Living in Translation, Translating Living: Cosmopolitanism as Creative Meaning-Making Among Global Youth

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Creativity

Abstract

As global trajectories of movement and change proliferate, scholars look to globalization as a critical construct across disciplines (e.g., Held 2001; Trawny, retrieved 1/12/11). While globalization references flows of people, ideas, and resources, cosmopolitanism offers the heuristic for understanding impacts of these flows on people, and on (inter)relationships between people. Stuart Hall argues that there are dialectical dangers in globalization: “an overriding homogenization and sameness,” and “warring differences” (Hall, 2006). As actions, ideologies and initiatives of people increasingly cross national and transnational boundaries, he warns we may become indistinguishable from one another as differences are erased, or differences may reign paramount and lead to disputes and violence. Cosmopolitanism offers a way to understand “universality plus difference” (Appiah, 2006), enabling engagement with and valuing of difference through explorations of culture, ethics and creativity.

Education in globalizing times calls for new skills, understandings and dispositions, and new orientations to self and other. Yet it is clear that there is little significant change in educational and curricular landscapes, or more equitable schooling for diverse youth (e.g., Lee 2005; Nieto 1999; Toohey 2000; Valdes 2001). This presentation turns to extra-school sites, focusing on a project that links youth in a community-based learning center in low-income housing in the U.S. with youth in a school in a poverty-stricken area of Uganda through digital communications, to support (English) language and literacy development, and global learning. Youth drew on their creativity to negotiate the design of multimedia projects to share and respond to designs of global others.

Stories Without Borders (the project I am involved with) involves collaborations by youth (10-12 years old), scaffolded by adults, to create and upload digital stories of their lives and communities to a dedicated project website. Once uploaded, youth in the other site view them, and participate in facilitated reflective conversations. The website hosts asynchronous chats, and the youth (as a group) exchange comments and questions. They then design the next project to create and share. Data were gathered over a period of 18 months, and consisted of the digital stories produced, texts of chats exchanged, periodic interviews with and emails exchanged between adult facilitators, and group interviews with youth.

In my presentation I will examine multimedia and multivocal representations of understandings of self and other. I will consider how questions such as Who are “we,” Who are “they,” and “How do we communicate who ‘we’ are to imagined others” help us understand how this project functions to expand not only the language and literacy repertoires of participating youth, but also their situated understandings of themselves and others in the world. Findings point to ways in which, through creative design and meaning-making, youth recruited ideologies and cultural models of everyday life, literacies, and education in their portrayals. Through transmission these creations were taken up and negotiated by global others, making clear that, with goodwill and appropriate scaffolding, the connections forged between these particular strangers can transform their worlds.

Author

• Margaret R. Hawkins, University of Wisconsin - Madison