“The other side of diversity”: Students’ experiences of race, difference, and inequality in a Costa Rican international school

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines bids for a more critical global citizenship education, the desire to engage students’ lived experiences of power and inequality, from students in an international school in Costa Rica that embraces diversity and conflict transformation as core values. In the midst of a racial reckoning prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement, I show how students pushed back against post-racial multiculturalism, White saviorism, and ahistorical approaches to cultural diversity in their school. I argue that their experiences as racialized diaspora subjects led them to critique elements of global citizenship education that fail to acknowledge structural racism. While much of the literature on global citizenship education emphasizes the failure to engage primarily elite/White/Western students in critical discussions of race and structural inequality, this paper shows how some students, primarily racialized non-white students, sought to open these conversations based on their own experiences of difference.