Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ujcc20

Download by: [The University of British Columbia] Date: 21 November 2015, At: 03:39

Journal of College and Character

ISSN: 2194-587X (Print) 1940-1639 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujcc20

Mapping Global Citizenship

Sharon Stein

To cite this article: Sharon Stein (2015) Mapping Global Citizenship, Journal of College andCharacter, 16:4, 242-252, DOI: 10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

Published online: 20 Nov 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Mapping Global Citizenship

Sharon Stein , University of British Columbiaa

Abstract

The demand to cultivate global citizenship is frequently invoked as central to colleges’ anduniversities’ internationalization efforts. However, the term global citizenship remains undertheor-ized in the context of U.S. higher education. This article maps and engages three common globalcitizenship positions—entrepreneurial, liberal humanist, and anti-oppressive—and articulates anadditional fourth possible position, based in encounters and engagements with incommensurability.Tracing the recurring patterns in each of these positions can allow for more complex and nuancedconversations and engagements to emerge among practitioners and students about global citizenship.

While the need to cultivate global citizenship is frequently invoked as an important element of internatio-nalization efforts (Braskamp, 2008; Lee, 2006), the term remains conceptually undertheorized in thecontext of U.S. higher education. Given that “global citizenship has no legal or political basis forlegitimacy” (Zemach-Bersin, 2007, p. 21), it is potentially more versatile, flexible, and open to resignifica-tion than notions of national citizenship. As Roberts, Welch, and Al-Khanji (2013) noted, there exists a“lack of coherence about what we understand to be the qualities of global citizenship” (p. 86). Among otherthings, global citizenship has been used to justify the affirmation, reform, refusal, critique, and compre-hensive reimagination of existing possibilities for cohabitating the planet. In an effort to assist highereducation practitioners in navigating these diverse possible approaches to global citizenship, in thefollowing article I examine common global citizenship positions. In particular, I consider how each positiondraws on and replicates patterns of meaning, thereby providing and circumscribing certain possibilities forknowing, being, and relating.

Though I offer this map as just one of many possible representations of global citizenship, it is myhope that those working in the fields of higher education and student affairs will find it useful for tracingthe situated socio-historical patterns and presumptions that underlie the meaning of the concept, under-standing themselves in relation to the myriad possibilities for engaging global citizenship, and facilitatingfurther engagement, so that new articulations and interventions might be developed. Thus, rather than putto rest conversations about global citizenship, I seek to extend and deepen them. I begin by providing abrief overview of the role that global citizenship plays in the internationalization of U.S. higher education.

aSharon Stein (s.stein@alumni.ubc.ca) is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of BritishColumbia.

242 Peer Reviewed Article

Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 4, November 2015

doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc © NASPA 2015 JCC

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

From there, I map four global citizenship positions that commonly appear in international programs andresearch. The entrepreneurial position emphasizes global citizenship as a means for rational economicactors to better compete in a global economy for their own benefit, and/or for the benefit of their nation.The liberal humanist position seeks to make existing systems more inclusive, and predicates concern forthe Other on recognition of a universal humanity. After outlining these first two positions, I map a third, theanti-oppressive position, which is often articulated in direct refutation of the first two positions, and then afourth, the incommensurable position, which conceptualizes engagement across onto-epistemologicaldifference. I conclude by reflecting on the challenges involved in efforts to push beyond existing scriptsand toward global citizenship other-wise.

Global Citizenship and Internationalization

Many U.S. colleges and universities invest considerable resources and energy to enhance their study abroadofferings, offer more internationally focused curricula, recruit international students, and otherwise inter-nationalize their campuses (e.g., Altbach & Knight, 2007; Biddle, 2002). While internationalization isdistinct from global citizenship education (Jorgensen & Shultz, 2012), the former is frequently understoodto offer important opportunities to foster the latter (Gacel-Ávila, 2005; Khoo, 2011). As an object of highereducation research, global citizenship has been understood as a desirable outcome of: studying abroad(Dolby, 2008; Tarrant, 2010), virtual learning (Patterson, Carrillo, & Salinas, 2012), and curriculuminternationalization (Hanson, 2010). Others have developed scales through which to measure and assessstudents’ global citizenship competencies (Morais & Ogden, 2011) and conceptualize effective approachesto students’ global citizenship learning (Braskamp, 2010; Roberts, Welch, & Al-Khanji, 2013). Despite thefrequency with which global citizenship is invoked in U.S. higher education, the term remains under-theorized. Authors of global citizenship studies in higher education tend to rely on a small range of possiblemeanings, focusing most of their efforts on developing pedagogical and/or experiential interventions tofoster and measure global citizenship in various contexts. Such research has the benefit of clarity andguidance for practitioners but can also limit opportunities for engagement with a broader range ofpossibilities.

Jorgenson and Shultz (2012) suggested global citizenship is frequently discussed both as a goaltoward which educational institutions should aspire and an attribute of individual graduates. In contrast,while the positions and scripts I articulate are often used to specify goals or support student development,each position is not meant to represent a one-to-one, fixed stance or identity that an individual or aninstitution might adopt. In some cases, scripts from different positions might overlap in ways that contradictor complement each other, and the same people or programs might enact different positions depending onthe context. Thus, while it is possible to consider these positions as tools for context-dependent use towardparticular ends, my intention in articulating them is instead to offer a flexible heuristic that practitioners, aswell as students, might use to identify, and possibly interrupt, existing representations and meanings.

As I review the four positions, I note how each tends to reproduce certain scripts, or discursivepatterns of thought and action, particularly with regard to conceptualizations of the Other. The concept ofthe Other is popularly deployed in political and philosophical theorizations of relationships constituted byand through difference at the level of both individuals and groups (e.g., Nayar, 2013; Roshanravan, 2012;Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988). While I generally use the Other throughout this article in reference to the Self ofthe U.S. university student, each global citizenship position offers a different perspective about whatconstitutes the Self/Other distinction and their interrelation, which in turn facilitates and forecloses certain

Global Citizenship 243

JCC © NASPA 2015 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

possibilities for engagement. I also recognize the weight of accumulated discursive-material effects, suchthat they cannot merely be sloughed off through individual disavowal, at the same time as I insist on thepossibilities of imagining and enacting global citizenship differently.

The Entrepreneurial Position

Given the importance placed on the internationalization of higher education as an economic imperative(e.g., Bolsmann & Miller, 2008; Stier, 2004), it is perhaps not surprising that global citizenship is oftenframed as a means for U.S. students to develop economic acuity. As Tarrant (2010) argued, “Mostinstitutions of higher education in the United States acknowledge that the future workforce of Americadepends on a citizenry that is sensitive to, and aware of, global issues” (p. 433). Increasingly hegemonicneoliberal notions of citizenship (Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011) also foster an entrepreneurial form of globalcitizenship that is a largely depoliticized, market-centric means to ensure students will be attractive toemployers, and to ensure the United States’ continued economic prosperity.

One example of this position, from a University of Wisconsin-Madison document entitled “PreparingGlobal Citizens and Leaders of the Future” (2008), states:

There are a diminishing number of professional career opportunities that will function in isolation orignorance of global customers, markets, suppliers, and competitors. We all need to acquire skills to copewith a global economy in which expansion of employment opportunities and markets is accompanied byglobal replaceability of work-force through outsourcing and migration of labor. (p. 3)

This text develops the argument that economic realities require that the university prepare its students tosuccessfully compete for jobs in a global labor market.

Global citizenship for a global economy is often undergirded by the conviction that we are currentlyliving in a knowledge economy in which knowledge is framed as universal, deterritorialized capital in aglobal flow of wealth and ideas (Gibb & Walker, 2011). Concern about competition for jobs and resourcesin this economy is coupled with the normative claim of neoliberalism that, “human well-being can be bestadvanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional frameworkcharacterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2). Theaspirational claim is that in order for individuals to become rational, autonomous entrepreneurs (Brown,2003), they should amass ever more human capital, including through higher education. Further, becausethe knowledge economy is global, developing intercultural competency, learning another language, orstudying abroad is understood as a strategic means to generate human capital.

However, as Zemach-Bersin (2007) pointed out, “Global citizenship. . .is an identity available andgranted to some but not to others” (p. 21). Although stratified structures of class, race, (national) citizen-ship, and gender make entrepreneurial global citizenship differentially available, this position nonethelessscripts all individuals as equally morally obliged to make economically savvy and rational choices in allareas of their lives. Scripts of the entrepreneurial position can only maintain that the market is indifferent tothese structures by ignoring their impact on the unequal distribution of life chances.

Caruana (2014) suggested that for those who enact global citizenship as a means to advance theirown economic mobility, there is often no “sense of responsibility to humankind that prompts activism”

(p. 90). Imagining relationships as economic transactions can significantly limit the kinds of relationalitythat are possible. For instance, in this position concern for the Other may be limited to a commitment toensure that those in the Global South catch up to abstract and supposedly universal ideals—including

244 Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 4, November 2015

doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc © NASPA 2015 JCC

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

capitalist competition—even as they remain at a structural disadvantage. In other words, from this position,one might view obligations to the Other as little more than recognition of the Other’s right to compete in aglobal free market system (Harvey, 2005).

The Liberal Humanist Position

Scripts of the liberal humanist global citizenship position are also frequently evoked in higher educationinternationalization efforts, often either as an alternative or supplement to the entrepreneurial position.Nussbaum’s (2002) work is one of the most widely cited sources for this position. Critiquing marketexchange as the basis for human connection, Nussbaum suggested that existing liberal education fornational citizenship should be expanded for global contexts. Specifically, she posited three essentialcapacities for a global citizen to possess: (a) critical self-examination, (b) recognition of ties to otherhumans, and (c) the ability to imagine oneself in another’s shoes. As Nussbaum’s work suggests, a liberalhumanist position is premised on the idea of a common humanity that allows for the Other to be accessedthrough acts of “recognition” (p. 295) and “imagination” (p. 299). This position asks Western students(often implicitly White) to cultivate greater understanding and appreciation across difference than may becapacitated by entrepreneurialism.

Scripts of the liberal humanist position often focus global relationships on an individual level, ratherthan on a structural scale, for example, through an emphasis on intercultural understanding (Caruana, 2014;Deardorff, 2006). This enhanced understanding is frequently framed as a competency to be achieved anddemonstrated as a means to an end, for example, in order to achieve consensus with more ease or to ensureaccess to better career prospects (thus making it compatible with the entrepreneurial position), as well as anethical imperative. In this sense, difference is framed as something to be overcome while at the same time itis presumed Western students have a right to access Others’ difference for their own development oradvantage. Further, as Roshanravan (2012) pointed out, although racialized U.S. students’ “daily encoun-ters with racism and ethnocentrism make them painfully competent in issues of diversity and cross-culturaldifference,” this competency is rarely recognized, which suggests “‘global competence’ is the domain ofWhite/Anglo knowers” (p. 9).

Internationalization efforts that emphasize global citizenship as a commitment to developmentprojects in the Global South, whether through research, service learning, or other engagements, are alsooften framed through liberal humanist scripts. For example, the Penn State University Office ofInternational Programs’ Strategic Plan (2008) argued for the need to embed service projects intostudy abroad programs because students “possess the skills, knowledge, and drive to alleviate someof the world’s most pressing concerns.. . .their talent and passion should be harnessed and put to gooduse” (p. 12). Possible service areas include “providing disaster relief services, building houses ineconomically challenged areas, teaching at community schools, providing aid at health clinics, workingto empower women, spreading a message of AIDS awareness” (p. 13). Students are framed in thisdocument as generous purveyors of knowledge, skills, and enlightened values to communities thatimplicitly lack these, which is a common trope of international service programs (Bryan, 2013;Jefferess, 2011; Khoo, 2011). There is no follow-up discussion about the importance of ethical orreciprocal engagement, nor any consideration of the knowledge, skills, or goals already held by thecommunities.

When students understand themselves as benevolent actors granting knowledge, humanity, resources,or rights to those they perceive to lack them, they affirm the supremacy of Western ways of knowing and

Global Citizenship 245

JCC © NASPA 2015 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

being. Yet because the liberal humanist position does not include a strong critique of power nor tracecolonial histories and ongoing racialized structures of expropriation and exploitation, it does not connectindividual students’ good intentions to the tradition of Western universities acting as civilizing entities(Stier, 2004) or the ways their activities potentially enact new forms of economic and cultural imperialism(Khoo, 2011). Thus, students often fail to situate themselves within historically accumulated materialadvantage and epistemic dominance.

Killick (2011) described a liberal humanist approach when he suggested “belonging within andidentifying with such an international community offers students the basis for extending the circle of peoplewhose rights they recognize within the global community, people at least a little closer now to beingequally human” (p. 380). The fact that affirmation of equal humanity is understood as the (potential)outcome of global citizenship education, instead of its presumed starting point, is telling. Rather than anexistential claim, it is aspirational. Further, the notion of humanity that animates this position tends toremain invisibly situated within a global imaginary that posits as universal the particular mode of humanexistence that was defined by Europe in contrast to its Indigenous and racialized Others (Silva, 2007;Wynter, 2003).

Hence, this script can reify the notion that students in positions of relative material advantage havesolutions to the problems of those denied it, rather than prompting these students to question theirassumptions about the category of humanity or to consider how their privileges may be assured throughthe impoverishment of those they seek to help. This impulse to help also tends to ignore that communitiesare capable of imagining their own solutions and futures. Thus, this global citizenship position may effacedifference and erase students’ structural complicity in violent global systems.

The Anti-Oppressive Position

Given the institutional weight of the entrepreneurial and liberal humanist positions, it can be difficult topose alternative imaginings of global citizenship. Nonetheless, a growing number of scholars havedemanded more critical, politicized, and historicized approaches to global engagement. The anti-oppressiveglobal citizenship position is largely scripted in contestation of the first two positions. This position tends toidentify how colonial, racialized, and gendered flows of power, wealth, and knowledge operate to theadvantage of the Global North, as a whole, and elites in both the Global North and South. In response, ittends to advocate for more equitable distribution of resources, cognitive justice, and more horizontal formsof governance, and aspires to radical transformation of existing structures, up to and including theirdismantling.

Despite internal diversity within this position, most question the entrepreneurial emphasis onaffluence and the liberal humanist tendency to structure relationships in sameness in order to affirmpurportedly universal knowledge and values. From this position, the Eurocentric roots of global citizenshipand the closely associated notion of cosmopolitanism are problematized. Though cosmopolitanism has itsorigins with the Hellenes (commonly known as the Ancient Greeks), during the Enlightenment Kantrevisited it to propose a globally unifying vision. Grosfoguel (2012) suggested that, particularly given hisuse of racialized logics, Kant’s vision was really a “European provincialism camouflaged as universalistcosmopolitanism and sold to the rest of the world as an imperial design” (p. 91; see also Dhawan, 2013;Jazeel, 2011).

Given these origins, there is an understanding in the anti-oppressive position that, although theconcept of global citizenship is not transcendentally tied to any particular state, institution, or identity, the

246 Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 4, November 2015

doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc © NASPA 2015 JCC

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

ways in which it is commonly deployed tend to reify existing inequalities. For example, Zemach-Bersin(2007) suggested global citizenship can obscure “politics and power structures that are tied to the interestsof and allegiances to the nation-state” (p. 20) and support “a sense of universal entitlement” among U.S.students studying abroad (p. 21). Some critiques offered by this position are so thoroughgoing as to suggestthe concept of global citizenship is irredeemable, while others reformulate it. For example, drawing ontransnational feminism, Mohanty (2003) conceptualized “transborder democratic citizenship” (p. 528),which entails “building feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, belief,and so on” (p. 530). Jorgenson and Shultz (2012) suggested the need to explicitly link global citizenshipwith social justice efforts, while Rhoads and Szelényi (2011) argued for a “globally informed collectivism”

that is “less imperial, more thoughtful, more caring, more transnationally connected” (p. 42).Many anti-oppressive scripts are rooted in the conviction that interventions should disrupt and resist

the reproduction of existing violent patterns of relation in order to “develop an alternative imaginary ofglobal connectivity” (Rizvi, 2009, p. 266). Some examples of this position are campus activists who contestthe use of sweatshop labor in the production of university apparel sold on campus (Silvey, 2002) or whocampaign for divesting endowment funds from fossil fuel companies or companies that profit from war orincarceration. Such actions are not always articulated through the framework of global citizenship,however, and may be understood as challenges to the concept itself. Some eschew the term globalcitizenship altogether, preferring terms that denote alternative conceptualizations of engagement, such as“trans-local relationalities” (Jazeel, 2011, p. 79), or imagining a form of global citizenship that “look[s] toits own undoing” (p. 94), that is, that goes to its limits in order to imagine beyond it. In any case, anti-oppressive scripts tend to question the depoliticization, ahistoricism, salvationism, ethnocentrism, andpaternalism that often characterize global citizenship efforts (Andreotti, 2012), and thereby offer a meansto speak back to the two dominant global citizenship scripts, and create important opportunities fordiscussion, systemic analysis, and self-reflexivity.

However, this position also has limitations. Those enacting anti-oppressive scripts can inadvertentlyassert their own innocence or heroism by failing to recognize their complicity in the systems under critiqueor to question their own assumptions and motivations (Ellsworth, 1989; Hoofd, 2012). Further, in someversions of this position, there is a strong emphasis on change based in a commitment to engineer progressthrough rational planning and individual political and moral agency (Moallem, 2006). Basing change inthese anthropocentric, logocentric, and egocentric logics can inadvertently reproduce coercive relationshipsand recreate the colonial violence that this position critiques (Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015).Thus, in its concern to refute the power and universalism of the two dominant positions, the anti-oppressiveposition can at times overlook the possibility that it, too, maintains some Eurocentric assumptions.

The Incommensurable Position

Although each of the three positions detailed above offer different approaches to global citizenship, they alllargely presume that their desired educational and/or political outcomes can be known and determined inadvance through the thought, planning, and intention of individuals. With these limitations in mind, Iarticulate a fourth position, in which existing scripts for thought and action are not outright rejected, buttheir limitations are illuminated through encounters with and across difference. To craft this position, I drawon scholars engaged in trenchant critique of the Eurocentric cosmopolitical ordering of the world and itspresumed hierarchy of humanity. This hierarchy produces a sharp distinction between White subjects of theliberal West (whose humanity is projected as superior and universal) and racialized or Indigenous Others

Global Citizenship 247

JCC © NASPA 2015 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

(whose humanity is suspect, and defined as perpetually underdeveloped and inferior according to universalstandards).

According to this position, the claims to universalism made by the West are only made possiblethrough the enactment of symbolic and material violence upon its Others, particularly through the demandthat the latter be made coherent and legible through some measure of sameness or out of tokenisticappreciation. As such, this position has similarities with the anti-oppressive position. However, rather thandemanding specific transformations, in this position there are tentative explorations of what it might meanto breach the current ordering of the world without prescribing exactly the outcome. Further, many of thesethinkers explicitly draw on possibilities offered by relationships across difference that do not need to bereconciled through consensus or synthesis.

Povinelli (2001) argued that a politics based in commensurability tends to require that all thoseperceived to think or act outside of sanctioned liberal norms adjust to those norms, either by changing inorder to adhere to them or by translating their difference into that which is legible to normative subjects. Inother words, commensurability is only made possible through repression and subjugation. In contrast, acommitment to incommensurability would resist “normative commitments and prescriptive futures”(Povinelli, 2013, p. 443). Bringing together that which appears incommensurable may undo given socialarrangements and generate new, more horizontal modes of relating.

Nayar (2013) argued that if universalism is foundational to Western onto-epistemology, then rethink-ing existing arrangements must not become efforts to merely include into Western humanity those whohave been excluded because doing so would maintain (though expand) existing boundaries, as in manyentrepreneurial and liberal humanist approaches (as well as some anti-oppressive). Such inclusion isconditional on the will of those doing the including and often translates into a demand that Others beotherwise than they are. An alternative approach might denaturalize colonial assumptions about universalhumanity and recognize different modes of existence as both co-eval and indispensable, rather than asindications of lack, inferiority, or insufficient evolution.

Denaturalizing assumptions about Western supremacy and the way these assumptions order the worldis no easy task, however, because doing so can create “ever-uncertain outcome[s]” (Nayar, 2013, p. 79).Hence, even the mere curricular presence of non-Western epistemologies in the university can be under-stood as threatening (Grosfoguel, 2013). In light of this, Santos’s (2007) work on thinking complementsNayar’s work on being. In brief, Santos suggested that epistemic violence creates a divide, on one side ofwhich Western knowledge is affirmed and the other side of which all other knowledges and ways ofknowing are denied. If this epistemic violence is structured by the “impossibility of the co-presence of thetwo sides of the line,” then rupturing this divide would require affirmation of “radical co-presence,” which“means that practices and agents on both sides of the line are contemporary in equal terms” (np).Incommensurabilities may arise from this co-presence, but these are to be welcomed because the contra-dictions that arise in liminal areas where different ways of knowing meet may be incredibly generative.Mignolo (2007) described these liminal areas in his concept of border thinking, summarized by Andreotti(2011) as “an epistemic mode that works as a ‘double critique’ to crack the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system away from Eurocentrism as an epistemological perspective” (p. 386).

The project “Through Other Eyes” (TOE) may be understood as a practical example of an incommen-surable approach to global citizenship. By presenting Indigenous perspectives on international development tostudents in the UK, TOE was intended to prompt recognition of “the limits of modern reasoning triggered byradical alterity” (Andreotti, 2014, p. 142). The project was formulated so as to invite (but not coerce)participating students to “re-arrange their attachments to absolute certainties and desires for consensus,

248 Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 4, November 2015

doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc © NASPA 2015 JCC

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

intelligibility and discursive completeness” (p. 143). Through this program, engagement with difference wasnot formulated as a means to develop greater understanding of the self or of the Other, or to find commonalitiesbetween the two, but rather served as a “push towards the limits of existing possibilities” (p. 143).

As with any other global citizenship position, incommensurability has limitations. For example,border thinking is not a mere abstraction but rather often grounded in “colonial wounds and imperialsubordination” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 493). Similarly, as Roshanravan’s (2012) work on the devaluedintercultural competencies of racialized populations in the United States suggests, although border thinkingserves as a means of survival for some, when these populations enact them, they are not recognized bymainstream institutions as valuable activities. Hence, from the perspective of the anti-oppressive globalcitizenship position, for example, it may be ethically irresponsible to encourage and engage in borderthinking without recognizing how existing efforts to border think are marginalized even as they are fosteredthrough structural inequities.

Further, the thinner script of this position in comparison to others may be frustrating for those,particularly in the liberal humanist or anti-oppressive positions, who seek clearly defined, progressiveoutcomes. However, the challenge offered by this position is also its gift: There is no one answer toquestions that might be raised from activities organized within it, such as “How can I know difference inways that do not prescribe otherness in my own terms?” (Jazeel, 2011, p. 88). Rather than assume that thischallenge makes the question not worth asking, it may be instead that these kind of impossible questionsenable new, and previously unimaginable, possibilities to emerge.

Conclusion

In this article, I mapped four global citizenship positions by tracing the recurring discursive scripts of each.The purpose of this mapping was to offer a provisional and partial interpretation of the positions that arepresently available. However, while existing scripts of global citizenship may provide the sense of securitydemanded of those guiding students’ international experiences, they can also foreclose opportunities toimagine otherwise. To claim that every approach to global citizenship will come with attendant limitationsis not to say scripts are all bad or that we can merely will them away in order to imagine them anew.Indeed, they are often strong and difficult to dislodge, being kept in place through repetition and entrenchedinstitutional forces and individual attachments.

Jazeel (2011) argued that imperial European imaginings of global cohabitation tend to inflect eventhe most radical efforts to rethink the concept. Drawing on Spivak’s work, he concluded that unlearningmight therefore be a necessary step toward living together differently, through “a willful wrenching awayfrom the desire to know without any degree of certainty or singularity” (p. 89). We might translateunlearning to an unscripting of discursive patterns of global citizenship. A first step in this processmight be to deepen critical engagement with existing scripts while nonetheless problematizing the colonialdesire to make the world fully knowable and, therefore, controllable. Thus, I would add that unscriptingmight need to be accompanied by what Spivak (2012) described as a move to “imagine ourselves asplanetary accidents rather than global agents” (p. 339).1 By encouraging students to imagine themselves asaccidents rather than agents, they might begin to recognize the practical and ethical limitations on their

1 I would like to thank Vanessa Andreotti for bringing my attention this idea of Spivak’s.

Global Citizenship 249

JCC © NASPA 2015 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

ability to control the world and their simultaneously boundless responsibility to grapple with the ethical andpolitical implications of interdependence.

Asking students to engage in this challenging work is no easy task, however, because social scriptssuch as those reviewed here are deeply embedded not only in institutional logics and structures but also instudents’ identities and sense of self. Thus, putting these scripts under question can generate both cognitiveand affective resistance (Taylor, 2013). However, the exercise of having students engage with maps ofglobal citizenship, such as the one provided here or ones that they themselves collaboratively produce,offers one way of denaturalizing common sense scripts for thought and action in international engagements.By helping students to identify how these scripts operate in both educational contexts and other areas oftheir life, and by helping to illuminate the gifts and weaknesses of each script, such maps can also prefigurethe imagination and enactment of other, less entrenched scripts.

At the same time, maps can offer important opportunities for students to face, and be taught by, theirown contradictions and complicity in systemic harm. In the process, students might come to recognize thatwhen they enact a particular script, they have not chosen another, and we have therefore bracketed otherpossibilities. In some cases, they know what they have bracketed, and do so intentionally, while otherthings they bracket unknowingly because they do not know they do not know them or perhaps becausethey are not knowable. If we encouraged students to approach global citizenship from a place thatacknowledges this bracketing, and the boundedness of their certainty, coherence, and control, they mightexperience indeterminacy, incoherency, and interdependence not as limitations but as generative of newpossibilities for knowing, being, and relating.

ORCID

Sharon Stein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6995-8274

References

Altbach, P., & Knight, J. (2007). The internationalization of higher education: Motivations and realities. Journal of Studies

in International Education, 11(3–4), 290–305. doi:10.1177/1028315307303542

Andreotti, V. D. O. (2011). (Towards) decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies

and Education, 9(3–4), 381–397. doi:10.1080/14767724.2011.605323

Andreotti, V. D. O. (2012). Education, knowledge and the righting of wrongs. Other Education, 1(1), 19–31.

Andreotti, V. D. O. (2014). Strategic criticism and the question of (in)accessibility of the Other. Glottopol: Revue de

Sociolingquistque En Ligne, 23, 134–147.

Andreotti, V. D. O., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of

higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(1), 21–40.

Biddle, S. (2002). Internationalization: Rhetoric or reality? ACLS Occasional Paper No. 56. New York, NY: American

Council of Learned Societies.

Bolsmann, C., & Miller, H. (2008). International student recruitment to universities in England: Discourse, rationales and

globalisation. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6(1), 75–88. doi:10.1080/14767720701855634

Braskamp, L. A. (2008). Developing global citizens. Journal of College & Character, 10(1), 1–5. doi:10.2202/1940-

1639.1058

Braskamp, L. A. (2010). Being effective interventionists to foster student global citizenship. Journal of College &

Character, 11(1), 1–6. doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1014

Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory and Event, 7(1).

250 Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 4, November 2015

doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc © NASPA 2015 JCC

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

Bryan, A. (2013). “The impulse to help”: (Post) humanitarianism in an era of the “new” development advocacy.

International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 5(2), 5–29.

Caruana, V. (2014). Re‐thinking global citizenship in higher education: From cosmopolitanism and international mobility to

cosmopolitanisation, resilience and resilient thinking. Higher Education Quarterly, 68(1), 85–104. doi:10.1111/

hequ.2014.68.issue-1

Deardorff, D. K. (2006). Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationaliza-

tion. Journal of Studies in International Education, 10(3), 241–266. doi:10.1177/1028315306287002

Dhawan, N. (2013). Coercive cosmopolitanism and impossible solidarities. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social

Sciences, 22(1), 139–166. doi:10.5250/quiparle.22.1.0139

Dolby, N. (2008). Global citizenship and study abroad: A comparative study of American and Australian undergraduates.

Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 17, 51–67.

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy.

Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–325. doi:10.17763/haer.59.3.058342114k266250

Gacel-Ávila, J. (2005). The internationalisation of higher education: A paradigm for global citizenry. Journal of Studies in

International Education, 9(2), 121–136. doi:10.1177/1028315304263795

Gibb, T., & Walker, J. (2011). Educating for a high skills society? The landscape of federal employment, training and

lifelong learning policy in Canada. Journal of Education Policy, 26, 381–398. doi:10.1080/02680939.2010.520744

Grosfoguel, R. (2012). Decolonizing Western uni-versalisms: Decolonial pluri-versalism from Aimé Césaire to the zapa-

tistas. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(3), 88–104.

Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in Westernized universities. Human Architecture: Journal of the

Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 11(1), 73–90.

Hanson, L. (2010). Global citizenship, global health, and the internationalization of curriculum: A study of transformative

potential. Journal of Studies in International Education, 14(1), 70–88. doi:10.1177/1028315308323207

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hoofd, I. M. (2012). Ambiguities of activism: Alter-globalism and the imperatives of speed. New York, NY: Routledge.

Jazeel, T. (2011). Spatializing difference beyond cosmopolitanism: Rethinking planetary futures. Theory, Culture & Society,

28(5), 75–97. doi:10.1177/0263276411410447

Jefferess, D. (2011). Benevolence, global citizenship and post-racial politics. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies,

25, 77–95.

Jorgenson, S., & Shultz, L. (2012). Global citizenship education (GCE) in postsecondary institutions: What is protected and

what is hidden under the umbrella of GCE? Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education, 2(1), 1–22.

Khoo, S. (2011). Ethical globalisation or privileged globalisation or privileged internationalisation? Exploring global

citizenship and internationalisation in Irish and Canadian universities. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(3–4),

337–353. doi:10.1080/14767724.2011.605320

Killick, D. (2011). Seeing ourselves-in-the-world: Developing global citizenship through international mobility and campus

community. Journal of Studies in International Education, 16(4), 372–389. doi:10.1177/1028315311431893

Lee, J. J. (2006). Global citizenship: Extending students’ knowledge and action to the global context. Journal of College &

Character, 7(1), 121–136. doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1504

Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality.

Cultural Studies, 21(2), 449–514. doi:10.1080/09502380601162647

Moallem, M. (2006). Feminist scholarship and the internationalization of women’s studies. Feminist Studies, 32(2),

332–351. doi:10.2307/20459089

Mohanty, C. T. (2003). “Under western eyes” revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society, 28(2), 499–535. doi:10.1086/signs.2003.28.issue-2

Morais, D. B., & Ogden, A. C. (2011). Initial development and validation of the global citizenship scale. Journal of Studies

in International Education, 15(5), 445–466. doi:10.1177/1028315310375308

Global Citizenship 251

JCC © NASPA 2015 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15

Nayar, J. (2013). The politics of hope and the other-in-the-world: Thinking exteriority. Law Critique, 24, 63–85.

doi:10.1007/s10978-012-9115-8

Nussbaum, M. (2002). Education for citizenship in an era of global connection. Studies in Philosophy and Education,

21(4/5), 289–303. doi:10.1023/A:1019837105053

Patterson, L. M., Carrillo, P. B., & Salinas, R. S. (2012). Lessons from a global learning virtual classroom. Journal of

Studies in International Education, 16(2), 182–197. doi:10.1177/1028315311398665

Pennsylvania State University. (2008). University Office of International Programs Strategic Plan: 2009–2013. Retrieved

from http://www.global.psu.edu/about/pdf/StrategicPlan.pdf

Povinelli, E. A. (2001). Radical worlds: The anthropology of incommensurability and inconceivability. Annual Review of

Anthropology, 30, 319–334. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.319

Povinelli, E. A. (2013). Response. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 15(3), 435–457.

Rhoads, R. A., & Szelényi, K. (2011). Global citizenship and the university: Advancing social life and relations in an

interdependent world. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rizvi, F. (2009). Towards cosmopolitan learning. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(3), 253–268.

Roberts, D. C., Welch, L., & Al-Khanji, K. (2013). Preparing global citizens. Journal of College & Character, 14(1), 85–92.

doi:10.1515/jcc-2013-0012

Roshanravan, S. (2012). Staying home while studying abroad: Anti-imperial praxis for globalizing feminist visions. Journal

of Feminist Scholarship, 2, 1–23.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Santos, B. S. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Revista Critica de Ciencias

Sociais, 80. Retrieved from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-san-tos-en.html

Silva, D. F. D. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Silvey, R. (2002). Sweatshops and the corporatization of the university. Gender, Place & Culture, 9(2), 201–207.

doi:10.1080/09663960220139725

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of

culture (pp. 24–28). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Spivak, G. C. (2012). An aesthetic education in the era of globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Stier, J. (2004). Taking a critical stance toward internationalization ideologies in higher education: Idealism, instrumentalism

and educationalism. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2(1), 1–28. doi:10.1080/1476772042000177069

Tarrant, M. A. (2010). A conceptual framework for exploring the role of studies abroad in nurturing global citizenship.

Journal of Studies in International Education, 14(5), 433–451. doi:10.1177/1028315309348737

Taylor, L. K. (2013). Against the tide: Working with and against the affective flows of resistance in social and global justice

learning. Critical Literacy: Theories & Practices, 7(2), 58–68.

University of Wisconsin-Madison. (2008). University of Wisconsin-Madison Reaccreditation 2009. Team 4: Preparing

global citizens and leaders. Retrieved from http://www.greatu.wisc.edu/theme- teams/documents/team4_report_

050908.pdf

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its over-

representation–An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

Zemach-Bersin, T. (2007). Global citizenship & study abroad: It’s all about U.S. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 1

(2), 16–28.

252 Journal of College & Character VOLUME 16, No. 4, November 2015

doi:10.1080/2194587X.2015.1091361 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc © NASPA 2015 JCC

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

ritis

h C

olum

bia]

at 0

3:39

21

Nov

embe

r 20

15