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american sentimentalism and the
­production of global citizens
Try this experiment: Go to your college’s
or university’s home page and look for
the mission statement. Odds are high
that you’ll find at least one reference—
whether explicit or implicit—to the
institution’s promise to “produce global
citizens.” While this goal has become
widespread, even a truism, in higher
education, the particular construction
of this concept is relatively new. Historically, study abroad and a global education were understood as the purview of
elite students, with the primary goal of
developing more complete, worldly, and
successful individuals. When “developing citizenship” was expressed as a goal
of higher education, such citizenship
was understood as national rather than
international in scope.
The production of global citizens as
a goal of higher education arises from
a particular mix of mediating factors in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first
Glenna Gordon
by ron krabill
Invisible Children founders Bobby Bailey, Laren Poole, and Jason Russell with members
of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army on the Sudan-Congo border in 2008.
the rise of online learning opportunities across national borders; more international students studying within the
United States and more competition for
“The White Savior Industrial Complex is not
about justice. It is about having a big emotional
experience that validates privilege.”
centuries, many of which fall under that
ever-amorphous phenomenon of globalization: international monetary configurations oriented toward global business
success; rapidly expanding (yet pervasively shallow) media focus on world
problems such as global health, human
rights, natural disasters, and poverty;
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U.S. higher education institutions from
abroad; and the decreasing costs of
international travel for U.S.-based students, to name but a few. One consequence of these shifts toward a global
perspective is a much more widespread
expectation that some form of international education be a part of every U.S.
student’s experience.
There are many reasons to applaud
the trend toward “globalizing” U.S.
education. Extending study abroad
opportunities beyond elite students
or institutions, and to locations that
push students beyond their economic,
physical and cultural comfort zones, are
significant achievements in their own
right. Likewise, increasing students’
sense of the necessity to understand
and be accountable for global issues
is a noteworthy humanistic endeavor.
In a country where shockingly few
national legislators have spent time outside of the United States or even possess passports, and where adults and
students alike have disturbingly limited
knowledge of basic global geography,
nothing but a problem to
the internationalization of
be solved by enthusiasm.…
higher education is a good
The White Savior Industrial
thing. Right?
Complex is not about jusWhat are some of the
tice. It is about having a big
unintended cultural conseemotional experience that
quences of these programs?
validates privilege.” TransnaAmerican
sentimentalism
tional communications netcan be seen as one such
works have helped amplify
outcome and the concept
the illusion that the expresprovides a lens that clarifies
sion of such enthusiasm—
the dangers of these trends
whether via social media or
without necessarily dismissother information and coming the benefits. Sentimenmunication
technologies
talism — emotion-based
(ICTs)—has substantive posiclaims to moral superiority
tive material impacts beyond
and as justification for one’s
the big emotional experience
actions—has a long track
of the enthusiast. The lens
record in literary and culof American sentimentalism
tural history, but it entered
reveals some of the dangers
the public eye most recently
of framing the internationaland forcefully in the debate
ization of higher education
around the Kony 2012 video
in terms of the production of
that went viral with over 100
global citizens.
million views since March
Like Kony 2012, global
2012. This debate was especitizenship practices in concially evident in writer Teju
temporary universities reflect
Cole’s scathing critique of
the assumption that awarethe video on Twitter. The
ness of global problems is
Atlantic magazine subseAuthor Teju Cole’s tweets are critical of the KONY 2012 campaign
a sufficient goal in itself.
quently reprinted Cole’s
and what it represents.
Behind this assumption is
seven tweets under the title
another, unspoken one:
of “The White Savior Indusif people become aware of horrifying
So the connections are not incidental
trial Complex.” In this elaborated version
injustice, then they will take action and
between Kony 2012, larger mediated
Cole notes, “I deeply respect American
the injustice will stop. This is the same
perceptions of global issues, and the
sentimentality, the way one respects a
assumption that underpinned much of
expectation that international experiwounded hippo. You must keep an eye
the early work in human rights. However,
ence, particularly one that includes some
on it, for you know it is deadly.”
as contemporary human rights workelement of “helping” those whose supCole’s American sentimentalismers have become excruciatingly aware,
posedly-exotic country one is visiting or
based critique of Kony 2012 applies well
to the idea of global citizenship as it has
been deployed in the rhetoric of higher
education. This is more than an accidental
parallelism. The filmmakers behind Kony
2012—with its claim to help child combatants by making the Lord’s Resistance
Army leader Joseph Kony “famous”
changing people’s consciousness alone
learning about, be part of a U.S. student’s
through social (and other) media—have
is not enough. As sociologists might
education. Both efforts rely on sentimenutilized college campuses as a primary
put it, awareness is a necessary, but not
talism as the driving motivational force
speaking and recruiting grounds for their
sufficient, condition for social change.
for social engagement.
organization, Invisible Children. Both
Ironically, increased access to mediated
According to two of Cole’s tweets,
critiques and defense of the film center
images of issues around the world seems
“The banality of evil transmutes into the
on questions of generational differences
to have increased many people’s faith in
banality of sentimentality. The world is
in engaging social media and politics.
U.S.-based students become global citizens,
while residents of the Global South become
subjects of a global world order.
Contexts, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 52-54. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2012 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504212466332
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their own global awareness as sufficient,
even while cynicism regarding mass
media (and news media in particular) has
simultaneously skyrocketed.
While seasoned human rights workers and sociologists understand that a
change in consciousness does not automatically lead to social change, American sentimentalism invites consumers of
global citizenship campaigns back to the
belief in this simple causal connection.
Indeed, the ideal of global citizenship
as often produced in U.S. higher education prioritizes the awareness-raising
and good intentions of some (U.S.-based
students) over the impact of those practices on others. An additional underlying
assumption is at work here: U.S. students
(and professors) inherently have the
power—often conferred by some combination of access to disposable income
and social media—to solve global problems, unlike those whom they are helping, who then come to be understood
merely as victims or as actors playing
minor roles in the drama of the student’s
global education. This dynamic replicates
the dual nature of colonial and postcolonial government that scholar Mahmood
Mamdani outlined in his influential book,
Citizen and Subject, while extending it
to a global scale: U.S.-based students
become global citizens, while residents
of the Global South become subjects of a
Robert Raines
mediations
To date, 3,590,161 people have pledged “to make Kony famous” by participating in
campaigns like “Cover the Night,” above.
deserving of civil, perhaps even human,
rights. Expanded to a global scale, such a
discourse of global citizenship allows, to
paraphrase Cole, the validation of privilege side-by-side with the big emotional
experience of becoming a global citizen.
Like sentimentalism itself, all of
these dangers—the linking of productivity with citizenship; the division of
the world into global citizens and global
subjects; and the illusion that awareness
and enthusiasm are sufficient for social
change—display as many continuities
Universities suggest that simply being aware of
global problems is sufficient.
global world order in which they are seen
as lacking agency.
The production of “global citizens”
also resonates with another common
discourse in the United States: “becoming a productive citizen.” The implication of this phrasing is that a citizen
who engages in political, cultural, and
especially economic systems in the way
that s/he is “supposed” to, is more of a
citizen, a better citizen, than one who
is unproductive. The radical, the unemployed, the hippy, the disabled, the punk,
the undocumented thus become less
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as disruptions with their historical precedents. In the late 1960s, social critic Ivan
Illich famously told students preparing for
service work in Mexico that he admired
their commitment and good intentions,
but that they nonetheless were hypocrites if they continued. His speech, “To
Hell with Good Intentions,” has become
standard reading for students preparing
for service-learning experiences as part
of higher education, particularly in economically underdeveloped communities
both locally and in the Global South. Yet
while awareness of Illich’s message has
spread, the fundamental dynamics of the
internationalization of education remain
much the same.
To take seriously Illich’s accusation
of hypocrisy, higher education needs
to rethink how it produces global citizens, challenging the assumptions of
American sentimentalism that are deeply
embedded within it. Turning toward
international education policies of radical
reciprocity provide one route forward. In
order to achieve this, higher education
would have to abandon its superficial
invocations of global citizenship in favor
of a deep engagement with the substantive, material, political and philosophical meanings of citizenship on a global
scale. Such a process would deprive its
students of the self-satisfied big emotional experience of an exotic adventure
in helping others, in favor of a relentlessly
self-reflexive engagement with the realities of global inequality, the politics of that
inequality, and our varying individual and
collective responsibilities within them.
Ron Krabill is in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts
& Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
He is the author of Starring Mandela & Cosby: Media
and the End(s) of Apartheid.