Cosmopolitan Literacies: Youth on the Frontlines of Intercultural Learning

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Creativity

Abstract

Aditi dreams of becoming a computer professional, Nathan an architect, Lillith a doctor, and Nadra a teacher. One is the child of a vegetable vendor in India; another is growing up in a small South African farming village; the third calls home a neighborhood in an American inner city; the last is the child of immigrant parents in a Norwegian suburb. These young people, diverse though their social, cultural, and material milieu may be, have in common the coming of age in a global world (cf. Hull, Zacher, & Hiebert, 2009). In addition, they are relationally linked via their participation in an online private social network , itself an exemplar of the radical connectivity of our digital era, where “cultural flows” of ideas, artifacts, texts, and images become our resources for meaning making and “self-imagining” across national, cultural, textual, and linguistic borders (Appadurai, 1996).

In this paper, we explore young people’s developing capacities to imagine and communicate online with interlocutors who often inhabit life worlds very different from their own, their “cosmopolitan literacies,” if you will (cf. Hansen, 2010; Papastephanou, 2005; Rizvi, 2009). We have mined three years of empirical data on youth’s participation on and off the social network, including qualitative and quantitative analyses of field notes, interviews, digital products, and online tracings, in order to reveal how burgeoning cosmopolitanism looks on the ground (Hansen, 2010) in the digitally-mediated realities of global youth. Through analysis of 300 adolescents’ online and offline communication, we demonstrate how youth develop cosmopolitan literacies over time, through small moments of, or attempts at, communicative exchange, as they negotiate relations among self, world, and other that invite imaginings of new narratives of self and new modes of cooperation.

The impact of communication cross-culturally and cross-nationally via social media has been variously theorized (Norris & Inglehart, 2009). Some have posited a convergence around western values, others the polarization of national cultures, and others still a fusion of values across cultures. Our research demonstrated that conversational exchanges among global youth were rife with linguistic, semiotic, and cultural misunderstandings. However, these did not lead to the rejection of others’ worlds or the sublimation of one national culture to another. Rather, the circulation, exchange, and especially the self-reflexive co-creation of videos (which became the network’s lingua franca) positioned youth to be hospitable readers of others’ worlds and audience-oriented creators and composers, and to juxtapose and intermingle local practices and meanings with those of global youth who participated in sometimes radically different life-worlds. We argue that as youth participate in thoughtful, socially mediated curricular practices of online communication, they come to see themselves as social actors with obligations to others: to be “hospitable” readers of others’ texts (cf. Silverstone, 2007), to be self-reflexive creators and composers, to be considerate interlocutors. In short, young people today like Aditi and her friends can develop cosmopolitan literacies that enable their participation as cultural citizens in a globally connected world, as they stand on the frontlines of intercultural learning.

Authors

• Glynda A. Hull, University of California - Berkeley

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania