Producing global citizens for the future: space, discourse and curricular reform

Abstract

AbstractThis article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education's seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called 'knowledge society' at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation's next agents. In order to locate curriculum's productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system's attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about institutions, knowledges and subjects that furthers the production of a neoliberal global imaginary.Keywords: global imaginariescurricular discourseshigher education Notes1. We put aside 'how-to' research that seeks to create internationalised curricula, define and inculcate 'global competencies' or meet institutions' and individuals' 'international needs' (e.g., Huang Citation2006; Hunter, White, and Godbey 2006; Luxon and Peelo Citation2009).2. In a moment of declining empire, this national anxiety echoes curricular discussions of students' need for global competence as a shift from acquiring 'hard power' (military and economic) to 'soft power', or 'cultural power, the power of example, the power of ideas and ideals – [which] works more subtly; it makes others want what you want. Soft power upholds the US world order because it influences others to like the US system and support it of their own free will' (Hunter et al. Citation2006, 269).