Reassessing globalization: new perspectives on education in the tumult of global change

Abstract

Dynamics associated with globalization – as expressed in the intensification and movement of cultural and economic capital, mass migration, the amplification and proliferation of images via digitalization and electronic mediation generally, and the rising precarity of labor, including intellectual labor – are now fully articulated to modern schooling and the social and cultural environments in which both school-age youth and educators operate. These developments on examination are not always salutary, and they are forcing educators to reconsider the boundaries of curriculum, pedagogy, and educational policy. If, as educators, we are to more fully engage with the complex range of experiences, images, and practices that now compel modern school subjects and affect their expression of needs, interests, and desires, then we must take these global developments seriously. This Call for Papers is aimed at foregrounding new incisive perspectives on the topic of globalization and education pertaining to the research dimensions of theory, methodology, and policy that might deepen our understandings of education and classroom practices, as well as the existential challenges that contemporary educators face in these tumultuous times of global change. Earlier discourses have underscored the implications of globalization for education, pointing to the growing importance of education in up-skilling, creating human competencies, and in producing scientific and technical knowledge to prepare societies for participation in a global economy. The predominance of brainpower industries and a technological shift accompanied by a move from emphasis on traditional knowledge cultures to a focus on preparation for an information and knowledge economy have also initiated policy reorientations from earlier democratization of university systems toward developing 'human capital', as imperative to securing individual and national competitive advantages. We, however, anticipate that critical insights into educational policy futures may also arrive from the Global South directed at innovative arrangements and borne out by democratic formations promoting not only smart ways of communication and networking or the mapping of discourses for harnessing human resources to maximize economic growth, but also for democratizing participation in a world community, for social inclusion and global justice, for creative and innovative social enterprises encompassing gender equity, human rights, ecological sustainability, global politics played through digital/urban/hybrid networks, and eventually, profound ways of understanding the spirit of the age. This is a Call for critical scholars to envision 'alternative futures' of globalization and education. We invite abstracts that offer reassessment of the critical futures of education in the tumult of global change and pursue alternatives that challenge the dominant neoliberal, techno-managerial, and instrumentalist paradigm that pervades the educational enterprise in this epoch. For example, some 'alternatives' that are already conceived include what Arjun Appadurai ( 1996 Appadurai, A. ( 1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar] , 2013 Appadurai, A. ( 2013). How histories make geographies. Circulation and context in a global perspective. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The future as cultural artifact (pp. 61 – 70). London : Verso. [Google Scholar] ) calls 'grassroots globalization' or 'globalization from below', what Amartya Sen ( 2010 -Abstract Truncated-