Programme leader: Robert Kloosterman

The mission of the research group is to contribute to the academic and public debates about globalization, its causes and consequences.

The research group Geographies of Globalizations was established in 2008. All members belong to the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies. This group was created by merging two research groups of the (former) Amsterdam institute on Metropolitan and international Development Studies (AMIDSt), namely the Space and Economy research group (established in 2000), and the Territories, Identities and Representations group (established in 2004). The Space and Economy group covered the field of Economic Geography, while the TIR group was mainly active in the field of Political and Cultural Geography. As the size of both groups in term of tenured staff was rather small, it was decided to merge the two groups into one larger research group to focus on the economic and political aspects of processes of globalization at different spatial scales.

Given our strong empirical inclination, it stands to reason that the emphasis in our research is on the role of these agents in how they interact with these structures and how they bring about these partly unexpected, unintended, and contingent structural changes. The often bewildering complexity of our research object - the variegated multi-scalar manifestations of cultural, political and economic globalization - demands approaches which are open to different theoretical and methodological perspectives as well as analytical techniques and data sources thereby combining spatial, the social and the historical sciences.

In short: this research group investigates how embedded actors engage strategically with globalizations. It does so with a special attention for the geographical dimensions of such engagements, dealing explicitly with the geographically differentiated impact of globalization processes, with geographically mediated opportunities and constraints (distance/proximity, boundary-making through inclusion/exclusion, location, cluster, institutional context, etc) shaping the actors' (perceptions of) risks and resources, and the employment of geographically differentiated strategies (territoriality, network governance, scale jumping etc).

Three research themes form the core of the program, each operating within distinct but increasingly overlapping fields of multidisciplinary study:

• Political Geographies of Globalization and Re-territorialization
• Changing Geographies of Urban Economies
• Comparative Financial Geography

In all cases, the overlaps between these fields - and allied cultural geographies - feature in our research. The re-regulation efforts at different scales of the financial sector and their impact on financial clusters provide common grounds for collaboration between the different subgroups.

The main objectives are to contribute to:

• The development of geographical approaches to globalizations and the refinement of their spatio-social vocabulary (distance, place, territory, scale, network, region, etc.) and methodological perspectives.
• The academic debates in social science and humanities on the current phase of globalization and its differentiated impacts.
• The integration of historical-sociological and politico-institutional concepts in geographic approaches to explain drivers and impacts of processes of globalization on sub-state levels.
• The dissemination of academic knowledge about globalizations among the the public, activists and decision makers.