Global Higher Education and the Production of Global Citizenships

Abstract

This chapter traces the sustained presence of discourses of global economy and militarization from the signing of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the International Education Act of 1966 to the coming of post-Cold War and post-9/11 iterations of international and global higher education. These periods illustrate how developments in global higher education reflect not a single historical trajectory but rather a site of political conflict between sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting discourses of national security, cosmopolitan ethics, global economics, and global disciplinarity. The chapter illustrates the consistent presence of these discourses through an analysis of their continued impact on current programs of global higher education. In addition, this chapter analyzes populist backlashes to global higher education and their role in obscuring these discourses.