Grounding Theory Around Global Citizenship Education Work in Hard Spaces in the Global South

• In Event: 45.065 - Exploring the Complexities in Global Citizenship Education: Hard Spaces, Methodologies, and Ethics

Abstract

In this paper, in my role as PI, I will give an overview of the project, considering the other abstracts as well as other subprojects within the overall project. The paper is theoretical with emerging qualitative research, and it is grounded in past work around sensitivities (self-citation), and de Sousa’s Santos’ concept of ‘epistemologies of the South,’ I aim to develop a grounded theory around Global Citizenship Education work in hard spaces in the Global South. Here, I conceptualize hard spaces as contexts that have been defined by multiple outside international actors and perhaps internally as well, as facing unique challenges to conducting GCE work. This may be because they are heavily surveilled, regulated, Panoptic spaces ((Foucault, 1977, pp. 195-228), because of political instability or another reason. This is not to say that surveillance does not exist outside the Global South or that it necessarily exists in the Global South, but the focus will be on this intersection of hard/Global South.

I came to this topic because, in five years of teaching a core PhD course, Comparative Education Research Methodologies, I have not seen a project that confronts, responds to, and/or resonates with the realities of my students’ and my research contexts, nor responds to how they can do work on GCE in those contexts (which they and I are doing). Nearly a week passes without a new vignette from one of us about methodological challenges in these settings. If they and I are to translate ‘knowledge into action,’ I believe that new ways of thinking about the liminalities of GCE in these contexts is necessary to open up dialogue on these issues from a place of sensitivity. As I state in another paper (self-citation), Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2012, p. 588) explained how they arrive at liminalities as a useful construct:

Rather than deploy social and cultural categories as intersecting, the use of simultaneity facilitates a conceptual liminality. This liminality is a position that is ‘necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space (Turner 1969, 95)’.

Theorizing opaqueness and ambiguity as it relates to doing GCE is of interest to me, as, to draw on Turner 1969 in Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2012, p. 588), I am called to conduct research in or mentor others conducting research in contexts that “elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.”

Following an exploration of the liminalities of the research on the UNESCO GCE cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavior learning outcomes (UNESCO, 2014, 2015) in such contexts, I end by asking, what are modern solutions for this ‘problem’ of (trying to) conduct GCE research in hard spaces? What does ‘overcoming’ this ‘problem’ look like? And, when asked about this ‘problem,’ is it possible to reach a place in which one ‘would rather answer’ (Habermas 1984 in de Sousa Santos (2012, p. 46).

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University