Re-Imagined Universities and Global Citizen Professionals: International Education, Cosmopolitan Pedagogies and Global Friendships

298 Pages·2014·2.372 MB·English

by  Shanti George (auth.)

Frontiers of Globalization Series
Series Editor: Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Professor of Sociology, University of California,
Santa Barbara, US.
Titles Include:
Shanti George
RE-IMAGINED UNIVERSITIES AND GLOBAL CITIZEN PROFESSIONALS
International Education, Cosmopolitan Pedagogies and Global Friendships
Sashi Nair
SECRECY AND SAPPHIC MODERNISM
Writing Romans à Clef Between the Wars
Shanta Nair-Venugopal
THE GAZE OF THE WEST AND FRAMINGS OF THE EAST
Jan Neverdeen Pieterse and Boike Rehbein (editors)
GLOBALIZATION AND EMERGING SOCIETIES
Development and Inequality
Boike Rehbein (editor)
GLOBALIZATION AND INEQUALITY IN EMERGING SOCIETIES
Rafal Soborski
IDEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL AGE
Continuity and Change
Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS IN CHINA
Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy
Frontiers of Globalization Series
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Also by Shanti George:
THIRD WORLD PROFESSIONALS AND DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION IN EUROPE:
Personal Narratives, Global Conversations
A MATTER OF PEOPLE: Co-operative Dairying in India and Zimbabwe
OPERATION FLOOD: An Appraisal of Current Indian Dairy Policy
STAKEHOLDERS IN FOSTERCARE: An International Comparative Study (lead author)
Re-Imagined Universities and
Global Citizen Professionals
International Education, Cosmopolitan
Pedagogies and Global Friendships
Shanti George
© Shanti George 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35894-3
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ISBN 978-1-349-47139-3 ISBN 978-1-137-35895-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137358950
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To my parents, Dr Leela Chacko and Captain P.V. George,
global citizen professionals of their time,
and to their grandchildren Mariam, Anisa, Aaditya and Amoy
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
1 The Politics of the Intellect in the Globalized World 1
Universities: neoliberal or emancipatory agendas? 1
Everyday intellectuals in developing countries 6
Missing in the literature 12
Knowledge, higher education and voices from developing
countries 16
International development studies: educating for national
and global citizenship 23
The present study 31
Narratives and methodological cosmopolitanism 34
Overview of the book 37
2 The Politics of the Intellect in Developing Countries 41
Introduction 41
A new class emerges and experiences a top-down commitment 45
Radicalization: the new class and the family 50
Radicalization: the new class and education outside the home 55
Social critics 65
International development studies as social criticism 76
European and North American advocates for developing countries 79
Conclusion 84
3 Citizen Professionals and Cosmopolitan Identities 86
Introduction 86
Three narratives 90
Civil servants, academicians and activists 95
‘Humanist intellectuals’ and ‘technocrats’ 104
Knowledge, power and the market 113
Changing the world 117
Living in the world 119
Conclusion 123
4 Cosmopolitan Pedagogies for Global Citizen Professionals 127
Introduction 127
Schools of development studies – beyond conventional
higher education 129
Self-education 138
vii
viii Contents
Co-learning with faculty 142
‘One world’ education and worldmaking 150
Conclusion 158
5 Global Friendships: Hegemonic or Transformative?
(I) ‘We Were All Strangers’ at a School of Development
Studies 160
Introduction 160
Desert island friendships 165
Smudged lines and states of ‘unhomeliness’ 175
The Netherlands: rich, but small and with limited
global influence 181
Conclusion 184
6 Global Friendships: Hegemonic or Transformative?
(II) Global Capitalism and Exclusion – A New Version of
the ‘Harvard Murder’ 190
Introduction 190
Three triumphs … 193
… and a tragedy 195
‘Looking for a villain’ 198
Questioning interpretations 204
Harvard: race, gender, class and friendship 208
A crime of passion 219
Comparisons 222
Conclusion 226
7 The Politics of the Imagination in Our Globalized World 229
Re-imagining universities in order to re-imagine the world 229
A review of main arguments 236
Inspiration for today’s universities 246
Steps in the desired direction 252
Beyond knowledge that excludes 255
Cited References 258
Index 278
Preface and Acknowledgements
As universities around the world continue their struggle to adapt to con-
stantly changing realities around them and as they face outspoken criticism
for not realizing their potential to contribute to a more equitable world,
where can they look for lessons? This book argues that universities should
consider the experiences of centres or schools of international development
studies in order to expand the constituencies from which student popula-
tions are recruited, to reorient curricula beyond the Eurocentric origins of
most contemporary universities, to re-examine teaching processes so as to
encourage mutual learning between faculty and students, and to recognize
more adequately the realities of the globalized world within which universi-
ties are located.
This book began when one school of development studies located in Europe
commissioned me to study first a sample of former students and later another
sample of current students, at the beginning and end of the 1990s. Rather
than conventional ‘tracer study’ approaches, life story methods were used.
Even within a small fraction of former and current students, these methods
elicited a tremendous amount and variety of life experiences – together the
samples numbered 124 individuals across 27 countries and five continents –
that illuminated what it is like to work within the field of ‘development’ and
to think both within formal settings and outside them about the processes
at work. The research on former students was published as an ethnography
of development education in Europe (George, 1997) and work on current
students was reported in a series of working papers (George, 2000, 2001 and
2002). It seemed to me and several other commentators that this body of var-
ied and vivid life histories also had wider relevance and application.
Life story methodologies focus on individuals as themselves, in contrast
to ‘tracer’ studies that view individuals as sites where the outcomes of par-
ticular interventions can be examined. The individuals discussed in this
book are very largely experienced professionals from Africa, Asia and Latin
America, and I searched for long in vain for theoretical frameworks that
would do justice to their lives and perceptions. As discussed in the open-
ing chapters, reflective professionals from developing countries are largely
invisible as protagonists in development studies analyses as well as in much
social science literature (with the telling exception of presentations of cor-
porate culture in different global settings within business and management
studies; see, for example, the attention paid to Trompenaars and Hampden-
Turner, 1999, and several later editions of their work).
Edited volumes on intellectuals in developing countries (Mkandawire,
2005a; Baud and Rutten, 2004; Galjart and Silva, 1995a) provided many
ix