Globalism for Undergraduates: Pedagogies and Technologies of Global Education in the US and Canada

Abstract

Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the reproductive condition for these postsecondary education systems and their infrastructures that has emerged within regional conditions of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials. Across its chapters, university globalism is defined and cataloged via institutional practices that shape learning and labouring conditions for students, their surrounding environments, and the pedagogies administered to market and credential student experience. Chapters examine the global university, the global learning interface, the global curricular programme, the global student and the global classroom as multi-scalar sites for observing university globalism’s forms and their effects, especially on the situation of undergraduates. This formation is studied via infrastructuralism as an analytic shortcut to questions of social reproduction, political economy and their geohistories in these Global North contexts as globally dominant, mass cultural sites for global education. I posit the framework of connectivity, defined as the social and infrastructural good through which globalism is variously represented and embedded into undergraduate study, to periodize this shared regional institutional culture from the 1990s to the present. Connectivity links higher ed’s digitalization with its cosmopolitan modes of networking, identity formation, and human capital development that emerge across the institutional spectrum in public pedagogies and curriculum studied herein. This infrastructure is managerial, extractive, and socially reproduced, conditioning ambivalence and pessimism into the institutionalist modes of learning, networking and credentialing promoted by university globalism. Connectivity’s pro-social ideologies of global citizenship, inclusive excellence and social innovation are analyzed against higher ed’s proletarianizing material conditions and its anti-social foundations in racial capitalism and settler nationalism within US and Canada. This study aims to illuminate global study’s contradictory terms for undergraduates alongside their organic intellectualism within university conditions, and their affordances for critical global pedagogical practice to meet the crises of the present.