Introducing Globalization

Sparke models inquiry into taken-for-granted concepts or events through rich understanding and questioning. More importantly, he reframes spatial theory as the starting point of social studies conversations about globalization. Rather than accept the inevitability of globalization, he depicts the inevitability of inequity. He examines how inequities become actualized in lives through geopolitical and geoeconomic infrastructure. He encourages us to reconsider the relationships between disciplines, contending that disciplined inquiry enables simplistic understanding. He allows geography and spatial theory to be a way of understanding the world, a lens that resonates across the social studies. The book importantly segments a variety of explanatory moments to allow readers without a strong economics background to understand economic principles. It is a lack of economic understanding that makes global policy discussions unintelligible to the general public. In the process, he ultimately constructs the globally minded citizen. While his brand of global thinking (and citizenship) has a problematic Western perspective, it also utilizes a critical lens that requires awareness of these contradictions and their implications for ourselves and others. The spatial thinking highlighted throughout this review relies on thinking across the disciplines to attend to how, where, and why places are constructed independently and interdependently across scales and time. Rather than assuming that places are knowable, rejecting the three myths encourages questions about what has been made invisible, how new places come to exist, the kinds of interactions that occur therein, and how they reify and amend cultural and other discourses. (Theory & Research in Social Education, 19 February 2015) ?Finally, a globalization text that takes its subject seriously yet simultaneously explores the myths that surround it. Matt Sparke relates the two ?levels? or ways of thinking about globalization as a material phenomenon and as a political project. This not only makes for a refreshingly novel take on globalization, one that other introductory books manifestly fail to achieve as they go one way or the other... it does so in an accessible manner.??John Agnew, UCLA ?This text is written by an extremely well qualified geographer who has experienced globalization in all its multi-faceted dimensions and has taught generations of his students about its inherent tensions and divisions. Its coverage is extensive and yet detailed; its well-researched content constantly challenges us to think critically about globalization; and its end-of-chapter exercises are great fun to work with. These are all the hallmarks of a superb text. I recommend it wholeheartedly!??Henry Yeung, National University of Singapore ?Written with passion, lucidity, and rigor, [this is a] rare text, making accessible to a generation of globally-oriented students the complex and urgent debates about globalization and the empirical and analytical research that can inform such debates.??Ananya Roy, University of California, Berkeley