From Global Citizenship Education, into the world: Towards more aesthetically-rich belonging work

• In Event: The future that I see: aspiration, education, and visions for “the good life”

Proposal

This paper, conceptual with qualitative empirical work, is a reflection on the process of writing a series of short, experimental pieces on re/invigorating and re/vitalizing work on educating for belonging in the world – tied together around the buzzy-high level discourse of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) (in which I am involved in, not removed from). What possibilities exist to move beyond aspirational, often taken-for-granted conceptualizations of GCE towards more nuanced, aesthetically-rich understandings of belonging as a characteristic of “the good life”?

I center questions rooted in Derrick Chang’s “Queering Citizenship” exhibition (Chang, 2014), the interdisciplinary work of Maggie Nelson, Cecilia Vicuña, Patti Lather, Carlos Alberto Torres, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, among others. I have explored elsewhere the synergetic relationship of the humanities and social sciences in UNESCO Chair of Global Learning and GCE Carlos Alberto Torres’ work (self-citation) which I argue is again important here to confront the potential - to adapt Ball (2012)’s analysis of networks - “dull aesthetic” and “aesthetic failure” (Riles 2000, p.19) of GCE. How can we “expand the cultural imagination in a nervous present”; how can we “queer or rethink the familiar ways citizenship and belonging are defined” (Chang, 2014)? What “aesthetic emotions” does GCE offer? And why care? Perhaps because rethinking aspirational GCE outcomes and refocusing on engaging people with transdisciplinary belonging work in different ways engages more voices and perspectives and counters narrow thinking with a deeper understandings of the world.

I reflect on the process of struggling to write ethically on what I call (to adapt language I have used previously to describes the challenges of studying foundational theory on saturated but continually relevant concepts), the “co-existing urgency” and “risk of lethargy” (self-citation) around GCE from 2016-2019. I argue that GCE is, on the one hand, a saturated field, and on the other hand, it is a field in which the most interesting work is going on in the cracks, the ruptures. Here, I incorporate an analysis of my colleagues’ and my interview with poet Claribel Alegría (self-citation).

In my edited companion book project to this (self-citation), I observed an (un?) surprising amount of misunderstanding of the call for postfoundational work on this topic - how to think outside boxes about what the term GCE means, how to write differently about GCE. I argue this is a structural and discoursal issue resulting from the fact that GCE has become such a “heavyweight” term, an expression I adapt from discussion about the writing experience of the “tricky to categorize” (Cooke, 2017) author Maggie Nelson (Als, 2016). It is hard to break out of this heavyweight discourse.

To counter this, I will discuss the idea of letting belonging work - as part of an agenda of “the good life” - “breathe,” incorporating analysis of my own and others’ poetic and artistic reflections on related themes, cultural analysis of popular “GC” educators (e.g. Anthony Bourdain), and data from critical exchanges with transdisciplinary colleagues whose work informed this series.

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Institute of International and Comparative Education, Beijing Normal University