“Pork pies and vindaloos”: learning for cosmopolitan citizenship

Abstract

This paper examines Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey’s 2003 article on cosmopolitan citizenship 14 years after its publication. Since its publication, young people’s disconnection from political life has increasingly become a cause for concern for most, if not all, Western democracies. Specifically, this article examines the implications for young people’s political life in Leicester following a period of local, regional and national political changes. The study has shown how some South Asian young people occupy “outsiders-within” status in Leicester’s “common culture” (and all the sub-cultures that exist within it) and see their ethnic communities from a range of voyeuristic positions. Young South Asian participants in the study have not distanced themselves from the South Asian community entirely, but the way participants have approached narrating their self-identities has not necessarily been forged in, or determined upon, how “Indian” or “Pakistani” identities are conceived by the common culture. Consequently, two questions arise. Firstly, what is the impact of developing cosmopolitan citizenship among young people forging new types of ethnic identities in Leicester? Secondly, what types of educational approaches (formal and informal) would be important to help strengthen young people’s political engagement? The paper concludes that the ongoing challenge for educators is to strengthen mutual understanding between students from different communities and backgrounds by drawing on their lived experience within the caveat of promoting cosmopolitan citizenship.