Conceptualizing Global Citizenship in Global Citizenship Education: Who Can Be the Global Citizen? A Case Study from Slovakia.

More so now than ever before – at the juncture of new and old resurfacing glocal crises – global citizenship education (GCE) is being framed as a pedagogical tool that can effectively address globalization and the interdependences and inequalities it generates. At the heart of such an education is a premise that claims that, if equipped with appropriate knowledge, attitudes, and skills, self-realization of “global citizenship” is possible, and consequently, students can begin thinking and acting beyond their local circumstances to address global challenges. However, as with any other education, if seen as neutral or normative, global citizenship education and the concept of “global citizenship” it proposes may reproduce harmful (un)acknowledged assumptions about the world. Consequently, as seminal work by Pashby points out, when approaching GCE, one should always ask “for whom and by whom” is GCE designed, who profits from it, and who does not. Making use of the postcolonial concept of hierarchization, this study aims to show that GCE puts into place particular discursive strategies that delineate who is the “global citizen” that can act as the “subject” and who is constructed as the “object” about which knowledge is being produced, thus, recreating the ages-old Self-Other binary. To demonstrate the existence of such colonial binaries, the method of Critical Discourse Analysis is applied to the case of Slovak GCE. By pointing out the presence of particular discursive strategies of activation-passivation, personalization-impersonalization, generalization-specification, this study, thus, reveals that, like every citizenship, the idea of “global citizenship” in GCE is based on the idea of who does and does not belong, who can become the “global citizen” and who cannot.