cultural Studies and to encourage team-taught courses at UW-Madison. Off-campus, we will continue our collaboration with the Minnesota-Stanford-Wisconsin MacArthur Consortium on International Peace and Cooperation , and we hope to develop national and international linkages with other cultural studies programs. We are also planning to establish more of a presence in print and on the web with the publication of conference papers, the development of the global-borderstudies discussion list, and the expansion of this web site.

The BTCS Research Circle has a double agenda. First, we examine intercultural sites of hybridity produced by cultural and commercial traffic, migration, nomadism, diaspora, and cyberspace. We encourage attention to the broad borderlands where cultures blend and clash and where various groups resist, reject, or imitate others. We hope to shift the focus from a theorization of difference to an analysis of contact zones where power circulates and agency is negotiated within the structures and processes of interactive exchange. Challenging parochial forms of cultural studies that focus on the uniqueness or eparateness of distinct cultural groups, we instead seek to foster attention to the transcultural dimensions of local, regional, and national cultural formations. Recognizing the existence of different and scattered hegemonies, we hope to avoid the reproduction of center/periphery models of cultural exchange as well as binary structures such as "the West and the Rest," "self and other," "man and woman." We explore new and emerging flows of transnational capital, especially in its relation to contemporary consumer culture and notions of multiculturalism, gender ambiguity, and cultural hybridity. We are particularly committed to extending cultural studies beyond Europe and the United States, encouraging the study of heterogeneity with respect to interactive structures of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, caste, sexuality, and origin. Attuned to the effects of an accelerating globalization, we nonetheless insist that transcultural traffic and contact zones are not new and have long been a part of human history.

Second, we encourage the transgression of disciplinary boundaries in the academy. As an interdisciplinary group, we bring together people across the humanities and social sciences to establish a middle ground of dialogue where participants draw on disciplinary knowledge without being limited to it. Taking up such topics as identity, gender and sexuality, modernity and postmodernity, migration and diaspora, media and representation, we have fostered the rethinking of local formations in global context. We have found that the interdisciplinary juxtaposition of people working on different parts of the globe and time periods helps to develop a common discourse that takes into account particularities without being confined to them. Such conjunctures can enhance comparative understanding and encourage an interdisciplinary and theoretical dimension to cultural studies that is still thoroughly grounded in disciplinary knowledge. We aim to combine the strengths of interdisciplinary breadth and disciplinary depth. We also hope to cross the often contentious borders between "area studies" and "global studies," bringing the strengths of each into fruitful dialogue. We see our efforts as contributions to the reinvention of the humanities and social sciences for the new millenium.

Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle in the news: " Research Circles Offer New Design For Scholarship " by Barbara Wolff, November 13, 2000.

Cultural Studies in Global Context Cluster

The Cultural Studies in Global Context Cluster recognizes that the accelerating changes world-wide associated with globalization requires a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to cultural studies in the humanities that goes beyond the delineation of cultural and disciplinary differences without ignoring them. The intermingling of the global and the local as well as the increased cultural traffic among different parts of the world has dramatically changed the nature of our disciplines in the past twenty years. The intensification of migration, cultural hybridity, and interlocking localities in the context of globalization of markets and the development of cyberspatial communications has increasingly broken down the boundaries between our disciplines and fostered a collaborative approach to the study of culture in the humanities.

Our objective is to combine Cultual Studies with transnational and global studies. We see the Cluster as a means of breaking out of parochial forms of Cultural Studies limited to separate societies and to foster analysis of the global dimensions of local, regional, and national cultural formations. We also want to integrate issues of gender into the study of transnational cultural flows, as gender and the condition of women worldwide are key constituents of culture, of serving as defining flashpoints for cultural conflict and hybridity. We are committed as well to extending Cultural Studies to cultures and countries beyond Europe and the United States. Recognizing the rise of hegemonic culture in different parts of the globe in different historical periods, we hope to avoid the tendency to reproduce center/periphery models of cultural exchange and the homogenization of heterogeniety into binary structures of "the West" and "the Rest." The knowledge of historical and geographical specificities produced in area studies programs in vital to the project of Cultural Studies in Global Context. Through transnational and interdisciplinary studies, we hope to foster the kind of integrated study of cultures that will increasingly be vital to survival in this new millenium.

The Cultural Studies in Global Context Cluster developed out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Strategic Hiring Initiative . The Cluster brought four new faculty members to the University: Guillermina De Ferrari, Kenneth M. George, Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon. All four are now members of The Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle Steering Committee, which has administered the cluster from the outset. The BTCS Research Circle, which pre-existed the cluster, has basically merged with the cluster to serve as a unit that could implement continued interdepartmental collaboration around a thematic focus after the cluster hires were completed.