Parallaxes and paradoxes of Global Citizenship: Critical reflections and possibilities of praxis in/through an international online course

Abstract

"Global citizenship" has become a popular term in recent times. Often its deployment is intended to evoke the full ambit of intersectionalities of the global justices. An interest in the concept and its rationalization in the contemporary era are marked by a response to global ecological and economic crises in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. It also comports with a moral liberal response to new place-based formations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class inequalities globally in complex arrangement with increasing politically invested ideologico-religious polarizations; persistent and pernicious levels of poverty, global violence and human degradation; the rise of new forms of nationalism and differentiated capitalist formations geopolitically (as in the case of the U.S. versus China); and a concomitant rise in cosmopolitanism and new integrations (as exemplified by the inception of the European Union). It is also associated with a resurgence of humanism and humanitarianism, and it can be said to be caught up, at least partially, in the globalization project of neo-liberal spread and capitalist imperialism.