International higher education and global citizenship education: The rise of critical cosmopolitanism’s ‘personhood’ in the age of covid-19

Abstract

COVID-19 is the first truly global pandemic of the 21st century, and while it has claimed thousands of lives, it has also provided our current global risk society with opportunities to inhabit increasingly rare moments of transnational openness and collectivity. However, higher education institutions (HEIs) continue to be guided by hegemonic forces which reify the necessity of human capital-based norms, values and competencies as a means of securing national and individual competitive advantage. Challenging the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy of the knowledge economy, knowledge socialism aims to cement the bonds of collectivity through decentralised and non-hierarchical avenues of non-rivalrous, peer-to-peer, knowledge exchange for the collective good. This article argues that in order to foment this turn – from individuality/competitiveness to collectivity/non-rivalry – a shift from a methodologically nationalist form of global citizenship education, towards one which embraces cosmopolitan personhood must occur. Thus, cosmopolitan personhood should be understood as an educational project and an ethical imperative which promotes a notion of cosmopolitan citizenship based in openness and the collective struggle towards securing the greater good.