(re)Imagining the global, rethinking gender in education

Abstract

This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the ‘girl-citizen’. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in ‘making’ and ‘managing’ global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

Keywords:

• gender
• globalisation
• governmentality
• imagination
• girl-citizen

Notes

1. I use the term ‘girl(s)’ throughout the paper to call attention to the way it functions as a homogenous category in a great deal of educational discourse. However, I recognise that this category is highly problematic. There is not, of course, only one way to be a ‘girl’. Furthermore, using categories like ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ reinforces the normative gender order and ignores the multitude of ways in which young people construct their sexed/gendered selves beyond these simple binary categories (Burns, 2004).

2. While some scholars apply Foucault's notion of the assemblage or the dispositif to their works, an actual textual reference that indicates when Foucault first used these terms is difficult to trace. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (2003) suggest that while the concept of an assemblage is used in various places throughout his work before 1975, it was in an (unspecified) interview in 1975, following the publication of Surveiller et Punir, that he first used the term dispositif.

3. Of course this is not a new phenomenon, previous ‘generations’ were morally and socially ‘shaped’ by dominant schooling policies and practices (McLeod, 2001, 2006; Wyn, 2000).