Going global: Internationally mobile young people as caring citizens in higher education

Abstract

The current literature on global education is dominated by a neoliberal framing of students, either celebrating or critiquing the youth subject as competitive, individualistic, and driven by the acquisition of economic capital. In contrast, this research incorporates theories of care into an analysis of the citizenship practised by college students on a global education programme. By attending to young people's relationships of mutual dependency and responsibility, which are inflected by race and class, this article examines students’ global experiences beyond a purely neoliberal framing. This research suggests that a care‐based approach to citizenship may more accurately capture the nuanced intricacies of young people's lives by taking into account two factors that have received little theoretical exploration in global education. First, young people make sense of their time abroad according to relations of love, dependency and care with others, rather than primarily in terms of future financial gain. Second, students engaged in global opportunities find themselves traversing historical trajectories of oppression that result in them reflecting on their position in the world, engendering feelings of responsibility in terms of addressing historical inequalities and current injustices. Student citizenship cannot be explained by neoliberalism alone, but instead encompasses deep relationality as well as the development of radical concern. This research demonstrates that producing student‐centred geographies of global education makes visible young people's manoeuvrings in and through various relations, which are illustrative of their political agency as caring citizens in the midst of neoliberalism.

Cosmopolitan sidestep: University life, intimate geopolitics and the hidden costs of “Global” citizenship

“…At UNC, there is a heavy emphasis on "global education" and service-oriented generosity through study abroad and service-learning programmes. UNC is making efforts to consider the ethics of this cosmopolitanism through programmes that encourage the participation of students from underrepresented groups and workshops that deconstruct the colonial implications of voluntourism (Reddy, 2019). We support these efforts, and also note that they are part of a global trend to produce cosmopolitan subjectivities (e.g., Cheng, 2018;Fong, 2011).…”

“…Our concern is the central role that universities play as incubators for ethical orientations to social justice. Reddy (2019) speaks to this, arguing that some of our assumptions about institutional extension across the globe miss the meaningful connections made by individual students. Our goal here has been to ask: if we consider the university as a geopolitical site that orients us to the global, what are our responsibilities as scholars and as participants?…”

“…In its "Blueprint for Next," the university asserts that its global approach means "scaling up Carolina's best ideas and initiatives to take on interrelated local and global issues, and leaving our impact both at home and in other countries where we can make a difference," through programmes like the "Global Accelerator," which seeks to "take local solutions to an international scale," and the "Carolina Global Guarantee," which aims to provide every undergraduate a "global experience before graduation." These initiatives are valuable, particularly in the current climate of "America First" nationalism, and many of the programmes and institutions providing a "Global Experience" are resourced by careful staff and cognisant of critiques (see Reddy, 2019). These institutional efforts sit alongside intense nationalist anti-globalist resurgence in the US context (cf.…”

Geographies of citizenship in higher education: An introduction

“…Here, social actions not only oppose the dominant and narrowly elitist models of citizenship, but also expose the hidden injuries that such models tend to obscure, and in a manner that exceeds the students’ own particular interests to include those of workers such as cleaners and frontline housekeepers. Interestingly, Reddy's () argument that students are capable of practising relational care found resonance in these two case studies, especially through young people's radical sensing of social justice, while she makes clear in her own study that caring citizenship offers an alternative glimpse into student engagement with global mobility. Cheng's () paper highlights the potential for liberal arts education to represent a space with bounded potential for students to experiment with political ideas and practices that would otherwise be impermissible outside campus.…”

“…The papers by Dimpfl and Smith () and Reddy () examine “global education” programmes in US higher education that are designed to cultivate students into cosmopolitan and globally oriented citizen‐subjects. Dimpfl and Smith draw on the case of a single US university to reveal the manner in which “mechanisms by which especially neoliberal cosmopolitanisms require an intentional and narrow rendering of what and who counts in the production of campus life” (2018, p. 635).…”