Global Ethics in Higher Education: Imaginaries of Interdependence and Global Change

• In Event: 29.019 - Internationalization, Immigration, and Global Citizenship Education: Toward Equal Educational Opportunity in Canada

Abstract

Global ethics is a growing field of study with a strong liberal foundation that addresses multiple and complex dilemmas including the availability of resources, violence, migration, poverty, exploitation, consumption, trade, tourism, and humanitarian intervention. The mobilization of global ethics in Higher Education requires a deep understanding of the cultural, economic and historical forces and flows that connect peoples, places, and world views, and of the difficulties of intervening in complex, dynamic systems. When that awareness is missing, learning and action tend to unintentionally reproduce unequal relationships between dominant and marginalized populations, simplistic rationalizations of inequality, and instrumental and ethnocentric imaginaries of justice, responsibility and change. Drawing on concerns expressed in postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous scholarship, this paper examines current idioms of global ethics that circulate in higher education. It highlights problematic aspects of this field grounded in an enduring modern/colonial global imaginary that disseminates a monoculture of thought premised on a singular, Eurocentric narrative of human progress, development and evolution. As a response to this challenge we emphasize the importance of historical and systemic critical analyses of the roles of global capital, nation states and Enlightenment humanism in the reproduction of inequalities. In analyzing institutional commitments that aligned with ideals of global ethics, this paper focused on the question: What imaginaries of interdependence and theories of global change are mobilized in HE discourses of global responsibility?

Author

• Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, The University of British Columbia