Actor‐network theory of cosmopolitan education

Abstract

In the past, philosophers discussed cosmopolitanism as a normative ideal of allegiance to humanity as a whole. A debate among social theorists, however, has examined cosmopolitanism as an incipient empirical phenomenon: an orientation of openness to foreign others and cultures. This paper introduces actor‐network theory to elaborate the social‐theoretical conception of cosmopolitanism. In light of the actor‐network theory of cosmopolitanism, the paper proposes cosmopolitan education that aims to foster in students three dispositions: to extend attachments to foreign people and objects; to understand transnational connections in which their lives are embedded; and to act on these attachments and understandings to effect transformations across national borders. Through this three‐fold cosmopolitan education, students will grow to be citizens of the world who traverse national borders dialogically by virtue of their transnational attachments, understandings, and actions.

Keywords:

• actor‐network theory
• citizenship education
• cosmopolitanism
• globalization
• Japanese schools
• international education

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association Meeting in New York City in 2008. I would like to thank the students, teachers, and educators who made this research possible, and also Michael Kennedy, Alexandra Gerber, Alwyn Lim, Jessi Streib, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. See Beck and Sznaider (2006), Hannerz (1990), Roudometof (2005), and Skrbis et al. (2004).

2. Nowadays the local is becoming a rarity: ‘much of what we often think of as the local is, in reality, the glocal’ (Ritzer 2003: 207). Similarly, what we think of as locals are becoming cosmopolitan locals.

3. Here the anthropological tropes of ‘travel’ (Clifford 1997) and ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha 1994) must be reconfigured to encompass the glocal or cosmopolitan‐local conditions of non‐immigrants. A distinction between mobile and immobile does not map onto a dichotomy between cosmopolitans and locals because localities themselves are becoming glocal and hybrid as they are made up of both mobile and immobile actants. People do not have to ‘travel’ (both literally and metaphorically) to be cosmopolitans. ‘Cosmopolitan locals’ are therefore different from ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ (Appiah 2006). Although the latter are people like immigrants who travel across national borders extensively, the former are mostly non‐immigrants who became cosmopolitan by virtue of glocal attachments.

4. See e.g. Damasio (1999).

5. The names of the school and the participants are pseudonyms. Responses in the text (and extracts from documents originally in Japanese) have been translated by the author.

6. The game, developed by Sega, the Japanese videogame company, involves battles between cards describing various beetle species. An animated television programme based on this game was aired through April 2005 to March 2006.

7. This finding was confirmed by Hess and Torney (1967), who reported that nearly 95% of their interviewees from grades 2–8 in the USA answered that America was the best country in the world and they would rather be an American than a member of another nation. They concluded that attachment to one’s ascribed national group developed from a very early age and served as a foundation of subsequent development of political attitudes and ideologies.

8. For more information see FPSP (2008) and FPSPI (2008).

9. See Japan Student Video (2008).