Research

MICHAEL PETER SMITH'S RESEARCH
INTERESTS AND PHILOSOPHY

Michael Peter Smith's research interests are situated within the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. He has written extensively and published several influential books on cities and urbanism, global migration, and transnationalism. During the past decade he has been engaged in comparative historical and qualitative ethnographic research on the impacts of transnational socio-cultural, economic, and political practices linking cities and regions in California to other localities and regions across the globe. His current research agenda places special emphasis on the forging of transnational political ties by Mexican migrants in California and their consequences on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.

The central assumption underlying his fieldwork on cities and globalization is that an agency-oriented approach to urban research is preferable to resolutely maintaining a global gaze focused disproportionately upon the global economy, reified as a pre-given thing, existing outside of thought, whose logic is deemed to account not only for the development of cities but for the subjectivities of their residents. His theoretical approach to empirical field research is spelled out in detail in his recent book Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Blackwell, 2001). In that book "transnational urbanism" is deployed as a cultural metaphor intended to precisely capture the criss-crossing of local and transnational social practices that come together in specific cities at particular times and enter into the contested politics of place-making and the social construction of social identities and power relations. The book and his subsequent transnational field research reflect Smith's belief that the methods of political economy and transnational ethnography must be conjoined and historicized if urban research is to be rendered capable of discerning the connections linking cities to the transnational web of relations to other localities in which they are embedded.

Smith's research has always paid close attention to the ways in which global and local connections are necessarily mediated by "meso-level" political institutions, agencies, understandings, and practices, thus underlining the continuing significance of state-centered actors and their agendas. Attention to these mediating structures and processes is apparent in Smith's current focus on the efforts by Mexican migrant sending states to incorporate transnational migrants into state-centered efforts to construct "extra-territorial" notions of nationhood and citizenship. The politics of constructing and contesting "extra-territorial citizenship" across the U.S.-Mexican border is a central focus of Smith's latest book, Citizenship Across Borders. The meso-level actors being interviewed for this book include agents of Mexican national, regional, and municipal governments and their interactions with three new sets of transnational political actors: migrants and their organizations, transnational electoral candidates and their supporters, and transnational activists and their networks.