Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online

Author(s): Glynda A. Hull, Amy Stornaiuolo and Urvashi Sahni

Source: English Education , July 2010, Vol. 42, No. 4 (July 2010), pp. 331-367

Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/23018017

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Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online1

Glynda A. Hull, Amy Stornaiuolo, and Urvashi Sahni

Calls now abound in a range of literatures—philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies—to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such

calls is the ancient idea of "cosmopolitanism." Refashioned now to serve as a

compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected and increasingly

divided, a cosmopolitan point of view remains resiliently hopeful, asserting

that people can both uphold local commitments and take into consideration

larger arenas of concern. They can, more particularly, "respond creatively

to shifts in patterns of human interaction generated by migration, rapid

economic and political change, and new communication technologies"

(Hansen, 2010, p. 1). Most accounts of cosmopolitanism are theoretical,

outlining possible conceptual models or promising types of skills and disposi

tions. In contrast, this article animates theorizing about cultural citizenship,

identity formation, and communication with an examination of what might

be considered sites for cosmopolitan practice—an online international social

network and offline local programs designed to engage youth in representing

themselves and interacting with the representations of others. Specifically,

we report our initial research with a group of teenage girls in India, tracing

their participation online and offline and their cosmopolitan imaginings

of self and other. We hope that this work with young people worlds away

geographically, culturally, and ideologically will speak to English educators

in the United States who feel likewise compelled to support their students

in developing twenty-first-century literacies—both the technological compe

tencies and the values, knowledge, and dispositions—needed to participate

confidently and critically as citizens of local and global worlds.

English Education, July 2010 331

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English Education ,V 42 N 4, July 2010

Iii this project, youth from different hemispheres and countries, pos

sessing different worldviews, languages, and aesthetic principles, interacted,

communicated, and exchanged digital arts-based artifacts via the online

social network Space2Cre8.2 Adolescents in Norway, the United States, South

Africa, and India, many of whom had not previously had such opportunities

to participate i n new media contexts, attended an extra-school or afterschool

class, where their teachers attempted to foster cosmopolitan orientations

toward others as they helped youth engage in conversations across differ ences around the artifacts they created and shared. The hope that fuels the

project is that such social networking sites, along with the online and off

line experiences that accompany them, can be a digital proving ground for

understanding and respecting difference and diversity in a global world as

well as fostering the literacies and communication practices through which

such habits of mind develop (Appiah, 2006; Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009).

In this article, we foreground one site, an extra-school class in a city in

Northern India, where 15 young women attended a twice-weekly program for

18 months. The program was embedded in an existing tuition-free "afternoon

school" for girls living in poverty who must work in the mornings to support

their families. The education of poor girls is a longstanding problem in India,

for they occupy a bottom rung of the social ladder and are often excluded

from educational opportunities (Sahni, 2009). Their "afternoon school"

respected the exigencies of families who depended on their daughters' labor for their livelihood but simultaneously gave girls entree to a formal

education. Through a number of activities that took advantage of the various

modes available for communication and representation—drama, movies,

videos, music, poetry, blogs, photo essays, chat, wall posts, audio record

ings—the program invited participants to reimagine themselves in relation to their local communities and the world around them and to develop an

awareness of their positionality relative to and in conjunction with others.

This agentive redefining of themselves, or the creation of "new narratives

of the self" (Stevenson, 2003, p. 346; Hull & Katz, 2006) through creative

practices, involved the girls' examination of their place in their home society

and their relationship to a global community. Through critical dialogues,

creative digital arts production, and networked communication, the Indian

youth came to exhibit the beginnings of what might be called cosmopoli tan dispositions: hospitable and critical imaginings of self and other. This article will illustrate these redefinitions of self, drawing on ethnographic

observations and interviews, analyses of the girls' creative products, and

social networking archives.

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

Cosmopolitan Habits of Mind

Those who write about cosmopolitanism often use metaphors of welcome

and connectedness: an open door, a gateway or port of entry, an inviting host,

a dialogue, a conversation. Indeed, the primary tenet of this habit of mind

is that differences, no matter how stringent, do not prevent compassionate

connections. Viewing cosmopolitanism as a strategy, a challenge, and a

means for balancing difference and universality, Appiah (2006) foregrounds

our "obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom

we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a

shared citizenship" (p. xv). He believes that cosmopolitanism entails respect

for legitimate difference, and that when such difference results in practices

motivated by opposing and alienating values, our most important tool is

dialogue, as we attempt to construct a global ethic that constantly considers

what we owe to others as members of the human community. Cosmopolitan

ism, as Appiah and others currently conceive it,3 prompts a broadening of

notions of citizenship, allowing us to recognize new spaces for community

and new forms of civic engagement within them. Increasingly those spaces

are digital (Bennett, 2008; Burgess, Foth, & Rlaebe, 2006; Hermes, 2006), and

the activities that circulate within and across them are symbolizations that

draw on multiple modes, that are often compelled by emotion and desire,

that blur the domains of private and public, and that position participants

to be more aesthetically aware and ethically and morally alert. These ideas,

we believe, are compatible with a newly invigorated English education that

recognizes literacies as multimodal, identities as hybrid, and Englishes as plural in our shifting and increasingly complex and interconnected social

worlds (Barrell, Hammett, Mayher, & Pradl, 2004; Kirkland, 2010).

Providing a compelling theonzation of the nature and role of media

in such interconnected worlds, Silverstone (2007) articulated the need to

conceptualize personal and mass media as moral public spaces. Indeed,

these media constitute, he argued, the primary means by which we come

into contact with others. Images of strangers, mediated by television, com

puters, cell phones, radio, and the like, largely constitute our understanding

of "others" and their worlds. To suggest the changing directionality of such

contact, Silverstone recounted a brief interview that was broadcast oil BBC

Badio in the midst of the U.S. war in Afghanistan not long after 9/11 and the

World Trade Center attack. An Afghani blacksmith was asked to comment

on the destruction of his village. The bombs were falling, his translated

voice proposed, because "A1 Qaeda had killed many Americans and their

donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles" (qtd. in Silverstone, 2007,

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English Education ,V 42 N4, july 2010

p. 1). What interested Silverstone about the blacksmith's account was that,

for a brief moment, it reversed the "customary polarities of interpretation"

(p. 4) "in which we in the West do the defining, and in which you are, and

I am not, the other" (p. 3). If, as Silverstone believed, the quintessential

characteristic of media in our global and digital world is its potential to link

strangers across geographic, social, and historical space, then the important

question becomes, when we hear the blacksmith's voice, whether we are able

to listen, becoming "hospitable" readers of distant texts, able to "recognize

not just the stranger as other, but the other in oneself" (p. 14). Such a vision

for reading and interpretation befits a global and digital age and implies a

central role for a freshly conceived English education.

Current processes of globalization are characterized by increased and

intensified flows of people, capital, texts, and images around the world and

across national borders (Appadurai, 1996). The directionality of such move

ments as well as their effects may be debated, but not their existence—and

not the challenge of conceptualizing media as a moral space or developing

the cosmopolitan habits of mind that would allow understanding and com

munication across difference. It is interesting to note the frequency and

urgency, among a diverse collection of theorists, of calls for dialogue and

communication across differences in ideology, geography, and culture as

the only solution to a fractured and divided world. These include philoso

phers such as Appiah (2006) and Benhabib (2002), media theorists such as

Silverstone (2007), and sociologists such as Touraine (2000). Theorizing the

importance of "a school for the Subject" (p. 265) in a world adrift in both

the excesses of capitalism and the extremism of communal allegiances,

Touraine believes that our best hope lies in the development of social actors

able to communicate inter-culturally. We concur, adding that teachers of

English, as the educators most concerned with helping students develop a

critical consciousness around language use and cultivate related literary

and aesthetic sensibilities, have an important role to play in this regard. Much has been made of late of the recent advances in media and

communication technologies that would seem to make possible and even facilitate such crucial communication across difference. Jenkins and col

leagues (2006) have helpfully characterized the "participatory culture" that has accompanied increases in access to communicative and expressive

digital tools and networks. Similarly, youthful engagement, almost all of it

self-sponsored and peer-centric, in activities such as social networking, blog

ging, text messaging, and video- and photo-sharing, has been celebrated as

evidence of identity enactment, social interaction, and creativity through the

uptake and transformation of newly available digital means (Ito et al., 2008).

Burgess and Green (2009) suggest that the video-sharing site YouTube could

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

be considered a space for the enactment of "cosmopolitan cultural citizen

ship," given that it is a digital context in which "individuals can represent

their identities and perspectives, engage with the self-representations of

others, and encounter cultural difference" (p. 81). We share the hope that

the participatory culture that surrounds new media can facilitate engage

ment with a larger public good, fostering communication, understanding,

and tolerance across difference. We are not, however, so sanguine that such

habits of mind spring full-bodied from such cultures and tools, habitus free,

liberated from their cultural, social, and historical legacies (Bourdieu, 1977).

Recent studies have revealed that participation on social networking sites

mirrors the social segregation that occurs offsite, (e.g., Prinsloo & Walton,

2008) and that their most prominent use is to connect users to groups of existing friends, not distant or foreign others (boyd & Ellison, 2008; Ito et

al., 2008). Schools often eschew such sites altogether, blocking students'

participation in the name of safety and the avoidance of inappropriate

content and interlocutors (Clifford, 2010; Livingstone, 2008; Notley, 2008),

while English classrooms have generally not yet begun to imagine how to incorporate social networking within an overcrowded, test-driven curricu

lum (Ahn, 2010; Beach, Hull, & O'Brien, in press). It seems to us, then, that

the promotion of cultural citizenship, cosmopolitan habits of mind, and

conversations across difference requires an educational framework and is at heart an educative endeavor.

Hansen (2010), writing from a philosophical perspective, has described

the elements of an education animated by cosmopolitanism that is rooted

in everyday, local commitments and in broader arenas of concern that al low us to participate in the world—that is, the "fusion, sometimes tenuous

and tension-laden, of receptivity to the new and loyalty to the known" (p.

5). The elements of a cosmopolitan education include "a recognition of the

importance of local socialization as making possible education itself" and

"the recognition that a cosmopolitan outlook triggers a critical rather than

idolatrous or negligent attitude toward tradition and custom" (p. 1). To

practice such attitudes persons must improve or transform the self or "cul

tivate as richly as possible their intellectual, moral, political, and aesthetic

being" as well as "be responsive to the demands of justice toward others"

(p. 8). Notably, when Hansen describes the practices associated with such stances, he privileges language arts and further believes that concomitant

capacities to "perceive, discern, criticize, and appreciate" (p. 9) are most

likely to come to the fore during encounters with difference.

Hansen's (2010) emphasis on literate arts redolent with critical capaci

ties as a means of developing cosmopolitan points of view is compatible with

a sociocultural perspective on learning, language use, and identity forma

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English Education ,V 42 N4, July 2010

tion. Rooted in a social view of literacy that focuses on everyday situated

practices within cultural and historical contexts (Barton & Hamilton, 1998;

Gee, 2004; Street, 1984), our study is informed in particular by Bakhtin's

(1981) dialogic framework, especially his construct of "ideological becom

ing" as a process of identity formation. Bakhtin theorized that this process

is characterized by "struggle and dialogic interrelationship" (p. 342) among

discourses or patterns of thought, language, and values. Specifically, he ar

gued that authoritative discourses—those historically and culturally rooted

discourses distant from ourselves and fused with authority—exist in tension

with internally persuasive discourses—those discourses that combine our own

and others' words in personally meaningful ways, constantly recontextual

ized through "interanimating relationships with new contexts" (p. 546).

For Bakhtin, it is such struggles within ourselves, between discourses, and

with others in social interactions that enable the generative potential of the

individual and lead to ideological becoming (p. 354). Further, it is via the

process of ideological becoming that we come to learn through dialogues

with self and others that invite engagement with difference (Freedman &

Ball, 2004; Morson, 2004). At heart, then, ideological becoming is a process

of learning, one that we believe can helpfully be understood in relation to

cosmopolitanism as educative practice.

We have benefited from pairing Bakhtin s enduring insights into

how language processes constitute self in relation to other with theories

of cosmopolitanism, particularly Hansen's (2010) account of educative

cosmopolitanism that focuses on the promotion

itward-looking focus of t0|erance across difference through ethical opolitanism highlights an(j mora) projects of self. The outward-looking citizenship and critical focus of cosmopolitanism highlights cultural jinings Of the relations citizenship and critical imaginings of the rela self and other through tions between self and other through new forms

IS of civic engagement, of civic engagement. Hansen's (2008) educative project, which "presupposes individual and com

munity diversity" (p. 208), stresses the importance of community as well as

the individual, which for our purposes is a useful refocusing of Bakhtin's

emphasis on socially constituted individual consciousness. Bakhtin (1981)

emphasized the often confl ictual process of making others' words one's own:

"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the

private property of the speaker's intentions; it is popu lated—overpopulated—

with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's

own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process" (p. 294).

Hansen, in contrast, foregrounds the artfulness, enjoyment, and choice that

The outward-looking focus of

cosmopolitanism highlights cultural citizenship and critical

imaginings of the relations

between self and other through

new forms of civic engagement.

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

can characterize being receptive to new discourses—again an educational

turn helpful in our project.

Having joined certain tenets of cosmopolitanism with the process

of ideological becoming, we are positioned now to explore the following

questions: How do young people develop cosmopolitan habits of mind and

attitudes toward others? What are the social and cultural processes that

characterize the development of cultural citizenship? What kinds of educa

tive spaces, especially those otiline, might facilitate such processes? And

what forms and designs do communicative practices in such spaces take?

We address these questions by examining the participation offline and online

of a group of teenage girls from India who were a part of an international

social networking project designed to promote cosmopolitan habits of mind.

Site Development, Data Collection, and Data Analysis

The larger project on which this article is based involved (1) the develop

ment of extra-school or school-based sites4 in four countries, which we

call the "Kidnet" project, where youth create multimodal artifacts such

as digital stories5; (2) the construction of a digital social networking site,

which we call Space2Cre8, through which these youth communicate with

each other and share their multimodal artifacts; and (3) a set of research

studies investigating the evolution of this network, its impact on personal

identity and cultural knowledge development, and the roles that various

forms of communication—language, image, music, video, and multimodal

combinations thereof—play in these processes. Space2Cre8 has gone through four iterations thus far and continues to develop as youth use the site and

make suggestions about its functionality and design. It is similar to social

networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in that participants can

articulate lists of friends, make wall and blog postings, send private mes

sages, chat, post videos, form groups, and see recent site activities. It dif

fers by being a private site, having a data collection mechanism attached,

and most importantly for purposes of this discussion, by virtue of fostering

friendship networks that include online-only relationships (rather than, as

is the case for MySpace or Facebook, online networks that primarily index

offline relationships). Further, in contrast to most social networking sites

where place is implicit, on Space2Cre8 national and cultural identities are

represented overtly and frequently.

We used mixed methods for data collection and analysis. In part, the

quantitative data were collected via an automatic history-tracking system that

recorded each participant's contributions to and use of the network. Other

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English Education, f 42 N4, July 2010

quantitatively oriented data included questionnaires and skill inventories

that allowed us to broadly document shifts over the course of the project. The

qualitative data consisted of observational field notes of students' interactions

as they participated in program activities and created digital stories and other digital products; audio-tapings and video-tapings of group interactions

and conversations related to the use of Space2Cre8; periodic semistructured

interviews; and records of online participation automatically archived by the

site history tracking system. Research staff at each site were fluent in both

English and the respective local languages; interviews were conducted in

participants' preferred languages and later translated to English and tran

scribed. A third data set consisted of participants' creative work, including

stories, music, images, and multimodal compositions.

Our approach analytically involved triangulating multiple data sources

and carrying out several types of analyses. Using the results of our automated

tracking system, we tabulated the frequency and types of participants' post

ings to Space2Cre8—their digital products, commentary on digital products,

and their communications with other participants. A second type of analysis

was open-ended and focused thematic codings of observational field notes

and interviews (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) collected at

each site and organized and analyzed using the qualitative analysis program

Atlas TI. Such examinations shed light on the nature of individuals' and

groups' engagement with Kidnet and Space2Cre8 activities; their semiotic,

linguistic, and social choices, intentions, and aspirations; and their learning

about the technology, communication, themselves, and their international

peers. Finally, using previously developed techniques (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008), we analyzed the digital products that

participants created and shared via Space2Cre8 by focusing on how those

products conveyed meaning through different semiotic systems (such as

image, sound, and language) and through combinations of these systems,

i.e., multimodally.

India is at once a country of vast potential, hope, and energy and a

country that faces enormous challenges. Its literacy rate is among the low

est in the world, especially among women, at 46.8 percent (www.stats.uis.

UNESCO.org). Its government schools suffer low enrollment, high dropout

rates, and teacher shortages and extreme disengagement, while their infra

structure is so lacking that children are often without classrooms, and access

to computers and the Internet is almost beyond imagining (Sahni, 2009). Our

project took place in Uttar Pradesh (UP), the most populated of India's 30-odd

states and, despite its adjacency to the capital of New Delhi, one of the poorest

states in the country. The school at which we worked, which was founded

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

by Urvashi Sahni (author), is called "Prayas"6 or "Inspiration." It is located

in the capital city of Lucknow, which has a population of approximately 3

million, almost 80 percent of whom are Hindu and 20 percent Muslim. Cre

ated to provide a quality education for the underprivileged, Prayas served at the time of our study some 500 girls from the ages of 3 to 18. Within the

school but outside of regular instructional time,7 15 girls from grades 9 to

11 participated in the Kidnet program twice a week.

Female, lower caste, and poor, these girls occupied a bottom position

in India's complex and hierarchical social system. Bakhti, for example, a

lower-caste girl of 17, lived with her father and siblings in an abandoned

shack that had no electricity. After her mother died when Bakhti was 13,

she took care of her younger siblings, whose ages were 9, 7, 3, and newborn

at the time of her mother's death. Her father, a painter afflicted with alco

holism, did not support his family and in fact took from them, selling the

odd item from the house to support his addiction, including Bakhti's school

books. At the time of our study Bakhti had attended Prayas school for four

years; during that period she also had enrolled all of her siblings except for

her youngest sister. Bakhti's days began at 6 a.m. when she left her home

without eating breakfast to go to work as a domestic servant cleaning seven

houses, for which she earned 1400 rupees (or 30 U.S. dollars per month). After finishing her work by 12:30 p.m. (popping in and out of her home after

each job to check on the children), she cooked lunch for herself and the rest

of the family, and then attended school from 2-6 p.