Global interconnectivity and its ethical challenges in education

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments around the world, around the claims that globalization is an ideology that has undermined the sovereignty of nation-states and created conditions that have produced wide-ranging social inequalities. And yet there seems little prospect of turning back from the facts of global interconnectivity. In this paper, I suggest that it is in this contradictory space that the work of educators is now located. Such a space has given rise to a range of perplexing ethical challenges that are not only political but also pedagogic. Politically, these challenges relate to the need to forge ethical communities that can generate collective action in the face of growing levels of global interconnectivity, on the one hand, and the popular appeal of nationalism, on the other. Pedagogically, these challenges demand approaches that assist students to make a better sense of the contradictory world in which they now live and learn, and develop a practice of ethics that foregrounds difference, complexity, contingency and uncertainty.