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mediations analyzing culture m 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; 52 contexts.org 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 fa l l 2 0 1 2 contexts 53 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 54 contexts.org 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.