Hannah Spector, PhD | Boston, MA

Open access. Introductory article to special journal issue on Curriculum Studies and the Anthropocene.

In recent years, there has been a surge of legislation across states in the US that amends school codes to mandate instruction on human rights and genocide. These amendments place curricular emphasis on the stated need for education about the Holocaust and other mass atrocities that occur ‘abroad’ (but not ‘at home’). That most school codes do not require instruction on African American history, which could include the compelling case of legalized, slow moving genocide of persons of colour and half of states do not mention Native Americans in their K-12 curriculum at all serves as a signal that, for the US, some humans and their rights count more than others. I frame this analysis with Billig’s concept of banal nationalism. It is said that the nationalism of ‘established’ nations reveals itself through a complex dialectic of remembering and forgetting in/convenient histories that brought a nation-state into existence. Banal nationalism also presents itself under the guise of cosmopolitanism. This chapter argues that the education laws interrogated here should be understood in terms of US banal imperial nationalism.

The purpose of this article is to interrogate ways that curriculum can respond critically to already existing global emergencies (including pandemics) while also becoming more proactive toward the prevention of world risks. To do this, it calls for the fortification of the traditional course of study that introduces students to the analysis of literary texts. However, a traditional approach to school-based literary analysis that attends exclusively to a text’s formal properties in order to determine its meaning is insufficient to get ahead of the world risk curve. Instead, the article turns to the concept of allegory as theorized in curriculum theory and to a theory of preventative foresight to interpret a famous dream (of a world-shattering contagion) in a famous work of literature (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) that provides a novel opportunity to understand the significance of sense in the time of plagues.

As executive board committee members of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (AAACS), we look back on the first of its kind AAACS 2020 live videoconference that we conceptualized for our annual meeting. We reflect on that virtual experience and consider what it means in the future to conference, teach, and learn in the virtual age.

This address was written for Carl Leggo and presented June 1, 2019, at the CACS preconference “The Many Faces of Love: Celebrating the Life Work of Carl Leggo”, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. It draws upon Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the three human activities—labour, work and action—that form part of her thesis in The Human Condition. Specifically, I aim to provide a brief description of the role that such activities play in constituting the vita activa (or life of action). This overview then circles around to the ways in which works of art, particularly poetry, help establish a sense of permanence in the world that the activities of labour and action do not. I then identify an intersection between Arendt’s writings on poetry with Carl Leggo’s as relayed in his own writings on the subject. This intersection highlights poetry’s infinite value.

Summary:
Cosmopolitanism in education has been articulated in many ways, potentially making understanding what cosmopolitanism can do or has already done for education confounding. At the same time, seeking to define cosmopolitanism in education runs the risk of pigeonholing an eclectic mix of schiolarship related to the subject. In philosophical and curricular conceptions, cosmopolitanism in education is presented in terms of legacies, trends, and typologies. Typologies include (a) projects and practices, (b) personhood, and © phenomena. Projects and practices have tended to explore how human rights and global justice ought to be or have been addressed educationally. At the same time, as a project, cosmopolitanism in education is also argued to be a form of social engineering that is meant to turn unreasonable, “savage” students into reasonable world citizens. Cosmopolitanism in education is also expressed as particular human lives whose individual sense of worldliness and care for the world becomes a curriculum for cosmopolitanism. Conversely, cosmopolitans are critiqued in the abstract as rootless people who care little for the temporary topos they occupy as long as the topos gives them what they need. While still emerging as a trend in education, cosmopolitan phenomena have manifested in the world as boundary-defying, manufactured global risks that threaten a non-excludable plurality of lives. These risks cannot be escaped regardless of identity or affiliation(s). Together, these trends and typologies provide a platform to understand a constellation of cosmopolitanisms in education.

Devoted to and inspired by the late Maxine Greene, a champion of education and advocator of the arts, this book recognizes the importance of Greene’s scholarship by revisiting her oeuvre in the context of the intellectual historicity that shaped its formation. As a scholar, Greene dialogued with philosophers, social theorists, writers, musicians, and artists. These conversations reveal the ways in which the arts, just like philosophy and science, allow for the facilitation of "wide-awakeness," a term that is central to Greene’s pedagogy. Amidst contemporary trends of neoliberal, one-size-fits-all curriculum reforms in which the arts are typically squeezed out or pushed aside, Greene’s work reminds us that the social imagination is stunted without the arts. Artistic ways of knowing allow for people to see beyond their own worlds and beyond "what is" into other worlds of "what was" and "what might" be some day.

Though contemporary discourse on cosmopolitanism has celebrated a cosmopolitan subject’s “rootedness” in two worlds – i.e. the polis and the cosmos – this emphasis has evaded analysis of the historical and damning term “rootless cosmopolitan.” Under the totalitarianisms of Nazism and late Stalinism, a “rootless cosmopolitan” was a life-threatening epithet aimed at those people, namely “the Jews,” criminalized for supposedly lacking national allegiance and affiliating with foreign cultures. This paper argues that an ethical problem arises when cosmopolitanism is understood in cultural terms. To illuminate this problem in the particular, this paper interprets Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, specifically the novel’s nationalistic themes and its cosmopolitan villain, Peter Petrovich Luzhin. In the unfolding analysis that draws from scholarship in cultural criminology, it is revealed that the Russian writer’s designated masterful genius helped fuel one of the greatest crimes in history (the Holocaust) perpetrated against a people accused of cosmopolitanism. It is argued that interpreting the criminalization of Luzhin provides an allegorical occasion to gain conceptual clarity on present articulations of cosmopolitanism as a cultural construct. Attending to Dostoevsky’s anti-cosmopolitanism, and those whom he has in/directly influenced on this subject, provides a rationale for critiquing cultural cosmopolitanism – a construct that is conceptually and materially dangerous.

Abstract
In line with the theme of this special journal issue on "Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Social Imagination: An Intellectual Genealogy," this paper puts into focus Greene’s writings on the imagination and analyses on this subject by her intellectual antecedents and contemporaries-descendants. Drawing from Hannah Arendt, the first section of the paper is largely descriptive and centered on the question: What is imagination and how does it function? The second analysis turns to Greene and asks why the ethical imagination is vital to develop in education. The last investigation engages in a theoretical extension of Henry Giroux’s writings on “the politics of disimagination.” Synthesizing these three great thinkers thoughts, I conclude that ethics and the ethical imagination are at the heart of our humanity.

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism act as a warning sign for political and miseducational circumstances in the United States. Because the term totalitarianism has been used imprudently (largely in the mass media) to express repressive conditions in so-called models of democracy, this paper seeks to both clarify and raise questions concerning its meaning as a form of nation-state sanctioned power and/or economic-technological force. This analysis draws largely from Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism expressed as an antipolitical phenomenon characterized by terror-ruled ideological indoctrination that destroys both the public realm and the private identities. I contend that analyses of twentieth-century totalitarianism are significant to today’s unprecedented questions and circumstances germinating in and having significance beyond the United States. I also describe the difficulty of action under extreme conditions. In the last analysis, I deliberate on the site of education as a totalitarian coercion.

This paper was first presented at the Three Mile Island nuclear accident 35th anniversary conference. It contends that the world risks associated with nuclear war, near-miss atomic catastrophes, and inevitable nuclear power plant accidents summons a new global ethic of responsibility. In the wake of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster, thinking and acting responsibly must be central to the work of curriculum studies and to the field’s key question: What knowledge is of most worth? Drawing from Ulrich Beck’s analysis of world risk society, I write on the nuclear predicament, complicating the reality of a “new wars” paradigm characterized by an inescapable “non-excludable plurality,” or we are all (not) in this together. I also write autobiographically, tracing my own sense of duty researching the Fukushima nuclear meltdown as a central component of my dissertation. Now a faculty member at a college whose campus location looks out at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, I call on educational scholars to centralize in our work ethical commitment to humanity and the planet. It is our obligation to engage students in thought and action on world risks associated with nuclear numbing.

In the educational strand of cosmopolitanism, much attention has been placed on theorizing and describing who is cosmopolitan. It has been argued that cosmopolitan sensibilities negotiate and/or embody such paradoxes as rootedness and rootlessness, local and global concerns, private and public identities. Concurrently, cosmopolitanism has also been formulated as a globally-minded project for and ethico-political responsibility to human rights and global justice. Such articulations underscore cosmopolitanism in anthropocentric terms. People can be cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan projects aim to cultivate cosmopolitan subjectivities. What is striking about scholarship in educational cosmopolitanism is its lack of serious attention placed on the greatest global threat facing not only but largely created by human beings: environmental degradation. In this paper, I provide an overview of key texts written on the who in educational cosmopolitanism which helps lay the groundwork for an analysis of what is cosmopolitan. Regarding the what, I examine a range of boundary-defying emergencies described in cosmopolitan terms including climate change, radioactive poisoning of the planet, and bioinvasion. In the last analysis, I consider what it would take and what the possibilities are for our species to be truly committed to caring not only for the human world.

While this dissertation responds to and builds upon various iterations of why cosmopolitanism?, I also articulate the meaning of a cosmopolitan education in ways that are different from previous arguments and descriptions: as actually existing global phenomena and as an ethical response to such phenomena. Drawing upon Ulrich Beck’s writings on world risk theory and cosmopolitan realism, I discuss the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a case of actually existing cosmopolitanism, or world risk turned catastrophe. At once a local and global environmental disaster that has consequences for a “non-excludable plurality,” the irresponsibility that contributed to and continues to be at play regarding fallout from Fukushima summons a transnational, planetary ethic of responsibility. Whereas nuclear meltdowns and warfare, pandemics, and global financial crises are world risks turned catastrophes whose consequences can be validated empirically, I also consider world risks that are intangible, impossible to ascertain with evidence-based research. By way of the faculty of the imagination, I draw a link between Chernobyl heart deform and United States “school deform”; I also read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, specifically Raskolnikov’s dream of a worldwide plague as an allegory for the breakdown of the faculty of judgment across time and place. What might an ethic of responsibility in response to world risks look like? Drawing upon theoretical writings on cosmopolitanism and empirical realities that solicit responsible actions, I contend that acting with the faculty of judgment and a compassionate heart are vital to re/creating the world. In writing upon judgment, I turn to Hannah Arendt whose style of writing about totalitarianism and its antithesis, freedom, is just as important for understanding what it means to judge and to act responsibly as is the content of what she writes. I question if judgment is the only faculty needed to live an ethical life, to act ethically toward others in an increasingly interconnected, codependent world. While Arendt is critical, even dismissive of the role that compassion has played in politics, I contend that a both/and rather than either/or ethic which includes judgment and compassion ought to work together to re/fashion a world habitable for all.

This article aims to contribute to scholarship on cosmopolitanism and education, with particular relevancy for environmental education. While much of current research in this area has underscored cosmopolitanism as a politico-philosophical project for global justice or a worldly sensibility that can be cultivated through literal and/or metaphoric travel to different lands, I argue that cosmopolitanism ought also to be understood in phenomenological-environmental terms. Drawing from Ulrich Beck’s work on world risk society and Hannah Arendt’s on responsibility, I examine the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a case of actually existing cosmopolitanism. When understood as a global risk (turned catastrophe), cosmopolitanism presents an urgent occasion to summons a “postnational ethics of responsibility” (Beck). Such an ethics centralizes the importance that story and metaphor play in planetary sustainability.

Essay review of three academic books on cosmopolitanism.