Re-imagined Universities for Global Citizen Professionals: International Education, Cosmopolitan Pedagogies and Global Friendships

Conventional universities are increasingly under fire for the role that they play in the contemporary world.  Universities today – it is argued -- support a neo-liberal corporate agenda (Peters 2004), ‘kill thinking’ (Evans 2004), and are peopled by ‘exhausted faculty’ and a ‘demobilised student body’ (Aronowitz and Giroux 2000).  International education is criticized for operating within a hierarchy governed by a narrow apex of ‘world class universities.’

Within the context of vigorous debates about how ‘another knowledge is possible’ (De Souza Santos 2009) and ‘another world is possible’ (Susan George 2004), the presentation will argue that schools of development studies can provide different models of international education that are very relevant when ‘re-imagining universities.’  A case study will be used of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, based on in-depth interviews with 124 former students from nineteen countries on five continents, embedded within recent literatures on cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, and the role of universities and the ‘knowledge sector’ within periods of rapid globalization.

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For more information please contact Annet van Geen or Roy Huijsmans