The success of individual nation states today is often measured in terms of their ability to benefit from and contribute to a host of global economic, political, socio-cultural, technological, and educational networks. This increased multifaceted international inter-dependence represents an intuitively contradictory and an immensely complex situation. This scenario requires that national governments, whose primary responsibility is towards their citizenry, must relinquish a degree of control over state borders to constantly developing trans and multinational regimes and institutions. Once state borders become permeable all sorts of issues related to rights earned or accrued due to membership of a national community come into question. Given that neither individuals nor states can eschew the influence of the growing interdependence, this new milieu is often described in terms of shrinking of the world into a global village. This reshaping of the world requires us to broaden our horizons and re-evaluate the manner in which we theorize human personhood within communal boundaries. It also demands us to acknowledge that the relative decline of Euro-American economic and political influence and the rise of Asian and Latin American states at the global level have created spaces in which a de-territorialized and a de-historicized notion of citizenship and state can now be explored. The essays in this volume represent diverse disciplinary, analytical, and methodological approaches to understand what the implications are of being a citizen of both a nation state and the world simultaneously. In sum, Deconstructing Global Citizenship explores the questionofwhether a synthesis of contradictory national and global tendencies in the term “global citizenship” is even possible, or if we are better served by fundamentally reconsidering our ideas of “citizenship,” “community,” and “politics.”

Drawing on contemporary global events, this book highlights how global citizenship education can be used to critically educate about the complexity and repressive nature of global events and our collective role in creating a just world.

This volume addresses the need for an international perspective on global education, and provides alternate voices to the theme of global education. The editors asked international educators in different contexts to indicate how their own experience of global education addresses the broad and contested concepts associated with this notion. Following the lead of the internationally acknowledged authors from North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia, perspectives were provided on a wide variety of contexts including tertiary education, and teacher education; various pedagogies for global education, including digital pedagogies; and curriculum development at school, tertiary and community levels. Contesting and Constructing International Perspectives in Global Education explores the tensions inherent in discussions of global education from a number of facets including spatial, pedagogical, temporal, social and cultural; and provides critical, descriptive and values-laden interpretations. The book is divided into five sections, “Temporal and Spatial Views of Global Education”; “Telling National Stories of Global Education”; “Empowering Citizens for Global Education”; “Deconstructing Global Education”; and “Transforming Curricula for Global Education”. It is envisaged as a starting point for a stronger international conception of global education and a way to build a conversation for the future of global education in a neo-liberal and less internationally confident time.

This Handbook is a much needed international reference work, written by leading writers in the field of global citizenship and education. It is based on the most recent research and practice from across the world, with the 'Geographically-Based Overviews' section providing summaries of global citizenship and education provided for Southern Africa, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and East and South East Asia. The Handbook discusses, in the 'Key Ideologies' section, the philosophies that influence the meaning of global citizenship and education, including neo-liberalism and global capitalism; nationalism and internationalism; and issues of post-colonialism, indigeneity, and transnationalism. Next, the 'Key Concepts' section explores the ideas that underpin debates about global citizenship and education, with particular attention paid to issues of justice, equity, diversity, identity, and sustainable development. With these key concepts in place, the 'Principal Perspectives and Contexts' section turns to exploring global citizenship and education from a wide variety of viewpoints, including economic, political, cultural, moral, environmental, spiritual and religious, as well as taking into consideration issues of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and social class. Finally, the 'Key Issues in the Teaching of Global Citizenship' section discusses how education can be provided through school subjects and study abroad programmes, as well as through other means including social media and online assessment, and political activism. This Handbook will be vital reading for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates in the fields of sociology and education, particularly those with an interest in comparative studies.

In the spirit of Ivan Illich’s 1968 speech ‘To hell with good intentions’, the book takes aim at a ubiquitous form of contemporary ideology, namely the concept of global citizenship. Its characteristic discourse can be found inhabiting a nexus of four complexes of ‘ruling’ institutions, namely universities with their international service learning, the United Nations and allied international institutions bent on global citizenship education, international non-governmental organizations and foundations promoting social entrepreneurship, and global corporations and their mouthpieces pitching corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. The question is: in the context of Northern or Western imperialism and US-led, neoliberal, global, corporate capitalism, and the planetary Armageddon they are wringing, what is the concept of global citizenship doing for these institutions? The studies in the book put this question to each of these four institutional complexes from broadly political-economic and post-colonial premises, focusing on the concept’s discursive use, against the background of the mounting production of the global non-citizen as the global citizen’s ‘other’. Addressed to all users of the concept of global citizen(ship) from university students and faculty in global studies to social entrepreneurs and United Nations bureaucrats, the book’s studies ultimately ask whether the idea helps or hinders the global quest for social and economic justice.

Misiaszek examines the (dis)connection between critical global citizenship education models and ecopedagogy which is grounded in Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. Exploring how concepts of citizenship are affected by globalization, this book argues that environmental pedagogues must teach critical environmental literacies in order for students to understand global environmental issues through the world’s diverse perspectives. Misiaszek analyses the ways environmental pedagogies can use aspects of critical global citizenship education to better understand how environmental issues are contextually experienced and understood by societies locally and globally through issues of globalization, colonialism, socio-economics, gender, race, ethnicities, nationalities, indigenous issues, and spiritualties.

Global justice is an exciting area of refreshing, innovative new ideas for a changing world facing significant challenges. Not only does work in this area often force us to rethink about ethics and political philosophy more generally, but its insights contain seeds of hope for addressing some of the greatest global problems facing humanity today. The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice has been selective in bringing together some of the most pressing topics and issues in global justice as understood by the leading voices from both established and rising stars across twenty-five new chapters. This Handbook explores severe poverty, climate change, egalitarianism, global citizenship, human rights, immigration, territorial rights, and much more.