Session Information
13 SES 01 A, Politics and Cosmopolitanism
Paper Session
Contribution
The long term aim of this paper is to contribute to educational thinking about social justice. Currently, I conceive social justice as a way of answering the question, how to live well, here, now, and in the future, as individuals always in relation with their worlds (XXXX, 2014a). In this paper I pay attention to what might be included in the term ‘worlds’. I hope that the paper will provoke a discussion that brings together debates in cosmopolitanism and in posthumanism, which will, in the end, contribute to our collective understanding of social justice in education. However, I am aware that such a project is at risk of being too abstract to have much traction on practices so I ground the discussion in some observations about the teaching of literacy. It is a suitable example, since it is of central concern in educational policies worldwide. In section 1, I summarise the opening arguments of a recent paper of mine in which I tried to re-think the normative concept of cosmopolitanism using the example of attempts to increase literacy world-wide. In Section 2, I explain what is meant by ‘posthumanism’ for the purposes of this article. In Section 3, I sketch out where some of the omissions are in my account of literacy and cosmopolitanism from a posthumanist perspective, going on in Section 4 to suggest what kinds of assemblage might inform an understanding of the concept of ‘literacy’ in the context of formal schooling. I suggest some implications such an understanding might have not only for literacy education, but also for understanding the concept of social justice, especially in respect of the ‘worlds’ in which it has a purchase. The paper is ‘work in progress’, intended to generate criticism and discussion.
Standard accounts of cosmopolitanism focus on the implications for Western education. But as Papastephanou says (2011): ‘It is the self that primarily benefits from the intercultural formation and not the Other who might be affected by such formation only by implication.’ It is of course laudable for educational theory to be concerned with local practices. However, there is little awareness of the implications for understanding cosmopolitanism in education world-wide. Yet the West has considerable cultural power to impose its understandings on the rest of the world. So I took a different direction. In my original article addressed knowledge transfer in the context of a world marked by deep imbalances of the distribution of power and wealth. In re-thinking that article I begin by outlining central themes in posthumanism. I compare how authors set posthumanism within current philosophy and theory, drawing on Badminton (2000) and Herbrechter (2013a, and b). The famous figure of the cyborg as drawn by Haraway (1991) has been key as has Guattari’s concept of an ‘assemblage’ – the actant possibilities in whatever happens to be around. (Bryant, 2009, np) The sources I have found particularly useful for this paper are Latour (2004; 2010) and Bennett (2010) all of which I find useful as starting points for looking at the teaching and learning of literacy and, in the end, social justice in education. These are: (a) anthropocentricism, (b) social materiality, and (c) political ecology.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Appiah, K.W. (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York, W.W. Norton Appiah, K.W. (2007) ‘Global citizenship,’ Fordham Law Review 75 (5) 2375-2391 Bennett, Jane (2010) Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press Bryant, Levi (2009) ‘Deleuze on Assemblages,’ Larval Subjects (Blog 8 October) https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/deleuze-on-assemblages/ (Accessed 30 January 2015) Enslin, Penny (2014) ‘Liberalism and education: between diversity and universalism’, in Len Wakes (ed.) Leaders in Philosophy of Education: Intellectual Self Portraits, Rotterdam: Sense Enslin, Penny and Tjiattas, Mary (2009) ‘Cosmopolitan justice: Education and Global Citizenship,’ Theories No.104 Goetz, Catherine (2013) ‘The particularism of cosmopolitanism’, Global Society, 27 (1) 91-114 Gurley, Lesley, Hamilton, Mary and Lea. Mary Rosalind (2014) ‘Textual practices in the new media digital landscape: messing with digital literacies,’ Research in Learning Technology 21 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21.21438 (Accessed 30 January 2015) Greenhalgh-Spencer, Heather (2014) ‘Guattari’s ecosophy and implications for pedagogy’ Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48 (2) Hansen, David T. (2010) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Education: a view from the ground,’ Teachers College Record, 112 (1) 1-30 Haraway, Donna (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature Routledge, 1991 Held, David (1992) ‘Democracy: From city-states to a cosmopolitan order?’ Political Studies, 60 10-39 Herbrechter, Stefan (2013a) Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, Bloomsbury Academic Herbrechter, Stefan (2013b) ‘Stefan Herbrechter Interview,’ Critical Posthumanism http://criticalposthumanism.net/?page_id=228 (Accessed 30 January 2015) Latour, Bruno (2004) The Politics of Nature, (Trans. Catherine Porter) Harvard University Press Latour, Bruno (2010) The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Duke University Press Mazawi, André Elias (2008) ‘Dis/integrated orders and the politics of recognition: civil upheavals, militarism, and educators’ lives and work,’ Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies, 13 (2) 69-89 Mouffe, Chantal (2008) ‘Which world order: cosmopolitan or multipolar?’ Ethical Perspectives, 15 (4) 453-467 Papastephanou, Marianna (2011) ‘The “cosmopolitan” self does her homework,’ Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45 (4) 598-612 Parsons, Allan (2013) ‘From literacy to agencies,’ http://prolepsis-ap.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-re-uses-of-literacy.html (Accessed 30 January 2015) Rizvi, Fazal (2005) ‘International education and the production of cosmopolitan identities,’ RIHE International Publications Series 9 from: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/3516 (Accessed 27 February 2013) Rizvi, Fazal (2009) ‘Towards cosmopolitan learning,’ Discourse, 30 (3) 253-268 Todd, Sharon (2010) ‘Living in a dissonant world: toward an agonistic cosmopolitics for education,’ Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29 (2) 213-228
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