On Refugees, Undocumented Students, and the Challenges of Educating for Cosmopolitan Moral Agency

• In Event: Teacher Meets World: A Critical Conversation on Hansen’s Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

In this paper I look specifically at Hansen's view of “human diversity,” “dwelling in an uncertain world,” and “tensions between home and movement,” insofar as the experiences of refugees and undocumented students might challenge current conceptions of what it means to educate for cosmopolitan moral agency in today’s diverse classrooms.

In an earlier paper Hansen (2010) wrote,
Cosmopolitanism presumes a sense of home, a sense of the local without which it may morph into nomadism, consumerism, or other postures that may make it hard if not impossible to express moral responsibility. As touched on previously, cosmopolitan thought has long been bound up with images of hospitality toward the stranger. No such hospitality is possible without a home in some meaningful sense of the term” (pp. 160-61).
While he acknowledges that “there are many modes of being at home in the world,” (p. 160), there is an assumption that the aspiring “citizen of the world” has a (sense of) home from which to depart on her journeys of intellectual, creative, and moral discovery and into which she can receive strangers. However, I want to suggest that for the refugees and undocumented students in our classrooms, being a citizen of the world is not so much the result of having freely chosen to become cosmopolitan as it is a result of their classification as people not having a home in the first place. In my view, the experiences of these students call us to rethink what it might mean to educate for moral agency in today’s globalized world. What, for example, might it mean to take displacement (whether physical or existential) as a starting point for cosmopolitan education? Might the development of moral agency for refugee and undocumented students require educational experiences more consistent with the spatial and temporal coherence of a laser beam rather than the refracting experiences a cosmopolitan prism provides? And what might we learn about hospitality from those who have no home?
In the paper I bring Hansen’s work into conversation with other educational scholars who have written about cosmopolitanism, especially Sharon Todd (2008), who draws on the Levinasian themes of difference, heteronomy, and responsibility, and Zelia Gregoriou (2004) who argues for a Derridean ethic of hospitality and différance as central to any conception of cosmopolitanism worth pursuing. From time to time I will also refer to the foundational work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Martha Nussbaum. In the final section of the paper I suggest that in order for cosmopolitanism to provide a helpful framework for educating for moral agency in today’s diverse classrooms we might need to revise our conception of cosmopolitan moral agency to take into account the experiences of the refugees and undocumented students in our midst, and I propose some potential starting points for that work.

Author

• Ann Chinnery, Simon Fraser University