Co-forming an international elite: theorising the partnerships of global politics, capitals, and international schools in maintaining global structures of power.

• In Event: Unveiling Power, Privilege, and Resistance: Interrogating Whiteness, Internationalism, and Black Feminist Activism in the Context of Racial Capitalism

Proposal

This PhD project seeks to develop a theory of internationalism that looks at how internationalism can become a space of privilege and power inhabited by people who have been taught to be international. Anchored in a deconstructive and decolonial approach, this project looks at the way that the existing world order has been constructed by racial capitalism, coloniality and specific neoliberal policies of market economies to favor a particular type of globalization that favors an elite class and disfavors those excluded. The project explicitly highlights international schools as a party to this class production and reproduction by suggesting they create future international elites to maintain said status quo. In looking at these schools and those who occupy the spaces of internationalism, it becomes revealed that it thrives by making invisible the forms of marginalization that structure the world order it seeks to maintain; notably, it does this through the forming of atypical elites whose role it becomes to disprove the presumption that elite equals western, white, and male (Derrida, 1974-1994). This project operates on two fronts and seeks to make two additions to the existing literature. Firstly, it theorizes internationalism as a differently attainable form of socio-cultural capital used to reproduce and produce elite power in and for a globalized world order; in doing so, it raises questions about the nature and limitations of social mobility, social reproduction, elite power and globalized economies (Gilmore, 2002; Robinson, 1983). Secondly, because of the diverse nature of international schools, theorizing a typology for them becomes a necessary step for this project to outline how they all contribute differently to the same co-formation of an elite. This typology is about making explicit how different lines of privileges and marginalizations intersect in distinct manners to co-form sites of international teaching and, thus too, international people (Bacchetta, 2010; Ahmed, 2007; Mills, 2007). It is this typology that then also structures the empirical part of this research project, where qualitative data is collected through participant interviews from 5 schools, each fitting a different category developed and through an observational study conducted over the length of an academic year in one institution that encompasses elements of some of the categories designed. Finally, it should be noted that while this project establishes itself foremost as a strong critique of internationalism for its complicity in the world order that marginalizes and harms too many while also protecting itself from attack by using its atypical elites as defense, it is also largely sympathetic to the consideration that there might be a competing internationalism being formed by the international non-elite in the form of global solidarity working toward resistance to oppression: this is the internationalism that is true to the mission of the former.

Author

• Sohane Inès Mousseid Yahya, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge