{"id":2976,"date":"2026-02-23T22:39:32","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T22:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=2976"},"modified":"2026-02-23T22:39:34","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T22:39:34","slug":"week-5-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2026\/02\/23\/week-5-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Transnational history is often presented as\u00a0a\u00a0solution to\u00a0the so-called \u2018methodological nationalism\u2019 that was and is prevalent amongst the social sciences. However,\u00a0Naumann\u2019s\u00a0Revisiting\u00a0transnational actors from a spatial perspective<\/em>\u00a0and Alcalde\u2019s\u00a0Spatializing\u00a0transnational history: European spaces and\u00a0territories<\/em>\u00a0argue that this new\u00a0methodology\u00a0is far from something that should be adopted uncritically, and it can itself fall into the same pitfalls as the methodology it was designed to supersede.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naumann argues that the \u2018transnational\u2019 has begun to increasingly resemble an essentialised \u2018sphere of its own\u2019. More specifically, how focusing only on mobility risks turning \u2018transnational actors\u2019 into cosmopolitan \u2018free agents\u2019, and treating the transnational as something entirely detached from local and national contexts. They instead posit that actors are, no matter their stripe, always present in multiple, layered spaces, the local, the regional, the imperial, and the international.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alcalde, meanwhile, connects transnational history and the \u2018spatial turn\u2019, arguing that, if done improperly, transnationalism will only replace the nation-state container that once confined how people approached history with new, larger, but still abstract containers, such as Europe, essentially resulting in the recreation of \u2018methodological nationalism\u2019 as \u2018methodological transnationalism\u2019. He instead calls for a flexible use of scales and spatial units derived from the research question, not assumed in advance.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both articles also clarify what makes a source \u2018transnational\u2019, arguing that some documents are not magically \u2018global\u2019 and others \u2018national\u2019, but that, a source becomes transnational when it allows us to trace cross-boundary relations. Such as an activist whose correspondence about a local political or environmental campaign is relayed to an international organisation. Naumann echoes Pierre-Yves Saunier\u2019s metaphor of the \u2018historian\u2019s Trojan horses\u2019 to describe sources about actors who migrate between spatial orders, allowing historians to better discover and measure transnational connections. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both texts\u00a0also\u00a0provide suggestions about how\u00a0sources\u00a0can be interpreted\u00a0transnationally, which can be boiled down to approaching\u00a0sources\u00a0from a \u2018spatial\u2019 lens:\u00a0what spaces does the source assume the reader is fluent in, what borders does it cross, and how\u00a0are its actors positioned socially.\u00a0Even relatively small\u00a0sources\u00a0can be used to reconstruct larger transnational spaces if we\u00a0simply\u00a0follow the networks\u00a0they exist within.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Transnational history is often presented as\u00a0a\u00a0solution to\u00a0the so-called \u2018methodological nationalism\u2019 that was and is prevalent amongst the social sciences. However,\u00a0Naumann\u2019s\u00a0Revisiting\u00a0transnational actors from a spatial perspective\u00a0and Alcalde\u2019s\u00a0Spatializing\u00a0transnational history: European spaces and\u00a0territories\u00a0argue that this new\u00a0methodology\u00a0is far from something that should be adopted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-M0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2976"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2998,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions\/2998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}