Complicating "International-ness" With/in Postfoundational Research

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: . . . In-the-Making: Generating Curricular Possibilities With Janet L. Miller

Abstract

I first encountered with Janet Miller, my teacher, mentor, and friend, during the Second World Curriculum Conference in Finland in 2006. At that time, I was a doctoral student and barely survived from the first year doctoral program as an “international” student. Janet’s conference keynote address has been advanced and published with the title of “Curriculum studies and transnational flows and mobilities: Feminist autobiographical perspectives.” I have read this article numerous times in curriculum theorizing on subjectivity, transnationalism, and cross-cultural conversation about “important” knowledge. During the symposium, I will explore the complicated meaning of “international” faculty adopting “working autobiography” as a mode of inquiry and representation (Miller, 2006, p. 33). Miller (2006) theorizes transnational flows and mobilities as a crucial, potential means to sustain various “perspectives on…phenomena in simultaneous yet often tension-filled relation to one another” (p. 33). Owing to Miller’s scholarship, I have been participating in the worldwide field of curriculum studies persuaded by “transnational flows and mobilities”—the ones which interrogate sociopolitical questions about the constitutions and operations of self and other (Miller, 2006, p. 33).” This article is still alive within me in the US academy where I confront constant tensions: A graduate student used a profanity in a sentence; a conference participant contacted my university president not satisfied with my keynote speech on race and equity; a graduate student wrote a really long email complaining that I did not protect his privacy related to a late assignment; and I receive a significantly lower course evaluation than colleagues although we develop and use the same, co-designed syllabus. Living in and working in a “foreign” country, I am drawn to defend these challenging situations by highlighting a humanistic version of understanding self/other and cultural differences. I am tempted to tell myself, “I have a different cultural background as an immigrant!” or “I am international faculty.” I use this rigid, bifurcated categorization of “domestic/international” as a defense mechanism to minimize my anxiety in response to incidents on campus. Miller has influenced me to look at subjectivity and experience differently, interrogating the subject discursively constructed within the historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic moments particularly with/in transnational flows and mobilities. Thus, I problematize a fixed label of “international” in that this “seamless” label may evade tensions rather than actively examine the complex cause and consequence of the incidents. Simply reiterating the binaries of self/other and domestic/international without considering the interactions generates another normalized grand narrative—such as “I shall overcome the barriers.” During the symposium, I work autobiographically to explore the discursive, political constructions of “international” faculty. I complicate the identifiable, binary boundaries of national/international. My participation in the symposium will provide a different way of revisiting ethical responsibility with the other as a person who is engaged in the professorate in the always shifting cultural context.

Author

• Seungho Moon, Loyola University Chicago