From Parochialism to Cosmopolitanism: Reimagining Ethical Education through Vulnerability and Relationality

• In Event: Transformative Praxis: Reimagining Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

In a hyper-connected world, moral parochialism can dull awareness of and concern for how the global capitalist machinery wreaks havoc on human and nonhuman lives at the margins. This conceptual paper seeks to center moral parochialism among students as a critical issue in ongoing theoretical conversations on students as ethical subjects in educational scholarship. It views students’ ethical subjectivity from the theoretical standpoint of continental feminist ethics. Though, it presents data from an ethnographic study to anchor theory in real-world scenarios, the paper adopts a post-foundational approach to inquiry of centering philosophical concepts rather than empirical analysis to offer a nuanced and conceptual exploration of ethical subjectivity. To counter moral parochialism, the paper recommends centering moral cosmopolitanism through pedagogies of precarity as the guiding framework for attempts to integrate ethical literacy as a critical element in curricular and pedagogical enactments.

Author

• Ajay Sharma, University of Georgia