Towards Cosmopolitan Learning

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Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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Towards cosmopolitan learning

Fazal Rizvi
a a
Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, 1310 S Sixth Street, Champaign, IL, 61820, USA Published online: 30 Jun 2009.
To cite this article: Fazal Rizvi (2009) Towards cosmopolitan learning, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30:3, 253-268, DOI: 10.1080/01596300903036863 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300903036863
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Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Vol. 30, No. 3, September 2009, 253268
Towards cosmopolitan learning

Fazal Rizvi*
Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, 1310 S Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA In recent years, the idea of cosmopolitanism has variously been explored as a political philosophy, a moral theory and a cultural disposition. In each of these cases, this new interest in cosmopolitanism is based upon a recognition that our world is increasingly interconnected and interdependent globally, and that most of our problems are global in nature requiring global solutions. In this paper, I argue that this recognition demands new resources of learning about how our lives are becoming re-shaped by global processes and connections, and how we might live with and steer the economic, political and cultural shifts that contemporary forms of global connectivity represent. In the context of these global shifts, learning itself needs to become cosmopolitan. This requires the development of a new approach around the old idea of cosmopolitanism, interpreting it not so much as a universal moral principle, nor as a prescription recommending a particular form of political configuration nor indeed as a transnational life-style but a mode of learning about, and ethically engaging with, new social formations. Keywords: cosmopolitanism; globalization; neoliberalism; cultural encounters; learning
Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 21:19 26 August 2013
Introduction In recent years, much has been said and written about the idea of cosmopolitanism. In popular discourse, cosmopolitanism has come to refer to various elite modes of living made possible by the global mobility of capital, people and ideas, resulting in inter-cultural encounters of various kinds. In academic literatures, it has been used to articulate a set of principles with which to interpret and respond to the contemporary conditions of globalization. The idea of cosmopolitanism has variously been explored as a political philosophy, a moral theory and a cultural disposition. In each of these cases, this new interest in cosmopolitanism is based upon a recognition that our world is increasingly interconnected and interdependent globally, and that most of our problems are global in nature requiring global solutions. In this paper, I want to argue that this recognition demands new resources of learning about how our lives are becoming re-shaped by global processes and connections, and how we might live with and steer the economic, political and cultural shifts that contemporary forms of global connectivity represent. In the context of these global shifts, I want to suggest, learning itself needs to become cosmopolitan. This, in my view, requires the development of a new approach around
*Email: frizvi@uiuc.edu
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/01596300903036863 http://www.informaworld.com
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the old idea of cosmopolitanism, interpreting it not so much as a universal moral principle, nor a prescription recommending a particular form of political configuration nor indeed a transnational life-style but a mode of learning about, and ethically engaging with, new social formations. My argument is that if global connectivity has become a pervasive socio-cultural condition, then attempts to understand the dynamics of intercultural relations should no longer be aligned entirely to local and national requirements and prejudices, but should instead seek to become cosmopolitan. In the context of educational practice, this focus on cosmopolitan learning should involve efforts to develop in students a set of epistemic virtues. This does not mean ignoring local issues, but to understand them within the broader context of the global shifts that are reshaping the ways in which localities, and even social identities, are now becoming re-constituted. Such a cosmopolitan understanding, I want to argue, is necessary, if we are develop ways of ethically steering the direction of globallocal relations, instead of allowing them to be shaped simply by the dictates of global corporate capitalism. Historical cosmopolitanisms There is, of course, nothing new about the idea of cosmopolitism. In a highly influential paper, Martha Nussbaum (1996) notes, for example, the enthusiasm some ancient Greek philosophers displayed towards the notion of a globally inter-related moral order. For the Stoic philosophers, the term, cosmopolitan stood for citizens of the world those who considered humankind as more important than their own state or native land. The Stoics were opposed to the views of their contemporaries, such as Plato, who considered citizens to have a duty to identify themselves first and foremost as citizens of a particular polis or city, help defend it from attacks, sustain its institutions of justice, and contribute to its common good. In contrast, according to Nussbaum (1996, p. 11), the Stoic philosophers regarded any attempt to accord ones own traditions special salience in moral and political deliberations as both morally dangerous and, ultimately subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve: morally dangerous because this reinforced the unexamined assumption that ones own preferences and ways of acting were somehow natural and perfectly rational and subversive because it overlooked the fact that, in the longer term, even our most local of interests are tied to the broader concerns of others. For the Stoics, cosmopolitanism did not, however, mean giving up local affiliations in order to be citizens of the world, but to recognize that while local traditions could be a source of great richness in the world, they could also produce much conflict, especially if they were celebrated in an uncritically partisan fashion. Indeed, the Stoics developed their view of cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of regular wars and on-going conflict between city-states. Their philosophical case for cosmopolitanism was thus based not only on a set of moral dictates but also on a particular understanding of how the interests of city-states were economically and politically related. Indeed, their moral principles evolved out of an empirical understanding of the nature and causes of political disputes. For the Stoics, education had an important role to play in disseminating this understanding linked to certain convictions about how such disputes could be resolved with a genuine
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belief in a common humanity that transcended differences in cultural traditions and political configurations. In the nineteenth century, various concepts of cosmopolitanism similarly emerged within a historical context of wars and on-going conflict among European states. Indeed, Kants famous essay, Perpetual Peace (1795/1960), was written during a period of considerable inter-state turmoil in Europe, around the time of the French Revolution. Kant saw the attainment of a cosmopolitan order as the greatest challenge facing humanity, even greater than the achievement of a coherent legal system within nation-states. He insisted that as fantastical as the notion was, a cosmopolitan order was essential if the human race was not to consume itself in wars between nations and if the power of the nation-state was not to overwhelm the freedom of individuals. Kant objected to the Hobbesian view that conflict was inimical to human nature, and was also critical of the ways in which European powers treated foreigners as enemies and continued to treat their colonies as if they were land without borders. In this way, Kant resisted growing nationalistic currents in his own times, expressed in France as enlightened and in Germany as romantic. As an Enlightenment philosopher, Kant was committed to a set of universal moral precepts. He viewed the world in terms of an integrated moral order, based on the promise of science as a language of universal laws that was applicable to the entire world, natural as well as social. Kants conception of cosmopolitan order was thus based on his formula of universal law, the highest of moral principles the categorical imperatives. This politico-legal order consisted of rules that prescribed a lawful external relation among states and a universal civil society. These rules were designed to constrain states power, but not their freedom. Kant intended such rules to guarantee the right of hospitality, a universal right of humanity to all individuals. His view of cosmopolitanism thus implied a particular form of moral education, designed to teach students the universalism of his moral theory, an understanding of the formal codification of individuals fundamental rights irrespective of their nationality, ethnicity, race, social status of religious beliefs, and a moral disposition to act in demonstration of respect for human dignity and universal rights (Kant, 2003). Over the years, the Kantian view of cosmopolitanism has not of course been uncontested. Even during Kants own times, many German philosophers favored a romantic nationalism, while others favored contrasting conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Pauline Kleingeld (1999) has noted that there were a number of different versions of cosmopolitanism in late eighteenth-century Germany. She lists these as:
moral cosmopolitanism; proposals for reform of the international political and legal order; cultural cosmopolitanism, which emphasizes the value of global cultural pluralism; economic cosmopolitanism, which aims at establishing a global free market where all humans are equal potential trading partners; and the romantic cosmopolitan ideal of humanity as united by faith and love. (1999, p. 506)
Kleingeld notes that these kinds of cosmopolitanism are by no means mutually exclusive and are even related to each other. However, what her list indicates is that the idea of cosmopolitanism has not only been highly contested over the ages, but that its different versions are grounded in different accounts of the ways in which the world is interconnected, accounts that foreground different aspects of this connectivity. As social and political conditions change, new ways of thinking about
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cosmopolitanism become necessary, as it becomes important to reconcile the moral demands of cosmopolitanism with emerging historical realities. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, support for cosmopolitanism in Europe had to come to terms with, for example, developments in capitalism, and also with the emergence of ideologies of colonialism. Under colonialism, notions of cosmopolitanism had to be taken beyond abstractions, into more substantive realms of social, economic and political practice. During the nineteenth century, for instance, globally integrated markets and financial systems emerged, as it became possible to transport goods across vast distances, and as people were able to remain in touch with each other using new communication technologies, such as the telegraph. As Scholte (2000, p. 70) notes, it is the incipient global communications, markets, money and finance in the late nineteenth century that encouraged the formation of international organizations to regulate cross-border movement of goods, money and people. These connectivities were not, however, restricted to the economic sphere, they also led to the development of a popular consciousness, as people wished to find out more about the countries with whom they traded, as well as the peoples and cultures they colonized. As Edward Said (1985) points out, the colonial consciousness was above all a mode of thinking, a system of knowledge with which to exercise power over colonized people, which contradicted many of the key tenets of Kantian universalistic cosmopolitanism. It represented a new way of describing and interpreting the global connectivity, a calculation that was able to justify colonial expansion and exploitation, without abandoning a sense the colonizers had of themselves as morally correct. In this new hegemonic view of cosmopolitanism education had to play a major role in the dissemination of colonial ideas, designed not only to buttress the exercise of power, but also to make it appear legitimate to the colonized and colonizing populations alike. In this way, the main aim of orientalism (Said, 1985) was the development of a global consciousness consistent with the economic and political interests of the colonial powers. Not surprisingly therefore both Britain and France invested heavily in creating educational systems in the countries they colonized. Schools were established to educate the masses, and universities were created to develop a local administrative elite beholden to colonial powers. The ethos and structure of the emerging colonial systems of higher education mirrored those of the colonial centre. The universities in far-flung parts of the British Empire, for example, followed the same curriculum, and examined students in the same manner. Universities in both Britain and the colonies encouraged students to imagine the British Empire as a seamless entity, built around a core set of values and interests that were often viewed as cosmopolitan. Students were encouraged to learn the languages and cultures of the Empire, even if this knowledge was constructed in a particular way, which portrayed the native as simple, exotic or inferior, in need of civilizational development. Contemporary global connectivities What these brief historical observations show is that the notions of global connectivity and interdependence have always been both located within particular historical contexts and informed by various political interests. This is true equally of our own age, in which global connectivity is experienced and interpreted in a range
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of new ways. The revolutionary advances in technology have enabled people living in different countries to not only become more inter-connected than ever before but also develop a distinctive consciousness about the challenges and possibilities of inter-cultural encounters. People have now become much more mobile, with global mobility perhaps becoming one of the defining characteristics of our age. And even if many, perhaps most, people are not able to travel extensively, they are constantly in touch with friends and colleagues who live and work around the world: their lives are increasingly shaped by the social imaginaries of what Craig Calhoun (2002) calls the frequently traveled and what Zygmunt Bauman (1998) refers to as tourists. Contemporary accounts of global connectivity hence differ markedly from earlier historical constructions. They are different from the colonial constructions, for instance, in that they do not assume a political center from which economic and political activity across the world is controlled and coordinated. They suggest rather that the major advances in information and communication technologies have converted the world into a single world system. According to Albrow (1991, p. 9), the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single society, global society. As a result of time-space compression, Robertson (1992, p. 8) argues, cultures and societies are being squeezed together and driven towards mutual interaction, within various social, economic and political networks that no longer presuppose linearity and homogeneity. So, while in various religious doctrines, the notion of global inter-connectivity represented a spiritual aspiration, and while in its colonial construction it was a political project designed to legitimize territorial conquests, in the contemporary era, it describes an empirical reality resulting from the ease with which goods, finance, people, ideas and media are now able to flow across the world, leading to a radical shift in our understanding of space and time. It places great emphasis on the role people themselves play in forging and sustaining conceptions of global connectivity. In this way, global connectivity is neither systematic nor structured around some central locus of power, but is defined through popular consciousness, a form of social imagination (Taylor, 2004). It is produced organically through the shifting subjectivities of people. Tomlinson (2000, p. 2) refers to this as complex connectivity, consisting in the rapidly developing and ever-densening networks of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life. This form of connectivity, he argues, implies proximity as a social-cultural condition. It suggests a kind of cultural awareness that has itself become global. In this way, the idea of globalization does not only refer to new practices of economic exchange but perhaps more significantly the intensification of consciousness of a world as a whole (Robertson, 1992, p. 8). As Arjun Appadurai (1996, p. 11) points out: globalization is not simply the name for a new epoch in the history of capital or in the biography of the nation-state, but is marked by a new role for imagination in social life. In relation to the various ways in which global processes now work through the flows of people, capital and information, as well as ideas and images found in the media Appadurai is surely correct in arguing that imagination has become a critical part of collective, social, everyday life and is a form of labor (1996, p. 11). A global imagination now plays a crucial role in how people engage with their everyday activities, consider their options and make decisions within the new configurations of social relations that are
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no longer confined to local communities but potentially span, either directly or indirectly, across national boundaries. It is now abundantly clear that no community is entirely unaffected by global processes, because even if people do not recognize their effects, it is hard to see how their subjectivities can remain unaltered by global shifts, produced by increasing amounts of travel, access to the global media, the changing nature of work, and the shifting modes of social imagination. People often experience these transformations as social disruption, but do not always recognize how the sources of this disruption do not necessarily lie within their own communities but in the massive changes taking place in the wider world. These changes shape the lives of both the tourists and the vagabonds, as well as those who are not mobile, in a manner that is dialectical, as Bauman (1998) has so clearly demonstrated. They represent various shifting dynamics of connectivity, produced in many different ways, displaying modalities that are uneven and disproportional. Contemporary global connectivities are generating intricate demographic profiles, economic realities, political processes, media and technologies, cultural facts and artifacts and identities. There people are now on the move more than ever before, for a whole range of reasons migration, work, tourism, education and the like. New dynamics of immigration are transforming the cities around the world, making them global (Sassen, 1991). Communities are now transnationally networked, with new patterns of communication and ideological links, configured in a range of diverse and complicated ways. The new diasporas (Cohen, 1997) are, for example, no longer reluctant to exercise political power in the communities they have left. All communities are exposed to global media and popular culture as never before. Cultural products are now globally produced, distributed and consumed. The nature of work is constantly changing, and is often organized in a manner that stretches across the world. In short, goods, capital, technologies, people, knowledge, images, crime, beliefs, fashions and desires all readily flow across territorial boundaries. While recent globalization theories have struggled to understand these new realities, the appeal of the idea of cosmopolitanism is in its suggestions about how best to live with them in a morally coherent fashion. In this way, the notion of cosmopolitanism has the potential to bring together both the facts and the values associated with complex connectivity. While the facts of rapidly developing and everdensening network of interconnections can no longer be denied, it is less clear how particular communities and people experience and are affected by global connectivity, how they interpret its various expressions and how they utilize this understanding to forge their sense of belonging, and their social imagination. These questions clearly require detailed empirical research that has now begun to be conducted by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural theorists alike (see, for example, Burawoy, Blum, George, & Gille, 2000). But these are not merely empirical questions, they are also normative. They relate to the issues of how we steer these global transformations to forge better futures. And if indeed these transformations affect everyone, albeit in ways that are highly differentiated and unequal, then the question arises as to how we develop a conception of cosmopolitanism that is not only empirically informed but also ethically grounded.
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Corporate cosmopolitanism In recent years, many theorists have sought to develop such a conception of cosmopolitanism, to address questions relating to the contemporary dynamics of global connectivity. Some have sought to revive Stoic and Kantian ideas, located within debates in traditional moral theory. However, a more implicit view of cosmopolitanism has also emerged, and has perhaps become hegemonic. It is associated with an ideology that sees the world as a single global sphere of free trade and economic exchange. It assumes cosmopolitanism to be a natural outcome of market economy in which national borders inevitably become less significant, and in which individual freedom has the potential not only to produce greater mobility and innovation but also result in greater cultural tolerance. This corporatist view of cosmopolitanism is based on a social imaginary that brings together, under a very broad conceptual umbrella, a range of economic, political, and cultural ideas, that are widely referred to as neoliberal. Fundamental to these ideas is an emphasis on individual freedom. In economic terms, neoliberalism implies the promotion of the instrumental values of free trade, competition and economic efficiency. As Peck and Tickle (2002, p. 394) argue, as a constellation of ideas, neoliberalism promotes and normalizes a growth-first approach to economic policy, relegating social concerns as secondary. It rests on a pervasive naturalization of market logics, justifying them on the grounds of efficiency, and even fairness. It highlights the importance of global trade and modes of production, unconstrained by national regulatory regimes. Politically, neoliberalism involves an emphasis on the idea of a minimalist state, underscoring notions of lean government, privatization and deregulation. These economic and political ideas are, however, also supported by a moral vocabulary based on the idea of individual choice, enabling people to pursue their own interests, unconstrained by the dictates of the state, as well as of national borders. The idea of cosmopolitanism based on these neoliberal premises thus suggests that the market, as a single global sphere of free trade, has the potential to promote greater intercultural understanding and peace. Such a view assumes the selfregulative capacity of the market and takes all human beings as equal potential trading partners. Its ideals are couched in terms of natural human rights, expressed in terms of property rather than personal rights (Bowles & Gintis, 1985). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, this view has been widely celebrated, not only by many governments but also political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama (1992), who wrote of end of history to mark what he saw as the inevitable triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy over socialists and nationalist regimes. In his highly optimistic view, he predicted the people of the world coming together, overcoming the structural barriers that prevented inter-cultural understanding. Fukuyama argued that the global portability of ideas, people and finance would inevitably lead to the development of cosmopolitan sensibilities, within a global potpourri of cultural forms and practices. Bruce Robbins (1998, p. 3) refers to this as actual existing cosmopolitanism, a view that suggests that transnational economic and cultural flows have produced an emergent cosmopolitanism, by virtue of the facts of the detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives. The new cosmopolitans, he suggests, are indifferent to where they live, viewing themselves to
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either have multiple attachments or be habitants of the whole world. Their calculations about sense of belonging are often strategic and de-centering. They view themselves as worldly, exhibiting a culturally open disposition and an interest in continually engaging in diversity. In another paper, I (Rizvi, 2005) have shown how the contemporary market-based practices of international education are based within this logic, and how the cosmopolitanism of many international students consists in their participation in an economic exchange, in which they are less concerned with the moral and political dimensions of global connectivity than with educations strategic economic possibilities. As a result, their cosmopolitan outlook is framed by the role they believe international education to play in better positioning them within the changing structures of the global economy, which increasingly prizes the skills of intercultural experiences and a cosmopolitan outlook. Aihwa Ong (1999) has similarly sought to understand the cultural aspects of this global world-view. She argues that, in the era of globalization, mobile individuals are able to develop flexible notions of citizenship as strategies to accumulate capital and power. The contemporary logic of capital accumulation is to induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions (Ong, 1999, p. 21). Powerful incentives exist for individuals to emphasize practices that favor flexibility, mobility and repositioning in relation to markets, governments and cultural regimes. She illustrates her general thesis by referring to Hong Kong Chinese immigrants to the USA, who seem to display an e lan for thriving in conditions of political insecurity, as well as in the turbulence of global trade (Ong, 1999, p. 24). What this discussion indicates is that globalization does not only describe a new global economic and political architecture, but more significantly implies the development of a new form of subjectivity. It valorizes cosmopolitan subjects who are culturally flexible and adaptable who are able to take advantage of the global processes that paradoxically are portrayed as objective and historically inevitable. But that these processes are neither objective nor historically inevitable can be demonstrated by showing how they privilege a particular interpretation of global connectivity, designed to steer the subjective or phenomenological awareness of people. It not only encourages a particular reading of recent changes in the global economy but also presupposes a set of values attached to that reading, which directs us towards a consciousness of the world as a single space constituted through a set of economic configurations and social networks. As Cohen and Kennedy argue, such an account is associated with a set of value preferences changes associated with globalization so that they are now incorporated into our emotions and our ways of thinking about everyday life (2000, p. 58). The corporatist view of cosmopolitanism is arguably based on this reading of global connectivity. It celebrates individuals who are able to take advantage of global mobility, negotiate linguistic and cultural diversity, and have the class-consciousness of the transnational elite (Sklair, 2000). It encourages values that are associated with global economic exchange, social entrepreneurialism and cultural adaptability. Freed from the constraints of national regulations, it views economic exchange as flexible and dynamic. It considers cultural exchange as necessarily productive of new hybrid forms that are increasingly global in character. They are facilitated by the unifying potential of global telecommunications and digital information systems to drive a
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new global culture of consumption. This approach to cosmopolitanism thus underscores the positive, socio-culturally and politically transformative meanings of the term (Zachary, 2000). Beyond corporatism and universalism However, the promise of this transformation is inherently contradictory, since it pulls people in the direction of cultural flexibility, on the one hand, and cultural uncertainty and confusion, on the other. The corporate cosmopolitanism of the global elite moreover masks the various contradictions of new capitalism, for while it involves a genuinely de-centering move that recognizes multiple identities working across complex and diverse experiences, it fails to show how the complex tensions and interactions between nationalist and global forces in the contemporary period might be resolved and how new forms of transnational solidarity might be forged. Corporate cosmopolitanisms faith in globalization opening up new emancipatory possibilities seems hopelessly unrealistic in view of the overwhelming evidence of persistent, even growing inequalities (Ray, 2007). As Craig Calhoun (2002) puts it, this new cosmopolitanism the cosmopolitanism of the frequent travelers is inevitably contradictory in its articulation of the possibilities of solidarity across cultural and national differences. At a time when identity politics has seemingly put an end to the possibility for genuine global solidarity, corporate cosmopolitanism promises a democratic means of dealing with politics of difference and of resolving cultural conflict. But such an approach seems unaware of its own potential collusion with global capitalism. It assumes global markets to provide the mechanism for cultural integration, but appears to overlook the fact that markets do not operate in a politically neutral space. On the contrary, with capital flows becoming more and more global, transnational corporations acquire an inordinate amount of power, creating conditions in which the subaltern groups of people are further marginalized. In this way, corporate cosmopolitanism serves only to extend the power of the transnational elite, reproducing asymmetries of power, both within and across national boundaries. In the contemporary context of globalization, other views of cosmopolitanism, based, for example, on Kants moral theory are equally hard to sustain, not least because they are based on a universalism that neither acknowledges cultural diversity as a permanent feature of modern life nor seriously addresses the historically inherited inequalities in power relations. Kants view of cosmopolitanism is built upon the Stoic ethical sensibilities, guiding them into the domain of actual political process and juridical organization (Hayden, 2005, p. 22). However, common to both the Stoics and Kant is a universalism that assumes a set of moral convictions that emerge out of a metaphysic of common humanity. They embody a humanism that presupposes that all cultural groups share similar moral outlooks. Accordingly, each of these views imply the need for the state to be neutral with respect to the particularities of any culture, except in preserving the rights of individuals associated with humanity. However, as Stuart Hall (2002) asks, whether this universalistic framework is the only and the best possible shell for understanding cosmopolitan modernity. Practically, he notes, there are all kinds of problems associated with the actual operations of such a system in guaranteeing either freedom or equality to all the
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citizens regardless of their background. Conceptually, Hall notes, a cosmopolitanism based on universal principles assumes a fixed notion of moral tradition as already constituted in authority, as well as a view of culture as static, and not as something that is continuously changing, responding to the new circumstances in which it is embedded and encountered. Such a universalism also assumes a world that is segmented in terms of specific, well-bounded, tightly knit, organic communities, now having to interact with others as never before. But, as Hall insists, this is not the world we live in anymore. In the current context of globalization, groups, while they are culturally marked, are not entirely separated from each other, and are constantly re-shaped by cross-cultural encounters. While cultural traditions might be important to them in terms of their self-understanding, most groups have wider lateral connections that are not only located within nation-states but potentially span the globe. Hall suggests that the globally open spaces in which we now live require a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism that
is aware of the limitations of any one culture or any one identity and that is radically aware of its insufficiency in governing a wider society, but which nevertheless is prepared to rescind its claims to the traces of difference, which make its life important. (2002, p. 30)
What this suggests is that local and national attachments remain important in the new era, but in ways that are crucially dynamic, articulated in new ways, against conditions in which our problems and their solutions are inter-connected and transcend national boundaries. In this context, the nature of the polity within which moral claims are best addressed is itself open to question and political elaboration. A philosopher who has sought to develop a view of cosmopolitanism consistent with these requirements is Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006). Appiah rejects both corporatist and universalist conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Properly conceived, he argues, cosmopolitanism does not contradict patriotism, but nor does it assume global connectivity can be described in some absolutist terms a universalism in disguise. Appiah stresses that while individuals and communities can be different, and have their foibles that shape interests and values, they can also learn. In his view, it is possible to genuinely engage with ways of other societies without approving, let alone adopting them. Appiah suggests that if people with vastly different religious, sexual, and political attachments are to live together without violence they must master the arts of conversation. Ultimately, Appiah believes that cosmopolitanism is best conceived as an ethical attitude towards global connectedness. This attitude is different from the currently hegemonic view which views globalization as a pre-given thing, existing outside of thought (Smith, 2001, p. 21) with its own developmental logic. To assume that it is the case is to pay little attention to the subjectivities of people, how these are formed, and how various discursive communities develop their own sense of global connectivity and interdependence. It is to ignore the salience of political agency, and to the fact that global processes are ever-changing products of human practices, and that they cannot be interpreted simply as expressions of the deeper logic of economic imperatives. It is to fail to come to terms with the situatedness of people, communities and nations alike. Time-space compression, for example, does not occur independently of the ways people experience their social location and relations,
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and cannot therefore be treated simply as a product of some deeper structural imperatives. If the facts of global connectivity are thus neither self-evident nor politically neutral then we cannot develop an ethical understanding of globalization, without reference to the actual actors who are shaping its hegemonic forms, on the one hand, and those who are contesting them, on the other, as well as the moral traditions within which they are located. In developing such an understanding, education has a major role to play in helping students to realize that each experience of connectivity has a specific history from which it has emerged, and that global connectivity is a dynamic phenomenon, politically and historically changing and that it is not only experienced differently, but is also interpreted differently in different contexts. Such an education involves a critical hermeneutical politics, a particular way of learning about cultural encounters and about sources of conflict and to imagine alternative futures. Cosmopolitan learning In such a context, the relationship between cosmopolitanism and education needs to be re-thought. If the views of cosmopolitanism based on universalism, on the one hand, and on the actual existing practices of globalization, on the other, are both flawed and inadequate, then we need an alternative, which while it recognizes the facts of global connectivity and interdependence does not assume the inevitability of the ways in which they are structured. I believe that cosmopolitanism can be a worthy goal, but only if it is historically informed and open to the diversity of moral and political traditions that are now inevitably involved in cross-cultural encounters. Cosmopolitanism is only worth pursuing if we are able to use it as an instrument of critical understanding and moral improvement. In this way, issues surrounding the cosmopolitan possibilities of education are at once empirical and normative. Empirically, they relate to the need for greater clarity over how global transformations are re-shaping our lives. Normatively, we need to ask how we should work with these transformations, creatively and in ways that are potentially progressive. And if indeed these transformations affect everyone, albeit in ways that are highly differentiated and unequal, then the question arises as to how education should respond to these shifts so that globalization does not further reproduce social inequalities. In other words, how should education be framed so that it provides students both an empirical understanding of global transformations, but also an ethical orientation towards them? At a practical level, attempts to realize the cosmopolitan possibilities of education face the highly entrenched traditions of educational policies and practices that remain largely locally defined, even if they are influenced by many external sources. The immediate issues we have to deal with are invariably local. If this is so, then, I believe that our approach to teaching about global connectivity should begin with the local, but must move quickly to address issues of how our local communities are becoming socially transformed through their links with communities around the world and with what consequences. In this way, I want to stress the relationalities that lie at the heart of any thinking about the dynamics of change. I believe that our focus ought to be on understanding the nature, scope and consequences of global transformations, rather than on some generalized principles of cosmopolitanism,
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global citizenship, or indeed the skills required in the global economy. In this way, learning about connectivity itself needs to become cosmopolitan. In developing this view of cosmopolitan learning, I draw heavily on both Appiah (2006) and Said (1994, 2004), especially Saids insistence upon the importance of contingency in both theoretical and political deliberations and his rejection of dualisms such as universalism and particularism, global and local, and empirical and normative. Said argues that a particular conception of humanism is essential in realizing cosmopolitan possibilities, but insists on viewing it as provisional. Responding to his critics (e.g., Clifford, 1997), Said maintains that: it should be possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism (2004, p. 10). Said refuses to view social theory in its narrow sense, but insists that it needs to be grounded within a political struggle that is spatially and historically specific. For him, intellectual work must always be viewed as tentative and strategic, working against the illusions of dualities and certainties. The same applies to learning, especially in relation to understanding the emerging conditions of global connectivity. I want to propose therefore a view of cosmopolitanism that defines it as a particular way of learning about our own social identities and cultural trajectories, but always in ways that underscore their connectivity with the rest of the world. In this way, I want to emphasize the dynamic nature of our identities and cultures, now changing more rapidly and intensely than ever before, mostly as a result of their interactions with identities and cultures that potentially span the world. Unlike multiculturalism that highlighted learning about other cultures within the nation-state, I want to argue that the sources of cosmopolitan learning are more diverse and extensive, and can no longer be contained within the borders of the nation-state. If learning about global connectivity is to become cosmopolitan then it must have the potential to help students come to terms with their situatedness in the world situatedness of their knowledge and of their cultural practices, as well as their positionality in relation to the social networks, political institutions and social relations that are no longer confined to particular communities and nations, but potentially connect up with the rest of the world (Said, 1983). Much of the traditional learning about other cultures and cultural interactions has been nationally defined. Cosmopolitan learning, in contrast, represents an aspiration that seeks to develop a different perspective on knowing and interacting with others within the changing context of the cultural exchanges produced by global flows and networks. It is based on a different view of culture as dynamic and creative, viewed as always in the state of becoming as a result of interactions of various kinds, rather than something that is entirely inherited within clearly definable boundaries and norms. It envisages cosmopolitan learning not in terms of an abstract universal moral law, but in efforts to develop in students a set of epistemic virtues with which to both understand current discourses and practices of global connectivity and to develop alternatives to them. I use the term epistemic virtues deliberately (as opposed to values) to highlight those habitual practices of learning that regard knowing as always tentative involving critical exploration and imagination, an openended exercise in cross-cultural deliberation designed to understand relationalities and imagine alternatives, but always from a position that is reflexive of its epistemic assumptions.
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Such epistemic virtues are, of course, best developed collectively, in transcultural collaborations, in which local problems can be examined comparatively, linked to global processes. But even when such collective learning is be possible, it is nonetheless possible to help students to interrogate how things are done differently in different places, how they might express particular histories of intercultural encounters. Such interrogation is clearly necessary if we are going to help students to develop a different social imaginary about their lives and life options in the materiality of their collective and interlinked circumstances that is, if we wish to help them to consider how things could be otherwise. With greater access to the new media, it is now possible to do this kind of pedagogic work through networks, both formal and informal, bringing together students from different backgrounds, with the objective of encouraging them to think outside their own parochial boundaries and cultural assumptions, helping them to reflect on how global processes affect communities differentially and to examine the sources of these differentiations and inequalities and what could be done about them. Thus, instead of learning about cultures in an abstract manner, cosmopolitan learning involves pedagogic tasks that help students explore the criss-crossing of transnational circuits of communication, the flows of global capital and the crosscutting of local, translocal and transnational social practices. Such learning encourages students to consider the contested politics of place making, the social constructions of power differentials and the dynamic processes relating to the formation of individual, group, national and transnational identities, and their corresponding fields of difference. It should be noted that this kind of learning is impossible within an emphasis on criticality. This is so because cosmopolitan learning necessarily challenges the prevailing orthodoxies both about education and about cultural formations. Moreover, it contests the hegemonic social imaginaries of globalization and is implicitly directed towards the goal of global relations that are more just, democratic and humane. Current attempts at the internationalization of curriculum highlight the importance of intercultural experiences, through such programs as study abroad, but do not seriously address how such pedagogies might produce a critical understanding of the new global configurations of economic and cultural exchange. Cosmopolitan learning of the kind I have in mind, in contrast, encourages students to examine the political meaning of intercultural experiences, seeking to locate them within the transnational networks that have become so much part of the contemporary era of globalization. It is not enough to state that globalization drives cultures towards mutual interaction; it is perhaps more important to examine how cultures are transformed by these interactions, and how our social imagination plays a central role in these transformational processes. If this is so, then, one of the major goals of cosmopolitan learning should be the development of a critical global imagination, based on a recognition that we all have elaborate interests and capabilities in constructing world pictures whose very interaction affects global processes (Appadurai, 1996, p. 11). Such an approach clearly demands the de-parochialization of the processes of learning and teaching, highlighting the importance of grassroots global networks capable of interrogating dominant social imaginaries that are no longer adequate for negotiating the complex global realities we now confront. In this sense, cosmopolitan learning is not so much concerned with imparting knowledge and developing
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attitudes and skills for understanding other cultures per se, but with helping students examine the ways in which global processes are creating conditions of economic and cultural exchange that are transforming our identities and communities; and that, unreflexively, we may be contributing to the production and reproduction of those conditions, through our uncritical acceptance of the dominant ways of thinking about global connectivity. Indeed, it should be in our collective power to develop an alternative imaginary of global connectivity, one which is informed not by the universalizing logic of the market, or by the romanticized notions of global citizenship, but by our determination to develop a different conception of global relations, which views all of the worlds diverse people and communities as part of the same moral universe. Such an imaginary requires the development of a sense of moral responsibility among students directed not only towards their families and nations, but also towards humanity as a whole. Cosmopolitan learning, thus, demands a new way of learning about other cultures and intercultural exchange. It requires the development of intellectual skills to examine the ways in which we create knowledge about others and use it to engage with them. In this way, it highlights both the cognitive and ethical dimensions of intercultural learning. It suggests that learning about others requires learning about ourselves. It implies a dialectical mode of thinking, which conceives cultural differences as neither absolute nor necessarily antagonistic, but deeply interconnected and relationally defined. It underscores the importance of understanding others both in their terms as well as ours, as a way of comprehending how both our representations are socially constituted. This suggests the importance of understanding intercultural exchange historically, in ways that show how no cultural tradition no set of cultural values and practices can be understood without reference to the historical interactions that produced it. This has always been the case, but in a world in which social networks of money, technologies, people and ideas increasingly shape life options and chances, thinking historically about global connectivity is indispensable. This is so because networks too have histories, without an understanding of which we cannot fully comprehend how peoples sense of their collectivity as solidarity in its positive manifestations and as marginalization in its negative is forged within power configurations that are often asymmetrical. The past is linked to the present and plays an important role in imagining the future. As Edward Said (1993) pointed out, it is only through this realization that we recognize that our identities are forged in histories of contact between groups of people, where knowledge and resources are traded, borrowed, improved upon, fought over and passed on to others. The notion of a pure culture, located within its own territory, has always been a myth because all cultures result from their encounters with others. If this is so, then, relationality must be regarded as crucial for any attempt to internationalize curriculum through cosmopolitan learning. If we cannot learn about cultures in their pristine and authentic form, then, our focus must shift to the ways in which cultural practices become separated from their homes and are converted into new forms in their new contexts, and on how this transforms both the places people leave and the places they come to inhabit. In a world in which flows of information, media symbols and images, and political and cultural ideas are constant and relentless, new cultural formations are inevitable, and can only be relationally comprehended.
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Therefore, this focus on relationality must replace approaches that treat other cultures as entirely separable from our own. Cultural formations can only be understood in relation to each other, politically forged, historically constituted and globally interconnected through processes of mobility, exchange and hybridization. A relational understanding of global connectivity also points to the importance of another element of cosmopolitan learning: reflexivity. Reflexivity (Beck, 2000) requires people to become self-conscious and knowledgeable about their own perspective and how it is subject to transformation as a result of its engagement with other cultural trajectories. Reflexive individuals are able to challenge their own taken-for-granted assumptions that are often linked to official and popular discourses of cultural difference. They are able to reflect upon the politics of their own representations of others, and point to the ways in which this politics is historically constituted. Such reflexivity cannot then be achieved without a critical recognition of our own cultural and political presuppositions, and the epistemic position from which we speak and negotiate difference. This must involve realizing that knowledge about cultures is never neutral and that our efforts to learn about and engage with others take place within asymmetrical configurations of power. This realization, however, needs not prevent us from continuing to explore, engage and learn from other cultural trajectories in an effort to transform our own. In the contemporary era, the volume and speed of intercultural exchange has increased at an unprecedented rate, creating greater possibilities of trade, transfers of technology, cultural cooperation and skirmishes, and even war, than ever before. Never before has there been a greater need of intercultural understanding and communication. But if this understanding is predicated on essentialist conceptions of culture, rather than within a pedagogically open framework that explores the dynamics of cultural interactions in an on-going fashion, then no amount of intercultural education is likely to be helpful. New ways of thinking about economic and cultural exchange are clearly necessary in which conceptions of others and ourselves are defined relationally, as complex and inherently dynamic products of a range of historical processes and the contemporary cultural economies of global connectivity. Epistemologically, all cultural understanding is comparative because no understanding of others is possible without self-understanding. If this is so, then, not only is it important to emphasize historicity, criticality and relationality, but also reflexivity in all our attempts to imagine and work towards better futures.
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Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education