Elite making and increasing access to cosmopolitan capital: DC youth experiences in education abroad

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the production of cosmopolitan capital among students participating in the DC Public Schools Study Abroad Programme, an initiative that has been lauded as shifting the narrative of equitable access to global learning. We draw on a framework of Bourdieusian ideas about cultural capital, as well as community cultural wealth perspectives to illuminate findings from a multi-year, mixed-method study of the programme. Our focus is on how students, many of whom identify as belonging to minoritised groups within the US, experience global travel and its varying effects as related to the production and expression of cosmopolitan capital. By examining how cosmopolitan capital is mobilised and enacted in a myriad of ways by youth in a globalising urban space, we engage and contribute to the literature on internationalisation and elite making, inviting a more relational definition of ‘elites’.

KEYWORDS:

• Education abroad
• cosmopolitan capital
• cultural capital
• youth
• international education

Acknowledgments

Funding for this study came from grants from the American Educational Research Association, the National Geographic Society, and the GW UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development. We’d like to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with aspects of the research: Jessica Fundalinski, Clark Boothby, Binyu Yang; GW students for their input and feedback on these ideas, especially Sabrina Curtis and Janiel Slowly; the DCPS Global Education staff; and all of the research participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Geographic Society [HJ-089E-17]; American Educational Research Association [ERSP 2017].