The Political Economy of Global Citizenship Education

This edited collection offers analyses of ‘global citizenship education’ within and across different national contexts. This book illustrates the contingency of definitions, the complexities of juxtaposing demands and priorities in different educational contexts, and the difficulties and tensions of asking a question that is arguably one of the most pressing of our time: how should we live together in interdependent ecologies in a finite planet? In the discipline of education, where market imperatives and the dictatorship of 'effective replicable results' have laid siege to independent debates, this book aims to emphasize the importance of raising our intellectual game as educators to interrupt new and old problematic patterns of engagements, representations, uncomplicated solutions and conceptual straightjackets.

Contributors to this volume address the tensions between homogenizing universalisms and parochial specifisms, ethnocentrisms and relativisms, deficit theorizations and romanticizations of difference, fantasies of supremacy and paralyses in guilt, the 'global' and the 'local'. The chapters take different approaches to map the origins, meanings, workings, ethics, politics and implications of initiatives, approaches, and conceptual frameworks related to the ideas of globalization, citizenship and education in different sites of knowledge production.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is Professor of Global Education at the University of Oulu, Finland. Drawing on postcolonial and postcritical theories, her research focuses on educational patterns of representations and engagements with otherness, inequalities and global change. She has extensive international experience working inter-disciplinarily and across sectors in the areas of international development and global citizenship education. Vanessa is the coordinator of the World Educational Research Association Global Ethics International Research Network and the author of Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education (2011), and Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (with Lynn Mario de Souza) (2012).