Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education

Mary Drinkwater, Fazal Rizvi, Karen Edge

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350052352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights, and Peace Education considers ways in which national systems of education could work together, across borders, to determine the meaning and significance of the principles of democracy, human rights and peace education, in ways that are comparative and relational. The contributors and editors (Mary Drinkwater, Fazal Rizvi and Karen Edge) argue that in an era of globalization, collaborative investigations are crucial for developing an understanding of rights, democracy and peace that is transnationally inflected, and through which national systems of education hold each other accountable. The chapters address issues such as citizenship, identity, language, conflict and peace-building, global educational policy, and democratic approaches to policy and education issues of democracy, human rights and peace education through analyses of case studies, research findings and policy initiatives drawn from countries in the global north and south.

Part One

Introduction

1

Transnational Perspectives

Fazal Rizvi, Mary Drinkwater and Karen Edge

Chapter outline

• Introduction

• Transnationalism

• The production of locality

• Transnationalization of student lives

• Rethinking pedagogic challenges

• Evolution of a partnership and pedagogy

• The evolution of the course

• Organization of this book

Introduction

As part of our scholarly work, each of us travels a great deal. Together, we believe there are few parts of the educational world we have not visited over the past decade, in relation to our work as teachers, researchers and university administrators. One of us, Drinkwater, teaches, researches, conducts workshops and presents at conferences, across all levels of education, in North and South America, the UK, Southeast Asia, East Africa and Malta, among other places. Rizvi travels extensively to Asia to carry out his research. He speaks at conferences and advises educational authorities and has maintained his links with American universities where he taught for almost ten years. For Edge, global travel is a core part of her senior administrative role, as vice-provost-International at the University College London, managing its transnational programmes and developing collaborative links with universities around the world, as well as teaching and researching in the fields of Educational Leadership and Comparative and International Education.

One of the major benefits of all this travelling is the opportunity to visit schools around the world and observe the extent to which and how educational systems are changing. On the face of it, however, we find remarkable similarities at the schools we visit. Indeed, many of these schools do not look all that different from the schools we ourselves attended, except, of course, for the evidence of a few more technological gadgets. The content of the textbooks the students use appears remarkably familiar to us, as do the mostly didactic modes of teaching that persist, despite the gadgets. But these appearances can be misleading. To begin with, the schools we visit, especially those in urban areas, are much more culturally diverse than they once were. Teachers tell us moreover that social media is transforming the lives of their students who are now globally connected in ways that are changing their approach to learning. Even the communities that are relatively isolated are not entirely unaffected by the global mobility of ideas and ideologies, cultural tastes and trends and capital and money. This mobility is clearly transforming the schools around the world, though in ways that vary greatly.

To understand how, let us consider a short vignette. Miguel teaches history at a publically funded secondary college in the South Side of Manila, Philippines. The school is located in a desperately poor part of the city. Its students are often forced to leave school early, often in order to supplement family income. The neighbourhood is crime-ridden with heavy presence of police, many of whom are known to be corrupt and violent. The school itself is poorly resourced, with its buildings falling down. It has a library that has few books. Few of its teachers stay on at the school beyond two to three years, becoming disenchanted with the poor conditions they are required to endure.

Miguel is an exception. He has been at the school for nine years and is thought to be one of its longest-serving teachers. He is a deeply committed teacher who enjoys good relationships with his students – but not always with their parents. This is so because most of the mothers of his students are overseas working as maids or cleaners in richer places, such as Hong Kong, Dubai and Singapore, and most of the fathers are drifting through life – alienated, anxious and angry. They are often in trouble with the police for petty crimes and instances of violence, both within and outside their home. The main source of their income is remittance, sent home by the mothers. Miguel is deeply concerned about the dire economic circumstances his students have to endure; yet he is always surprised with the positivity with which they approach life. Most of them have a very buoyant and optimistic ‘take’ on their future, which, for the girls, lies in following their mothers to go and work abroad. While they know how difficult life is for their mothers, with no security of employment, long hours and exploitative labour conditions, they nevertheless refuse to let this deter them from their plans for this future.

The aspirations the boys have are also linked to a naively romantic view of places like Hong Kong, Dubai and Singapore. If they can’t get an opportunity to work abroad themselves, they want to marry a girl who might. For them, Fridays are special because it is on that day the cheques arrive from abroad. There is money to have a party with, and forget their economic and social problems for at least for a day or two, until the routine of desolation and despair sets in again. Miguel knows that only around 10 per cent of his students are likely to get jobs abroad but does not have the heart to puncture their hopes of a brighter future.

What this vignette shows is that the social experiences of students in the school in Manila are deeply shaped by the complex connections they have across national borders through the mobility of money. Their everyday experiences are potentially affected by events taking place in distant localities. In this way, this vignette is illustrative of the ways in which classrooms, schools and communities constitute spaces that are becoming increasingly transnationalized, giving rise to a whole range of new pedagogic challenges as well as opportunities. The collection of papers included in this volume addresses some of these challenges and opportunities. Most notably, the papers examine how forces of globalization are transforming the spaces within which education now takes place, and how this demands new ways of thinking about concepts such as human rights, cosmopolitanism, citizenship, social justice and democracy as they relate to issues of educational policy and practice – in ways that are no longer nationally specific but span national and cultural borders. To do this, the papers examine policies and programmes designed to promote education for global citizenship, human rights and democracy in terms of their diverse meanings, contested politics and practical efficacy transformed by transnationalism.

Transnationalism

The idea of transnationalism captures a set of processes relating to social, economic and political connections between people, places and institutions across national borders, potentially spanning the world. These connections have greatly expanded over the past three decades by developments in transport and communication technologies, resulting in unprecedented levels of mobility not only of people but also of money and capital, ideas and ideologies, and media and cultural practices (Urry 2007). This has given rise to systems of ties, interactions and exchange that ‘function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world’ (Vertovec 2009, 3). These systems, however, are not only driven from above by governments and corporations, but also from below by ordinary people in ways that are often contingent, complex and messy (Smith 2001).

Transnationalism is thus not necessarily an elite phenomenon: it involves ordinary people at all levels of social strata. In her landmark study of transnational villagers, Peggy Levitt (2001) has shown, for example, how it is possible for poor immigrants from the Dominican Republic in Boston in the United States to remain culturally and politically active in the life of the villages from where they have emigrated, through their deliberate and strategic attempts to forge transnational ties and practices. The idea of transnationalism suggests that while a certain level of structural assimilation is always required in the processes of migration, the rejection of cultural and political links is no longer necessary. Indeed, as Levitt (2001) asserts, over the past two decades, transnational activities have been ‘reinforced by the growing numbers of global economic and governance structures that make decision-making and problem-solving across border increasingly common’ (4). In this sense, transnational cultural and economic links are now increasingly common.

The idea of transnationalism thus describes an emerging social morphology that cuts across national borders through the emergence of a whole range of dynamic networks. According to Faist and his colleagues (2013), transnational space ‘consists of combinations of ties and their contents, positions in networks and organizations, and networks of organizations that can be found in at least two nation-states’ (13). These spaces involve relatively stable, lasting and dense sets of relationships, formed around kinship groups, circuits of information and services and communities characterized by ‘a high degree of intimacy, emotional depth, moral obligation and social cohesion’ (Faist et al. 2013, 14). In this way, something like a transnational public sphere has emerged, which appears to have rendered any strictly bounded sense of community or locality obsolete.

That is not to say that the territorially defined local traditions and state regulations and structures are no longer relevant to people’s lives. On the contrary, they continue to define the ways in which people make sense of their mobile lives. Indeed, it is invariably from the perspective of a local sensibility that people forge transnational connections. Nation-states clearly continue to perform a major enabling role in transnational mobility and exchange: the importance of national laws, regulations and national narratives cannot therefore be overlooked. National boundaries still demarcate the nationally specific systems of education, health, taxation and border management. The transnational processes have however transformed the nature of the state itself, changing the forms in which its capacity and reach are expressed. Global flows of finance, media images, risks and consumption patterns have destabilized any specific sense of national authority, and have opened up the possibilities of post-national systems of social and economic exchange. What has emerged is a new form of sociality entailing multiple levels of actions across multiple identities and points of reference (Pieterse 2004).

This has also altered the nature of economics and politics. Clearly there have always been important economic dimensions of mobility. Transnationalism has however greatly expanded the amount, scope and forms of economic exchange, producing a range of ‘multiplier effects’ of cross-border relations (Guarnizo 2003). In monetary terms, global remittances are believed to be approaching $500 billion (Singh 2013), and have become a most visible symbol of the ties that connect globally mobile workers to their countries of origin. However, the raw data on remittances does not fully capture the extent to which transnational mobility of workers entails the development of various spin-off industries and ethnic entrepreneurial activities in areas as diverse as communication, transportation and finance. Indeed, transnationalism has opened up new avenues of capital flows, as well as various new strategies of capital accumulation, demanding national and international policy makers to monitor and control flows of capital in attempts to align these flows to national policy priorities (Castles 2002).

These attempts to align transnational processes to national policy agendas have however proven incredibly complicated. Indeed, transnationalism has created new political spaces in which it has become possible to disseminate and share information, forge new publicity and feedback loops beyond the control of national authorities, mobilize support and enhance public participation and political organization, and lobby government and intergovernmental organizations. The transnational communities are now able to engage in the politics of homeland in a variety of ways. What has long been the case with the Jewish diaspora now also applies to most transnational communities, from Indian and Irish, Jamaican to Japanese. In his book Fear of Small Numbers, Appadurai (2006) has shown, however, how this political transnationalism is systematically ambiguous, producing both reactionary and nationalist responses, as well as cosmopolitan and progressive possibilities. The complexity of politics in a more interconnected world demands a fundamental reconfiguration of the conceptual nexus between identity and citizenship, on the one hand, and political order, on the other.

It is no longer possible to assume a linear relationship between nationhood and cultural identity. Transnational consciousness is often marked by dual or multiple identifications, de-stabilizing and de-centring attachments, making it possible to simultaneously be ‘at home away from home’. It opens up the possibilities of new subjectivities, linked to what Landold (2001) calls ‘circuits of transnational obligations and interests’ (217). Transnational social conditions variously reshape people’s aspirations and expectations, their sense of moral obligations, their link to institutional structures and their relation to the state. Recent literature on diaspora has highlighted how social norms embedded within the transnational moral economy now have a different form, often disconnected from the requirements of complete social integration. Transnationalism encourages modes of social affiliation and engagement that are selective and strategic, and are not necessarily defined by long-standing cultural obligations. Ray (2007) has argued that while transnational processes are embedded in particular localities, they are no longer wedded to them, leading social theorists such as Beck (2001) to conclude that in an era of globalization, individualism has been reinforced, along with ‘biographies full of risk and precarious freedom’ (23).

The production of locality

What this brief account of transnationalism suggests is that it has changed the nature of people’s relationship to space, particularly by creating transnational social fields that connect and position some people in more than one country. As people begin to become more mobile and inhabit multiple places, the potential arises of transforming the very constitution of each of these places. In his work, spanning more than two decades, Appadurai (1996, 2006 and 2013) has investigated the ways in which global cultural flows have destabilized the certainties of nation-states, reconstituting the ‘sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts’ (Appadurai 1996, 178). This, he argues, has transformed ‘the actual existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized’ (178).

A locality, of course, does not exist in any objective sense, as given; rather, it is produced by social subjects who belong to a community of friends and family, and who share various senses of commonality, rites of passage, ceremonies and complex social arrangements. Indeed, Appadurai (1996) posits deliberate practices of performance, representation and action are involved in the production of a locality: ‘hard and regular work is done to produce and maintain its materiality’ (181). If this is the case, then the relationship between the production of local subjects and the neighbourhoods in which such subjects are produced, named and empowered to act socially is a historically dialectical relationship.

In this sense, Appadurai (1996) views locality as ‘a phenomenological property of social life that is produced by particular forms of intentional activity, generating a great variety of material effects’ (183). It is always historically grounded and thus contextually specific (Appadurai 2013), inherently involving power relations. A sense of locality is always produced in relation to a broader set of conditions that constitute its wider context. At the same time, local practices and projects generate the shape of the context mediated by a relational consciousness of other localities. The production of localities is, in this way, strategic: it consists in social activities of production, representation and reproduction, defining the material and conceptual boundaries of a neighbourhood. Appadurai (1996) highlights that as local subjects perform the tasks associated with reproducing their neighbourhood in a range of strategic and contingent ways, ‘the contingencies of history, environment, and imagination contain the potential for new contexts to be created’ (185). If a locality is constituted by a ‘structure of feeling, a property of life and an ideology of situated community’, then the contextual features of transnationalism must necessarily imply major shifts in the cultural production of localities (Appadurai 1996, 185).

Recent processes of globalization have resulted in a growing disjuncture between territory, subjectivity and collective social movement, reconstituting the conditions in which relations of sociality are performed. These conditions involve high degrees of connectivity and circulation. In his recent writing, Appadurai (2013) argues that ‘in our era of globalization, we need to understand more about the ways in which the forms of circulation and the circulation of forms create the conditions for the production of locality’ (69). What is distinctive about globalization, Appadurai (2013) insists, is that it involves new transnational forms of circulation that have destabilized the isomorphism of people, territory and legitimate sovereignty that had traditionally defined the moral basis of the modern nation-states. The disciplinary authority of the nation-states has been weakened in an era of relentless human mobility and connectivity across national borders. Transnational mobility has created new opportunities of economic, cultural and political exchange, but has also c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Transnational Perspectives on Democracy and Education
• Part Three: Transnational Perspectives on Citizenship and Education
• Part Four: Transnational Perspectives on Peace-building and Human Rights Education
• Index
• Imprint