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The Who and the What of Educational Cosmopolitanism

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…everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster;

W.H. Auden, “Musee des Beau Arts”

Abstract

In the educational strand of cosmopolitanism, much attention has been placed on theorizing and describing who is cosmopolitan. It has been argued that cosmopolitan sensibilities negotiate and/or embody such paradoxes as rootedness and rootlessness, local and global concerns, private and public identities. Concurrently, cosmopolitanism has also been formulated as a globally-minded project for and ethico-political responsibility to human rights and global justice. Such articulations underscore cosmopolitanism in anthropocentric terms. People can be cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan projects aim to cultivate cosmopolitan subjectivities. What is striking about scholarship in educational cosmopolitanism is its lack of serious attention placed on the greatest global threat facing not only but largely created by human beings: environmental degradation. In this paper, I provide an overview of key texts written on the who in educational cosmopolitanism which helps lay the groundwork for an analysis of what is cosmopolitan. Regarding the what, I examine a range of boundary-defying emergencies described in cosmopolitan terms including climate change, radioactive poisoning of the planet, and bioinvasion. In the last analysis, I consider what it would take and what the possibilities are for our species to be truly committed to caring not only for the human world.

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Notes

  1. Certainly Papastephanou’s (2012) distinction between globalization and cosmopolitanism leaves room for debate. As Beck (2006) puts it, globalization “promotes the idea of the global market…allowing capital, commodities and labour to move freely across borders” (p. 9). Cosmopolitanism, differently, is a “multidimensional process” often resulting from world risks that help shape various forms of political action as a response to globalization. Beck’s interpretation of cosmopolitanism is one that I call attention to for those in education interested in engaging cosmopolitanism from within the global ecological crisis.

  2. One way to extend Pinar’s critique of religiosity and consumer society is by taking cues from eco-democracy and earth democracy. Eco-democracy also called “eco-cracy” means “creating ecologically sustainable systems, reverence for the planet and not its continuous plundering” (Skolimowski 2002, p. 152). The kind of reverence described by eco-philosopher Skolimowski echoes earth democratic practices which “exist as spirituality and wisdom in many traditional and indigenous cultures” (Martusewicz and Edmundson 2005, p. 73). Indeed, a sense of the sacred for the natural world might be said to juxtapose the technique-worshiping secularism of (post)industrial democracies.

  3. In the United States, for example, there are rightwing politicians and political pundits a la Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh who insist that climate change is a scheme concocted, a myth waged, by liberals who want the government to have more control over our lives. While such rhetoric is clearly erroneous as any scientist studying the phenomenon can confirm, a significant portion of the American public buys into this rhetoric. In effect, if climate change can summon cosmopolitan solidarity, it can also summon a divisiveness that has the capacity to put the world in even more dire ecological circumstances than it already is.

  4. If exotic species and nuclear issues have something in common, they are expected to become inadvertent “victims” of manufactured climate change. E.g., Great Britain’s nuclear waste repository located on the Cumbrian coast is “virtually certain” to be contaminated by radioactive waste due to rising sea levels (Edwards 2014). And the “deadly duo” of invasive species and climate change “cannot be overestimated” (Simons as cited in IUCN 2010).

  5. What Orr fails to appreciate in his appraisal of NYC—“a modest enough standard for wildness (p. 131)—is that building vertically rather than sprawling laterally conserves more of the natural environment and is more attuned to sustainable planning..

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Gert Biesta for their important criticisms which helped me to narrow the focus of this paper’s argument. I also give thanks to Reid Ipser, an entomologist specializing in invasive species, for his feedback on this paper and Bill Pinar who has been a consistent source of inspiration and encouragement.

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  1. School of Behavioral Sciences and Education, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA, 17057, USA

    Hannah Spector

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  1. Hannah Spector
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Correspondence to Hannah Spector.

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Spector, H. The Who and the What of Educational Cosmopolitanism. Stud Philos Educ 34, 423–440 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-014-9441-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-014-9441-4

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