Reflection Paper

52 contexts.org

Try this experiment: Go to your college’s

or university’s home page and look for

the mission statement. Odds are high

that you’ll find at least one reference —

whether explicit or implicit — to the

institution’s promise to “produce global

citizens.” While this goal has become

widespread, even a truism, in higher

education, the particular construction

of this concept is relatively new. Histori-

cally, study abroad and a global educa-

tion were understood as the purview of

elite students, with the primary goal of

developing more complete, worldly, and

successful individuals. When “develop-

ing citizenship” was expressed as a goal

of higher education, such citizenship

was understood as national rather than

international in scope.

The production of global citizens as

a goal of higher education arises from

a particular mix of mediating factors in

the late twentieth and early twenty-first

centuries, many of which fall under that

ever-amorphous phenomenon of global-

ization: international monetary configu-

rations oriented toward global business

success; rapidly expanding (yet perva-

sively shallow) media focus on world

problems such as global health, human

rights, natural disasters, and poverty;

the rise of online learning opportuni-

ties across national borders; more inter-

national students studying within the

United States and more competition for

U.S. higher education institutions from

abroad; and the decreasing costs of

international travel for U.S.-based stu-

dents, to name but a few. One conse-

quence of these shifts toward a global

perspective is a much more widespread

expectation that some form of interna-

tional education be a part of every U.S.

student’s experience.

There are many reasons to applaud

the trend toward “globalizing” U.S.

education. Extending study abroad

opportunities beyond elite students

or institutions, and to locations that

push students beyond their economic,

physical and cultural comfort zones, are

significant achievements in their own

right. Likewise, increasing students’

sense of the necessity to understand

and be accountable for global issues

is a noteworthy humanistic endeavor.

In a country where shockingly few

national legislators have spent time out-

side of the United States or even pos-

sess passports, and where adults and

students alike have disturbingly limited

knowledge of basic global geography,

“The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

mediations

analyzing culture

m american sentimentalism and the production of global citizens by ron krabill

Invisible Children founders Bobby Bailey, Laren Poole, and Jason Russell with members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army on the Sudan-Congo border in 2008.

G le

n n a

G o rd

o n

53fa l l 2 0 1 2 c o n t e x t s

the internationalization of

higher education is a good

thing. Right?

What are some of the

unintended cultural conse-

quences of these programs?

American sentimentalism

can be seen as one such

outcome and the concept

provides a lens that clarifies

the dangers of these trends

without necessarily dismiss-

ing the benefits. Sentimen-

t a l i s m — e m o t i o n - b a s e d

claims to moral superiority

and as justification for one’s

actions — has a long track

record in literary and cul-

tural history, but it entered

the public eye most recently

and forcefully in the debate

around the Kony 2012 video

that went viral with over 100

million views since March

2012. This debate was espe-

cially evident in writer Teju

Cole’s scathing critique of

the video on Twitter. The

Atlantic magazine subse-

quently reprinted Cole’s

seven tweets under the title

of “The White Savior Indus-

trial Complex.” In this elaborated version

Cole notes, “I deeply respect American

sentimentality, the way one respects a

wounded hippo. You must keep an eye

on it, for you know it is deadly.”

Cole’s American sentimentalism-

based critique of Kony 2012 applies well

to the idea of global citizenship as it has

been deployed in the rhetoric of higher

education. This is more than an accidental

parallelism. The filmmakers behind Kony

2012—with its claim to help child com-

batants by making the Lord’s Resistance

Army leader Joseph Kony “famous”

through social (and other) media—have

utilized college campuses as a primary

speaking and recruiting grounds for their

organization, Invisible Children. Both

critiques and defense of the film center

on questions of generational differences

in engaging social media and politics.

So the connections are not incidental

between Kony 2012, larger mediated

perceptions of global issues, and the

expectation that international experi-

ence, particularly one that includes some

element of “helping” those whose sup-

posedly-exotic country one is visiting or

learning about, be part of a U.S. student’s

education. Both efforts rely on sentimen-

talism as the driving motivational force

for social engagement.

According to two of Cole’s tweets,

“The banality of evil transmutes into the

banality of sentimentality. The world is

nothing but a problem to

be solved by enthusiasm.…

The White Savior Industrial

Complex is not about jus-

tice. It is about having a big

emotional experience that

validates privilege.” Transna-

tional communications net-

works have helped amplify

the illusion that the expres-

sion of such enthusiasm —

whether via social media or

other information and com-

munication technologies

(ICTs) — has substantive posi-

tive material impacts beyond

the big emotional experience

of the enthusiast. The lens

of American sentimentalism

reveals some of the dangers

of framing the international-

ization of higher education

in terms of the production of

global citizens.

Like Kony 2012, global

citizenship practices in con-

temporary universities reflect

the assumption that aware-

ness of global problems is

a sufficient goal in itself.

Behind this assumption is

another, unspoken one:

if people become aware of horrifying

injustice, then they will take action and

the injustice will stop. This is the same

assumption that underpinned much of

the early work in human rights. However,

as contemporary human rights work-

ers have become excruciatingly aware,

changing people’s consciousness alone

is not enough. As sociologists might

put it, awareness is a necessary, but not

sufficient, condition for social change.

Ironically, increased access to mediated

images of issues around the world seems

to have increased many people’s faith in

Contexts, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 52-54. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2012 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504212466332

U.S.-based students become global citizens, while residents of the Global South become subjects of a global world order.

Author Teju Cole’s tweets are critical of the KONY 2012 campaign and what it represents.

54 contexts.org

mediations

their own global awareness as sufficient,

even while cynicism regarding mass

media (and news media in particular) has

simultaneously skyrocketed.

While seasoned human rights work-

ers and sociologists understand that a

change in consciousness does not auto-

matically lead to social change, Ameri-

can sentimentalism invites consumers of

global citizenship campaigns back to the

belief in this simple causal connection.

Indeed, the ideal of global citizenship

as often produced in U.S. higher edu-

cation prioritizes the awareness-raising

and good intentions of some (U.S.-based

students) over the impact of those prac-

tices on others. An additional underlying

assumption is at work here: U.S. students

(and professors) inherently have the

power—often conferred by some com-

bination of access to disposable income

and social media—to solve global prob-

lems, unlike those whom they are help-

ing, who then come to be understood

merely as victims or as actors playing

minor roles in the drama of the student’s

global education. This dynamic replicates

the dual nature of colonial and postcolo-

nial government that scholar Mahmood

Mamdani outlined in his influential book,

Citizen and Subject, while extending it

to a global scale: U.S.-based students

become global citizens, while residents

of the Global South become subjects of a

global world order in which they are seen

as lacking agency.

The production of “global citizens”

also resonates with another common

discourse in the United States: “becom-

ing a productive citizen.” The implica-

tion of this phrasing is that a citizen

who engages in political, cultural, and

especially economic systems in the way

that s/he is “supposed” to, is more of a

citizen, a better citizen, than one who

is unproductive. The radical, the unem-

ployed, the hippy, the disabled, the punk,

the undocumented thus become less

deserving of civil, perhaps even human,

rights. Expanded to a global scale, such a

discourse of global citizenship allows, to

paraphrase Cole, the validation of privi-

lege side-by-side with the big emotional

experience of becoming a global citizen.

Like sentimentalism itself, all of

these dangers—the linking of produc-

tivity with citizenship; the division of

the world into global citizens and global

subjects; and the illusion that awareness

and enthusiasm are sufficient for social

change—display as many continuities

as disruptions with their historical prec-

edents. In the late 1960s, social critic Ivan

Illich famously told students preparing for

service work in Mexico that he admired

their commitment and good intentions,

but that they nonetheless were hypo-

crites if they continued. His speech, “To

Hell with Good Intentions,” has become

standard reading for students preparing

for service-learning experiences as part

of higher education, particularly in eco-

nomically underdeveloped communities

both locally and in the Global South. Yet

while awareness of Illich’s message has

spread, the fundamental dynamics of the

internationalization of education remain

much the same.

To take seriously Illich’s accusation

of hypocrisy, higher education needs

to rethink how it produces global citi-

zens, challenging the assumptions of

American sentimentalism that are deeply

embedded within it. Turning toward

international education policies of radical

reciprocity provide one route forward. In

order to achieve this, higher education

would have to abandon its superficial

invocations of global citizenship in favor

of a deep engagement with the substan-

tive, material, political and philosophi-

cal meanings of citizenship on a global

scale. Such a process would deprive its

students of the self-satisfied big emo-

tional experience of an exotic adventure

in helping others, in favor of a relentlessly

self-reflexive engagement with the reali-

ties of global inequality, the politics of that

inequality, and our varying individual and

collective responsibilities within them.

Ron Krabill is in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts

& Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.

He is the author of Starring Mandela & Cosby: Media

and the End(s) of Apartheid.

R o b er

t R ai

n es

Universities suggest that simply being aware of global problems is sufficient.

To date, 3,590,161 people have pledged “to make Kony famous” by participating in campaigns like “Cover the Night,” above.