Grounding the global: A call for more situated practices of pedagogical and political engagement

Abstract

This article examines the complexities and limitations of conceptualizing global education as requiring the intervention or movement of people, in various capacities, from the global North to the global South. I rely on feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial scholarship to foreground questions of race, colonialism and history in relation to “the global.” To begin, I critically analyze how the global is deployed as a theoretical and political concept by locating it within specific material and historical relations. Secondly, I consider the multiple vectors of race, class, gender and Northern status along which global subjects are imagined and constituted. Thirdly, I consider more specifically the prevalence of white women in different kinds of global interventions. I then explore how racialized Northern women fit into the picture of the global. I conclude with an invitation to ground the global and reconceptualize our social justice efforts by attending to our own historical locations and ongoing complicities in North-South relations.