Ontologies of Place, Creative Meaning Making and Critical Cosmopolitan Education

Abstract

Discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism, focusing on the rapid flows of people, resources, and knowledge around the globe and subsequent encounters between global citizens, present a binary between “global” and “local.” At the same time educational theories, perhaps especially in the areas of language and literacy studies, promote a view of learning as occurring through mediated interactions in local, situated practices. This article offers a lens to bridge perspectives between ever‐increasing global shifts and movements and situated human interactions through a theorization of the mediational nature of place. Following discussion of global and local as binaries across literatures, I offer a theory of ontologies of place, highlighting it as mediational in meaning making in human interactions. Locating learning within a sociocultural framework, I describe a project linking underresourced English‐learning youth transnationally through multimodal e‐communication, then present an analysis of data from the project to illuminate how place mediates the interactions through which understandings are negotiated and constructed. Findings point to not only the primacy of place in creative meaning making among global youth, but also to the necessity of paying adequate attention to a critical cosmopolitanism: a way forward that considers how to promote and support global encounters and engagements in a way that expands affiliations, openness, creativity, and caring with an imperative to create and sustain just and equitable relations.