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From narrow to wide, from the past to the present,  we are posting it all!

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From narrow to wide, from the past to the present,  we are posting it all!

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In multiple texts, the concept of cosmopolitanism seems to be presented as an either / or choice to the current common core/testing regime. Must it really be either/or? If so, I feel the latter will win. (At least it seems to be now.)

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In reading "On Cosmopolitanism," reviewing Michelle's link from Stanford's encyclopedia, and the video on cosmopolitan by Rawji that Alex posted, an image rose up for me of people migrating millenia ago as we moved from continent to continent. It seems that cosmopolitanism is always the change that is our common experience. And assimilation or the will to make things stable is our 'against' the organic system of change that occurs naturally. This so makes me do a cosmic laugh. All our problems are so old and we still haven't solved them. Hahaha. Weep weep weep.

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This helps me to keep it real when I get to into design what I think CL is instead of being curious and 'reading' what is being presented and performed.

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Hull & Stornaioulo Fav Quote to ground me in my def of 

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Hull & Stornaioulo Fav Quote to ground me in my def of 

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“We have to determine, perhaps case by case, what that proper distance is or might be when we are confronted with both familiar and novel appearances or representations of the other. And we have to understand, of course, that in such cases there is no prix fixe, no singular, and no permanent. Neither can proper distance, like everything else that is meaningful in social life, be taken for granted nor is it pregiven. It has to be worked for. It has to be produced.” (Silverstone pp. 475–476) (via Hull & Stornaiuolo p20)

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In overviewing this semesters reading list I am excited about the Module on Intersectionality and Identity as well as Politics and Ethics.

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In reviewing what I've been carrying with me for definitions of cosmopolitan literacies, Hull & Stornaiuolo, Hawkins and Nygreen and Moya have been the most grounding. H&S because of their richly exampled writing of proper distance in multimodality. Hawkins because she helps to position me into the pic big historically about how CL is rolling. Nygreen both with a short article on activism and identity as well as her book we read last semester, help me to see how CL is positioned in LCLE. Moya helps me with my own positioning inside the classroom - moving away from multicultural perspectives that have a hangover of neo-liberalism into more cosmopolitan approach.

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Is Assimilation the anti-thesis to Cosmopolitanism?

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Is Assimilation the anti-thesis to Cosmopolitanism?

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In viewing the video that Alex posted in our Pop Culture Discussion Thread, this quote stuck out for me andbrings up something that has been resounding in my notes - is assimilation a dirty word?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_mmKodFZg4

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I saw this image online, some of these words related directly to what we have read. However other words I would like to include as standing out in our readings:

literacies
testing-culture
research
cultural caplital
multimodality
communication
competing ideologies
resources
transformation
participation
belonging
critical
social justice
benefits

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Image source: http://www.passportclubonline.com/why-geography-.html

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Expanding conceptions of adolescent literacy research and practice: Cosmopolitan theory in educational contexts -- Bean & Dunkerly-Bean

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Expanding conceptions of adolescent literacy research and practice: Cosmopolitan theory in educational contexts -- Bean & Dunkerly-Bean

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Cosmopolitanism may sound very modern, perhaps fashionable, but it is neither.

Why do we treat it as such? I feel that this comment is spot on. Often when things are perceived as new or modern, they are also given less trust or capital. How can we lead people realize that it is a neither a new nor untested concept? How can we give it more capital so that research related to cosmopolitanism is better understood and utilized in the classroom?

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Something for all of us to consider in advocating for a cosmopolitan framework within the current political climate:

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Something for all of us to consider in advocating for a cosmopolitan framework within the current political climate:

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Graphic by Asyrique Thevendran/The Gazelle

Last week, nearly 60 million U.S. citizens voted for a presidential candidate whose campaign rhetoric was fueled by racism, sexism and xenophobia. In casting their ballots for Donald Trump, these voters essentially repudiated the core values for which NYU Abu Dhabi stands: cosmopolitanism, diversity and education.

In the face of this repudiation, we at NYU Abu Dhabi must continue to stand for these values - to stand firm and to stand together - in order to promote a vision of the world that moves beyond the parochialism, intolerance and fear that motivated those U.S. American voters.

The good news is that even more U.S. American voters are ready to stand with us. Trump won the U.S. presidency because of the 18th-century electoral college system that promotes state-based thinking over national thinking, but Hillary Clinton won the overall popular vote. In the U.S. presidential elections, a little more nationalism and a lot less parochialism would be a great step forward. But the bigger step, the one that's harder to take, is to move from nationalism to cosmopolitanism.

In some accounts, Clinton based her candidacy on what an organization called The Voter Participation Center describes as the rising U.S. American electorate: unmarried women, people of color and millennials. In hindsight, focusing on these voters may have been her campaign's undoing, insofar as it led her to take for granted and therefore to not court the so-called traditional working-class white voters, particularly in states in the Midwest that her campaign regarded as safe Democratic Party strongholds.

If the rising U.S. American electorate is an idea whose time has not yet come, at least in its ability to decide a U.S. presidential election, it is an idea whose time is about to come. As CNN recently pointed out, "The Census Bureau projects that no one racial group will be a majority of the country by the year 2044. Republicans and Democrats looking to chart an electoral future as the country continues to grow browner and younger will have to take heed of these shifts."

The Clinton coalition, even if it couldn't carry the day on Nov. 8, seems to be on the right side of history. Indeed, that may be why Trump's silent majority was so motivated to turn out: its days seem to be numbered. What may well emerge from this demographic shift is the ascendancy of cosmopolitan over nationalist modes of thinking, but would-be cosmopolitans cannot take this development for granted.

Let's remember that cosmopolitanism originated as an alternative to nationalism: it was based on the idea that nationalistic modes of thinking are too narrow and that each of us is first and foremost a citizen of the world, with significant obligations to humanity as a whole. More recently, cosmopolitanism has been understood as an alternative to universalism, pluralism and multiculturalism, ideas upon which it draws but with which it also takes issue. To put it in shorthand fashion, cosmopolitanism is a perspective that regards human difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved.

But as the results of both the Brexit vote and the U.S. election have made clear, the fear of difference remains a potent factor in global politics. In 1992, the political scientist Andrew Hacker published a powerful and influential account of racial division in the United States, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. Hacker argued that "America may be seen as two separate nations" and that while "there are places where the races mingled," nevertheless "in most significant respects, the separation is pervasive and penetrating. As a social and human division, it surpasses all others - even gender - in intensity and subordination."

Despite the eight-year presidency of Obama, recent events suggested that Hacker's argument is still depressingly relevant, if in need of emendation. The Black Lives Matter movement and the powerful articulation of the oppression of African Americans in the United States offered by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his prize-winning book Between the World and Me suggest that the racial divide is still potent, perhaps because the election of an African American president in 2008 actually had the effect of bringing into the open racist feelings that had been simmering in private within segments of the U.S. electorate.

To update Hacker's argument to account for conditions in 2016, however, we would have to include an analysis of the way in which those Trump voters lump all non-white U.S. Americans together. One place to start might be an investigation of the etymological and cultural genealogy of the ugly term sand n-----, which is sometimes used in the U.S. to refer to persons with Middle Eastern or North African descent.

And it goes without saying, after the treatment accorded to Clinton during the election cycle by those who opposed her, that it is an open question whether the gender gap is, as Hacker suggests, surpassed by the color gap. The things that Trump said about women, not just in the infamous Access Hollywood tape but throughout the campaign, would, in an ordinary U.S. election, have undone his campaign. But there was nothing ordinary about this election cycle.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times titled What Trump Exposed About the G.O.P., Mark Schmitt suggests that what distinguished this election cycle was its exposure of the true basis of Republican Party politics since the Reagan era: not ideology, but identity. In his constant recourse to negative identity politics, Trump seems to have intuited this fact. "It was always about identity, about them and us," Schmitt writes. "The politics of 2016 breaks entirely along lines of identity: first race or ethnicity, followed by gender, level of education, urbanization and age."

Schmitt's piece is an example of the kind of critical thinking that liberal arts curricula like NYUAD's are designed to develop. The Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the presidential election in the U.S. demonstrate that too many voters either don't think or base their thinking in emotion, or on ideas that resist conscious articulation. Developing these skills is crucial if we are to be able to create global political forums that are based on reason rather than emotion. Critical thinking skills help voters to vote in a more informed and rational fashion, but they also enable analysts to understand those instances when voters are voting on the basis of something other than reason or even ideology.

At NYUAD, the Core Curriculum - in both its original and revised forms - seeks to train students to think critically about big ideas and global challenges, to think rationally about issues that often elicit knee-jerk emotional responses. One of the strengths of the Core is its emphasis on developing critical thinking by exposing students to a variety of disciplinary methodologies. The failure of polling models to predict the Brexit and U.S. presidential outcomes vividly demonstrates that effective critical thinking depends on much more than developing a facility with numbers, statistics and big data. What's needed, in addition, is the ability to understand cultures - national, local, religious, ethnic and those based on other forms of identity - and to be able to think across cultural divides.

And here's the rub: the hardest divide for would-be cosmopolitans to cross is the chasm that separates them from those who reject cosmopolitan ways of thinking, who refuse to engage in the kind of dialogues based on reason that cosmopolitans embrace. Clinton's ill-considered, spur-of-the-moment characterization of Trump supporters as deplorables points to just how difficult it is to remain truly cosmopolitan in the face of intolerance.

How many of us, like Clinton, were not appalled by what she described as "the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic" people that Trump courted and incited? But true cosmopolitanism requires that we work hard each and every day to put ourselves in the shoes of those who do not share our values, that we try to understand and even empathize with their points of view, even as they criticize and denigrate us. Empathy must be our guide as we try to reason with counter-cosmopolitans and to persuade them that our approaches are better. Trained critical thinkers should be able to recognize when emotion is trumping reason - pun intended - but also should be constantly aware of the limits of their own thinking.

The most difficult thing for worldly, urban, liberal cosmopolitan thinkers to do is to learn something from those that they consider parochial. Recent events suggest that it is also absolutely necessary. Only then can we realize the lofty ideal that motivated Clinton's campaign: that we are stronger together.
Cyrus Patell is a contributing writer. Email him at feedback@thegazelle.org.

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Why Stronger Together Is Easier Said Than Done | The Gazelle

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Graphic by Asyrique Thevendran/The Gazelle Last week, nearly 60 million U.S. citizens voted for a presidential candidate whose campaign rhetoric was fueled by racism, sexism and xenophobia. In casting their ballots for Donald Trump, these voters essentially repudiated the core values for which NYU Abu Dhabi stands: cosmopolitanism, diversity and education.

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Cosmopolitanism as a tool for Social Justice

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Cosmopolitanism as a tool for Social Justice

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"...a humane, meaningful life subsumes not only an individual and internal gaze on one's life, but also the understandings and dispositions that lead to external actions and engagements, in a spirit of openness and inquiry, to collaboratively and proactively create more just and equitable living conditions" (Hawkins, 2014, p. 98).

"Was (2008), for example, argues for an expansion of communication among individuals, schools, and communities in order to cultivate a cosmopolitan-minded sense of responsibility.  The school can therefore play a valuable switchboard role in connecting immigrant learners with the community" (DeCosta, 2014, p. 26).

"Cosmopolitanism as an effect of globalisation acknowledges the accelerated movement of people, ideas, images, information, goods and capital in important ways that deserve our research attention to create conditions in schools that promote open, creative minds" (Bean & Dunkerly-Bean, 2015, p. 52).

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http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/MALVINA/mr141.htm

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wild bird (Cardinal) singing in my backyard in Florida, recorded with a German Camera (Thomson), having a good directional microphone and good amplification and good suppression of wind - noise.. www.WolfhartIndustries.com

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"Perhaps that is where we must look to find our own pedagogy of acompanamiento, where students on the margins can engage and speak with passion and authority" (Sepulveda, 2011, p. 569).

I hads not thought about bringing accompaniment into my research project; however, I think service learning and accompaniment are linked in many ways.  I am going to consider adding this into my lit review or discussion.

"We may not have to choose between being practitioners, researchers, activists, or cultural beings; all aspects of our selves potentially exist in a synergistic relationship to help inform our understandings of literacy research, practice, and advocacy" (Simon et al., 2012, p. 20-21).

This is such an important point for research-practitioners. I find that now that I have stopped trying to be "the objective educator", I am much more effective in my teaching!

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What counts in philosophy, history, and social theory as cosmopolitanism?

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What counts in philosophy, history, and social theory as cosmopolitanism?

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History and politics: "The word 'Cosmopolitan' derives from the Greek cosmopolites or 'citizen of the world', a term used by Diogenes, a Greek philosopher, in the 4th century BCE to declare his political allegiance to the world" (Bean & Dunkerly-Bean, 2015, p. 47).

Cosmopolitanism in ethnography and anthropology: "...reposition our analytical gaze toward observable practices as well as fleeting moments of belonging that, if given notice and a place to be seen, may flourish and be nurtured" (Vasudevan, 2014, p. 50).

Cosmopolitan citizenship: "Belonging is a precursor to citizenship" and are "starting points rather than an award to be earned or a benchmark to be reached" Vasudevan, 2014, p. 52).

Cosmopolitan literacy, as defined by Hull and Stornaiuolo (2014) “foregrounds the rhetorical stances and ethical commitments involved in communicating across difference—the cognitive, emotional, ethical, and aesthetic meaning-making capacities and practices of authors and audiences as they take differently situated others into account.”

Media and communication studies and proper distance: “...distance is not just a material, a geographical or even a social category, but it is, by virtue of both and as a product of their interrelation, a moral category. The overcoming of distance requires more than technology and indeed more than the creation of a public sphere. It requires proximity” (Silverstone, 2003).

Social theory: “an increasing awareness of the validity of different cultural practices and values” and, perhaps, empathy for those individuals with different “values, practices, and beliefs” (Hull and Stornaiuolo, 2014).

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The Council of Youth Research: Critical Literacy and Civic Agency in the Digital Age

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The Council of Youth Research: Critical Literacy and Civic Agency in the Digital Age

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" ...the civic and literate disengagement of communities of color is being socially structured and facilitated within public schools.  Literacy, the skill that has strong conceptual links with democracy, is cut off from its civic rationale and fails to speak to the experiences of urban students.  Nevertheless, literacy remains one of the most powerful tools available to promote civic consciousness and tap into the voices and experiences of students of color..." (p. 153).

Yes, yes, yes!!! This directly connects to my research and my students' experiences (not just students of color, but all marginalized students). Literacy instruction is meaningless if it is not connected to students' lived experiences and advocacy efforts; and in many ways, as a literacy educator and civic engagement advocate, my goal is to create "a learning community dedicated to the civic engagement of urban students...through critical literacy practices" that can lead to better student outcomes, empowerment, empathy, and agency.

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Which version provides a best fit for your work, AND why? “Educational cosmopolitanism would urge the teacher to perceive both sets of projects not as endings or termini but as beginnings: as points of departure toward an orientation of receptivity, of reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known.” Hansen 2010, p. 17

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Which version provides a best fit for your work, AND why? “Educational cosmopolitanism would urge the teacher to perceive both sets of projects not as endings or termini but as beginnings: as points of departure toward an orientation of receptivity, of reflective openness to the new and reflective loyalty to the known.” Hansen 2010, p. 17

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As a starting point, important to my work because it interacts with critical literacy (our themes: power, privilege and social responsibility) and begins to get my students to think about global others.

“...cosmopolitan approaches to literacy draw from, and in a sense expand, notions of critical literacy.

While critical literacy addresses issues of local social inequality/injustice and their consequences, a cosmopolitan perspective on critical literacy focuses on global human rights and the ramications of actions in one part of the world resonating throughout the globe .”
(Bean & Dunkerly-Bean, 2015, p. 48

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Moving to LCLE research, what concepts and distinguishing features are foregrounded?GLOBAL OTHERS “...communicating across difference...take differently situated others into account” (Hull and Stornaiuolo, 2014, p. 17).“...The engagement with global others in the service of an expansion of students’ ‘skills, competencies, and knowledges’ (following Luke)”... (Hawkins “Ontologies” 2014, p. 97). 

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Moving to LCLE research, what concepts and distinguishing features are foregrounded?GLOBAL OTHERS “...communicating across difference...take differently situated others into account” (Hull and Stornaiuolo, 2014, p. 17).“...The engagement with global others in the service of an expansion of students’ ‘skills, competencies, and knowledges’ (following Luke)”... (Hawkins “Ontologies” 2014, p. 97). 

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What are the  distinguishing features of competing conceptions?                1. “Cosmopolitan to mean, first and foremost, not a citizen of the world per se, but rather an inhabitant of the world” (Hansen, 2013, p. 38) Also defined as “citizen of the world” in Hawkins “Ontologies” 2014       2. Use of multimodal tools in the endeavor of cosmopolitanism: Hull and Stornaiuolo’s (2014) use of Multimodal videos to create proper distance.Hawkins (2014) Stories without Borders Campano (2016) Community projects working together for change (video ESOL classes)Skerrett (2015) transnational research of literacy and language for transnational students

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What are the  distinguishing features of competing conceptions?                1. “Cosmopolitan to mean, first and foremost, not a citizen of the world per se, but rather an inhabitant of the world” (Hansen, 2013, p. 38) Also defined as “citizen of the world” in Hawkins “Ontologies” 2014       2. Use of multimodal tools in the endeavor of cosmopolitanism: Hull and Stornaiuolo’s (2014) use of Multimodal videos to create proper distance.Hawkins (2014) Stories without Borders Campano (2016) Community projects working together for change (video ESOL classes)Skerrett (2015) transnational research of literacy and language for transnational students

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Garcia, et. al. “...we discuss the work of a multiyear youth civic engagement initiative that focuses on critical digital lit-eracy as a gateway to civic agency and college access” (2016, p. 153).

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Knowledge, Power, Hope: Activism, Research and Social Justice -- Tannis Atkinson

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Knowledge, Power, Hope: Activism, Research and Social Justice -- Tannis Atkinson

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"Many educators feel their teaching work is less important than the statistical reports and test results they are expected to produce." pg. 6

Navigating the chasm between communities / social activism and academic institutions is not for the faint of heart. It's disheartening to hear and feel that teaching work is less important than the ability to produce statistics and train students to pass tests. Sadly, this quote stood out because of how well I could related to this feeling.

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If we ask MB, it would be possible to embed this at the top of our discussion or as a separate discussion so that it's visible and easy to find!

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"I found this awesome link that explains the theorists and foundations of cosmopolitanism. "
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/18r9NnRtR5RwfqfC7o0aeqn8EPw8I0T_E5vLiY3fnZ4M/edit

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Please feel free to add and juxtapose! Voice, video and pics, as well as files can be uploaded and shared here. Remember to scroll!

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Refresher

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Politics and Ethics

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L600

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Intersectionality and Identity

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Foundation