Moore Institute Visiting Fellow, Dr Dalene Swanson( University of Stirling, Scotland) ‘ Decolonising Global Citizenship (Education) and ethical, indigenous, onto-epistemological alternatives’.

Dr Dalene M. Swanson, University of Stirling

Dalene is an educationalist and her research expertise spans (reconceptualist) curriculum perspectives, mathematics education, critical cultural studies, ethical internationalisation, democracy in education, and social and ecological justice. She is interested broadly in critical, ideological and socio-political perspectives in education and society, and mostly writes from poststructural and de/post-colonial perspectives. In particular, she has expertise in critical global citizenship, democratic education, and indigeneity, especially the African onto-epistemology of Ubuntu. Philosophical and social concerns around poverty, marginalisation, (neo)colonialism, as well as her research into “the construction of disadvantage” frame much of her work. Hegemonic tenets within neoliberalism, economic development and globalisation reflect ongoing concerns of global injustice. Dalene also has expertise in critical arts-based and narrative methodologies (especially ‘critical rhizomatic narrative’ methodology she developed), and other creative, post-foundational and counter-hegemonic research and writing methodologies and practices. Dalene also brings arts-based approaches to bear on mathematics education as a decolonising practice.

More information can be found at: http://rms.stir.ac.uk/converis-stirling/person/23287

Decolonising Global Citizenship (Education) and ethical, indigenous, onto-epistemological alternatives

Global citizenship and associated discourses on globalisation often comport with a moral liberal response to new widespread place-based formations of race, class, gender, migratory and ethnic inequality. This often-imported liberalism resides uncomfortably and selectively alongside increasing politically and ideologically invested polarisations, pernicious levels of poverty, global violence and states/frames of war (Butler, 2009), widespread conflict-induced population displacement and mass migration, human and ecological degradation, the rise of new forms of extremist ethnic nationalism, and differentiated capitalist formations geopolitically. It is also associated with a concomitant rise in cosmopolitanism that resides in complex arrangement with a rise in world conservativism and fascism, theo-political and ideological polarisations, along with new fragmentations and integrations as the political terrain shifts in accordance with the economic perturbations of late modernity and global capitalism in crisis. With it comes a seeming resurgence of humanism and humanitarianism, albeit that these are partial and selective. In this sense, global citizenship is contradictory and less than innocent, and can be said to be at least partially caught up in the globalisation project of neoliberal spread and capitalist imperialism (Swanson, 2011).

On the international education front, over the last few decades, global citizenship discourses have been taken up with some intensity in policy documents, vision statements and higher education and schooling curricula documents within Western parliamentary democracies, as well as having increasingly pervaded developing educational contexts. They have also most notably be taken up in internationalisation discourses in higher and further education contexts in an attempt, as public relations strategy, to provide ‰Û÷positive’ moral justification for the new forms of academic neo-colonialism.

On the surface, global citizenship and globalisation discourses are promoted in ways that seem to herald world humanism, reflecting a sense of global interdependence and mutualism. Under a banner of globalisation and economic progressivism, the world embetterment these discourses promise appears uncontestable and lies within the current common-sense doxic order of things that render alternatives improbable and irrational (Bourdieu, 1990). Much globalisation parlance tends to be framed within Western Enlightenment thinking that suggests that the global citizenship reach and outstretched hand to ‰Û÷the other’ is necessarily benevolent or of mutual interest (Swanson, 2010, 2011, 2015b), one which often hides under a banner of neutrality the difference in power relations, the cultural imperialism, the individualistic orientation and self-interestedness, and the latent symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) in such global citizenship overtures. Global citizenship’s institutionalisation as the ‰Û÷great white hope’ of international relations (Brysk, 2002) testifies to its often racialised and privileged framing. Education systems and curricula that celebrate the common sense goodness of global citizenship without challenging its hidden curriculum (Jackson, 1968) create spectres (Derrida, 1994) of what might otherwise have been imaginable, and fall short of and even lie counter to their stated purposes in their nullifying effect. In so doing, they fail to enable a world structured according to a radical hope (Lear, 2006; Swanson, 2015a) of global justice, to development as freedom (Sen, 1999), and to the action-oriented imaginings that bring into the realm of possibility a renewal of the world (Arendt, 1958). This promise of renewal ushers in an imagined world of widened democratic possibilities and alternative wisdoms as expressions of lived experiences for those living on/within the margins and/or living the violent consequences of perforated borders and border epistemologies.

This presentation offers perspectives of counter-hegemonic possibility, of hybrid third fora (Bhabha, 2004), and the inclusion of indigenous wisdom and embodiments, such as Ubuntu onto-epistemology (Ramose, 2002a, 2002b; Swanson, 2007, 2015a, 2015b). It offers a view of surface-to-surface and intersoular (Serres, 2008) ontologies as alternative onto-epistemologies of conscience (Swanson, 2015b). It does so to the end of decolonising global citizenship in order to make possible viable ethical alternatives and deep democratic actions.

References:

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Serres, M. (2008). The Five Senses: A philosophy of mingled bodies (I). [Trans. M. Sankey and P. Cowley]. London: Continuum.

Swanson, D.M. (2007). Ubuntu: An African contribution to (re)search for/with a ‰Û÷humble togetherness’. The Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2, Special Edition, 53-67. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/JCIE/article/viewFile/1028/686

Swanson, D. M. (2010). Value in shadows: A contribution to values education in our times. In T. Lovat (Ed.), Springer handbook on values education and student wellbeing (pp. 137-152). New York, NY: Springer Press.

Swanson, D. M. (2011). Parallaxes and paradoxes of global citizenship: Critical reflections and possibilities of praxis in/through an international online course. In L. Shultz, A. A. Abdi, & G. H. Richardson (Eds.), Global citizenship education in post secondary institutions: Theories, practices, policies (pp. 120-139). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers.

Swanson, D. M. (2015a). Frames of Ubuntu: (Re)framing an ethical education. In H. Smits & R. Naqvi (Eds.), Framing peace: Thinking about and enacting curriculum as radical hope. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Swanson, D.M. (2015b). Ubuntu, Radical Hope, and an Onto-Epistemology of Conscience. Journal of Critical Southern Studies, 3, 96 -118.