World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic Education in Cultivating Citizens of the World

Abstract

One of the key distinguishing characteristics of the twenty-first century is the intensification of global mobility and interconnectivity. At the same time, this illusion of connectivity is also disrupted by rising instances of cultural and religious intolerance evidenced in the spread of extremism, fundamentalism, and xenophobia worldwide. Consequently, governments have become increasingly conscious of the need to empower citizens with the skills and dispositions to navigate cultural diversity in a global age. This chapter premises on the argument that education for citizenship be explicitly reframed as education for cosmopolitan citizenship. It focuses on the role of aesthetic education in developing a cosmopolitan imagination that continually disrupts national, institutional, and parochial norms. Though aesthetic education encompasses the production of artworks and the processes of art-making, it is primarily attentive to shaping perspectives and predispositions toward others. This occurs not merely through artworks themselves but through three key pedagogical tools that aesthetic education supports to developing an imagination hospitable to diversity and difference – pedagogies of interruption, bridge-building pedagogies, and critical cosmopolitan pedagogies. Through an ongoing process of world-seeing and world-making elicited through narratives of otherness, aesthetic education facilitates cosmopolitan sensitivities as a means to live ethically and hospitably with diverse and multiple others in a globally interconnected age.