Envisioning a Sustainable and Equitable Transnational Engagement: Cross-Disciplinary Collaborative Online International Learning

Background

How might one better envision a healthily sustainable and equitable transnational engagement? Impactful global teaching and learning occurs as one interrogates the concept of global citizenship while providing access to relevant international education. However, the complexity of global citizenship education cannot be captured by a single theory. In this context, Latin American scholars often work from a modernity colonial lens and an epistemic racism lens (Andreotti, 2011). For example, Argentinian scholars Dussel (1998) and Mignolo (2002) write about the paradigms of Eurocentrism and modern world systems that center Western civilization and/or constructs of modernity with colonization and capitalism. In fact, Quijano (1997), a Peruvian sociologist, conceptualizes the “coloniality of power” as a global hegemonic model of power that has been in place since the conquest and subjugation of the Americas that articulated and positioned race and labor, space and people, according to the needs of capital and how it benefited White Anglo Europeans (Escobar, 2004). Maldonado-Torres (2004) argues that the darker side of modernity is that modernity depends on coloniality for its existence and that one must challenge the racist geopolitics of knowledge that are at the root of Western discourse, thus reproducing epistemic racism. In fact, this author critiques the way multiculturalism has been operationalized – bringing diverse voices into Eurocentric sites – because it “hides in this way a deeper multiracism that only recognizes the right for difference when peoples are well domesticated by capitalism, the market economy, and liberal ideals of freedom and equality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2004, p. 49). The authors recognize, like Mignolo (2002), that it is problematic to think from the canon of Western philosophy because it reproduces “the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of inclusion” (p.66).

In the light of the above, the authors would like to honor those theoretical and epistemological perspectives but take them a step further. The authors root this chapter in critical, feminist, and Ignatian pedagogies in ways that help them explore the tension between globalizing and Westernizing classrooms, which is above all political, having to do with power and social capital. A critical theoretical lens accepts and even necessitates that the pedagogical be political and vice versa. Consequently, critical theorists routinely question unequal relations between individuals and groups of people and act to offset them (Kanpol, 1994).