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Overheating

Beskrivelse

The accelerated and intensified contact which is a defining characteristic of globalisation leads to tensions, contradictions, conflict and changed opportunities in ways that affect identity, the environment and the economy. In all three cases, change takes place unevenly, but often fast and as a result of a peculiar combination of local and transnational processes. Such forms of change lead to ‘overheating effects’ in local settings worldwide: Unevenly paced change where exogenous and endogenous factors combine lead to instability, uncertainty and unintended consequences in a broad range of institutions and practices, and contribute to a widely shared feeling of powerlessness and alienation,. People perceive, understand and act upon the changes in widely differing ways depending on their position in the locality (class, age, gender etc.) and on the characteristics of the locality as well as its position within regional, national and transnational systems. In order to understand globalisation, it is necessary to explore how its crises are being dealt with in local contexts – how people resist imposed changes, negotiate their relationship to global and transnational forces, and which strategies for survival, autonomy and resistance are being developed. These explorations must take the genius loci of the locality seriously, situate the locality historically and connect it to an analysis of global processes. Finally, in order to demonstrate the ubiquity of overheating effects, systematic comparison between otherwise very different localities is necessary. Locally, the crises are best understood as crises of reproduction: People across the world find it difficult to sustain themselves economically the way they used to; their right to define who they are is under pressure, resulting in a crisis of identity; and the physical environment changes in ways which indicate that human activity at the outset of the 21t century is ultimately unsustainable.

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