Toward a Critical Cosmopolitan Pedagogy DISSERTATION
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Becoming Cosmopolitan: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitan Pedagogy DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Tammy Birk Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marlene Longenecker, Advisor Dr. Merry Merryfield Dr. Dorothy Noyes Copyright by Tammy Birk 2011 Abstract My dissertation, Becoming Cosmopolitan: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitan Pedagogy, names and explores the central features of a critical cosmopolitan pedagogical practice. Global learning, while a popular and laudable curricular goal in higher education, still remains vaguely defined and open to interpretations that detach it from ethical and engaged ends. My dissertation takes as a primary task the theorizing of cosmopolitan pedagogies that will fully and complexly realize the aims of ethical and engaged global learning. Because I am most interested in exploring the benefits and challenges of framing global learning within an explicitly cosmopolitan context, this project takes as a primary task the examination and elaboration of the notional relationship between the global and the cosmopolitan. How, for example, might cosmopolitan questions enrich and complicate contemporary discourse on the global in higher education? What might be gained from a more overt identification of the global with the cosmopolitan in pedagogical work? And, if we admit the usefulness of cosmopolitan frameworks for global learning pedagogies, why is it important that we define our investments as critically cosmopolitan? Critical cosmopolitanism, as I define it, is a variant of cosmopolitan discourse that resists abstract universal truths about human or global community; thinks the local and the global relationally; insists on a strong and broad ethical concern for the other that does not disregard difference; complicates and decolonizes ways of thinking about social identity and power; and challenges the uncritical commodification of cultural difference. I argue that this iteration of ii cosmopolitanism offers a socially relevant and transformative language for global learning, as it is intent on questioning and, ultimately, deterritorializing borders and boundaries that work to reify both identity and location. Because critical cosmopolitan pedagogy additionally seeks to complicate its relationship to abstract and imperial versions of universalism on the one hand, and insular and restrictive forms of civic identity on the other, I believe that it emerges as the most productive and promising of cosmopolitan frameworks for global learning. In the dissertation, I define what I believe to be the key paradigms and sensibilities of a critical cosmopolitan pedagogy. Critical cosmopolitan teaching and learning is marked by three significant conceptual paradigms: a rethinking of the local and global as mutually constitutive and relational, an enlarged and reinvigorated conception of citizenship, and a complex engagement with otherness. It is also my central contention that a critical cosmopolitan orientation—necessarily self- reflexive, heightened in its care and responsibility for the world, and challenging of routine forms of cynicism—is the dispositional goal of critical cosmopolitan pedagogy. Finally, this project hopes to better understand and answer the anxieties that are inspired by critical cosmopolitan practices and values in pedagogical work. I am interested in one particular response: anxiety about the engulfment and erasure of the local (usually, in the name of the global or ―elsewhere‖). Without a more complex exploration of the way that anxiety threatens and undermines critical cosmopolitan pedagogy, I believe that we are less equipped to contend with resistance in the learning situation and, as a result, less successful in our efforts to introduce students to new and viable possibilities for cosmopolitan subjectivity, responsibility, and belonging. iii Dedication for my daughter Eva Angelina Birk-Petri because she thinks with her heart and in memory of my grandmother Angelina Palladina Hopeck because she was the one who did it first iv Acknowledgments I began another dissertation sixteen years ago. I loved it for what it was: an exploration of the transferential implications and impasses of the pedagogical scene. Then, as now, I was intensely interested in the psychic terrain of teaching and learning, even more specifically the reasons why we make ourselves available—or unavailable—for the transformative potential of education. It would be too simple to say that I outgrew the critical questions that organized the first dissertation. In fact, I was only beginning to answer them when I found another love interest: global education. While lecturing at Ohio State, I was hired to teach a few courses in a Global Studies program at Franklin University. The program was the cornerstone of Franklin‘s general education core, and, surprisingly, it was a profoundly interdisciplinary and innovative curriculum. I began to organize courses that were centered on pressing global issues and concerns for an audience of exhausted adult evening students who were often unsure about the direction of their lives and even less sure about the extent that they wanted to know or care about the complex dilemmas facing the contemporary world. The work was hard, I felt young and evangelical, and those years at Franklin— including a stint as chair of the program—taught me a lot about what it means to be truly transformed by what you teach and learn. I left Franklin an entirely different person. After I was hired at Otterbein for a full-time position in the English department, I began to think about ways that I could bring some version of ‗world-mindedness‘ to the Integrative Studies curriculum, our general education core. At the time, Integrative Studies had been meditating on questions about human nature for nearly thirty years, and I knew that the students had grown tired of the introversion and insularity of the program. I approached the chair of the program and the Dean v of Arts and Sciences, begging for a chance to apply for a grant from AACU (American Association of Colleges and Universities) that would fund a radical revision of the general education core. The grant, General Education for Global Learning, would not only help cover the costs of faculty development, it would also identify Otterbein as one of sixteen national institutions pioneering globally-conscious general education programs. The chair and the Dean were both pessimistic: about the idea of curricular revision, about the desirability of turning our general education core outward, and about the rightness of a national stage for our efforts. ―I‘m not sure Otterbein students want this kind of learning,‖ one of them told me. I didn‘t think that the exhausted returning adult students at Franklin who were underemployed and barely managing mortgages and families wanted that kind of learning, either—but, after years in the classroom with them, I knew better. I understand that parochialism comes easily, but it is also amenable to scrutiny and revision. The vast majority of students are capable of thinking beyond borders and boundaries of all sorts, if they are given room to examine and work through the anxieties that frequently surface when we loosen our grip on the need for borders and boundaries. So I pressed on at Otterbein, without institutional sanction. And, to my surprise, we won the grant. That began a nearly five-year process of entirely reimagining and reorganizing the general education core at the University. That process—stressful, surprising, and often grueling—taught me a lot about what it means to define global learning for an audience that is unsure about what it means to highlight the global or if it is important to prioritize it in the first place. I will talk a bit about that process in this dissertation, as it shaped my thinking about the necessity of two things: one, defining global learning in ways that align it clearly and specifically with critical cosmopolitan frameworks and, two, understanding and working through the anxiety that is often generated by critical cosmopolitan commitments in teaching and learning. vi Meanwhile, as the work and the years piled up, my first dissertation remained undone and languishing. On most days, it seemed like it belonged to someone else, and, when I reread parts of it, I can remember underlining it as if I were learning from it for the first time. This proved an experience both illuminating and disorienting. My life and my interests had taken me in another direction, and, for the longest time, I had no idea how I was going to rewind myself long and far enough to finish the Ph.D. This is where Marlene Longenecker enters the story. And it is fitting that she is the first person that I acknowledge here, because one of my greatest debts is owed to her. Marlene suggested that I do the unthinkable thing: scrap the first dissertation—all the notes, the writing, the years of sorting, the intense psychic investment–and begin a new dissertation that reflected my live interests. When she first said this to me, I felt my blood leave my body. I didn‘t believe I had it in me to begin this arduous process again. I was too old, too busy, too perfectionist, too conflicted about writing to begin again a second time. But, because Marlene is Marlene and she‘s right about most things in life, I actually went home and mulled it over. And it didn‘t take me long to realize that this was what I needed to do, even if I had some doubts about my ability to find the commitment in myself again. At some point, I made the choice to go forward. Nothing melodramatic. Just the choice to begin moving. And I‘ve been moving—over summers and sabbaticals and occasional weekends—ever since. So, let me begin my acknowledgments by reiterating that one of my greatest debts is owed to Marlene Longenecker.