Global Drinking Project

Drinking has been playing a globally important role independently from time and space, influencing economic, legal, political, religious as well as societal dimensions.
In line with the commitment of Global Studies to generate knowledge by moving across space and time (Steger 2018), we take as our point of departure the ways in which specific arenas and drinking practices relate to the global economic, political and cultural flows we call globalization.
What does the global circulation of a specific drink entail in different localities? How are ethnic, gender, class and cultural identities entangled, forged or transformed through drinking performances? In an era of accelerated space and time compression, what happens when drinks previously linked to a place or specific modalities of consumption are turned into global commodities, and which meanings are thus given to them by their new consumers? Our focus on the materiality of drinking will show how this is both descriptive and generative of the ways cultural identities are formed, practiced or contested, often through ambitions and feelings of belonging, exoticism, cosmopolitanism and nostalgia. Classic conceptualizations of drinking as functional to social relations and bonding will thus give space to more dynamic analyses of their workings within the neoliberal capitalist economy.
Moving beyond national borders, as global scholars we adopt a transnational focus on the dynamic interplay between the regional, national and global dimensions to shed light on how values, ideologies, imaginaries and identities are realized, reaffirmed or contested through drinking, and how these differ across specific places, times and modalities of ingestion.