Every Wednesday at 4.30 pm, 14 November – 12 December 2018
Room 4.09, 35, Berkeley Square
CIRE Reading Group
The decisions that people make in and through education are often influenced by their view of globalisation, the opportunities it offers them or the exclusions it creates. Literature theorising how we imagine the globalisation and how we imagine the future may help us to understand why some young people decide to the West to study higher education; how they respond when they are denied access to education; the career decisions of foreign language teachers or why some policy ideas become global policy agendas.
This reading group engages with texts primarily from anthropology and cultural studies in order to explore how dominant or widespread ways of imagining globalisation shape the possibilities that individuals imagine for their own future, or their aspirations. Some readings are concerned with how globalisation is experienced by internationally mobile individuals living within hybrid communities. Others focus on poorer, marginalised communities and individuals, with identities strongly associated with specific localities.
Week 1: 14 November
Taylor, C. (2002) Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Culture 14(1): 91-124. Introduction (pp. 91-2) and Section 3 (pp. 105-111)
Charles Taylor coined the term social imaginaries in order to explain how ideas about individuals and society that originated with a small number of European thinkers came to shape modernity in the West.
Canclini, N.G. (2014) Imagined Globalization. Translated by Yúdice, G. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ch. 2.
Canclini focuses on how globalization and identity is conceptualised and represented at a time of unprecedented mobility. Nestor Garcini Canclini is an Argentinian anthropologist with an interest in hybrid cultures.
Week 2: 21 November
Steger, M. B. (2009) The rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship online. Introduction.
Steger also draws on Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries to understand concepts and experiences of globalisation but his analysis has a more political focus.
Week 3: 28 November
Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London & New York: Verso. Chapter 9 – The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition.
This week we turn to the aspirations. Appadurai discusses the capacity to aspire in relation to the voice and agency of oppressed communities to imagine and navigate an alternative future. Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-born anthropologist, who has conducted extensive research with slum dwellers in Mumbai.
Week 4: 5 December
DeJaeghere, J. (2018) Girls’ educational aspirations and agency: imagining alternative futures through schooling in a low resourced Tanzanian community. Critical Studies in Education 59(2): 237-255.
In the last week, we look at one example of the application of the Appadurai’s concept of the capacity to aspire to education. Dejaeghere also draws on the capability approach to conceptualise agency and Bourdieu, to understand structure.
CIRE 