Abstract
It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization. Contemporary scholars in the humanities, such as Peter Critchley, Noam Chomsky, Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Eisenstein, David Orr, Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein, Lynn Margulis, Mustafa Tolba, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Giroux, Carolyn Merchant, Paulo Freire, Fritjof Capra, and Pier Luigi Luisi have aptly redefined the concept of “world” as a biological and cultural ecosystem. This paper seeks ways to integrate the theory and practice of eco-citizenship into various cross-disciplinary aspects of higher education, with a focus on curricular adjustments steered by World Languages and Cultures programs. It vests universities with a mission to engage themselves both as places of resistance against the neoliberal privatization of the commons and as the interactive, practical, analytical, and creative grounds needed for a healthy rebuilding of our global community. Through an assertive commitment in favour of eco-citizenship, universities will help clarify and resolve the strong conflict we are witnessing today between neoliberal orientations and an ecological exigency clearly delineated by scientific and humanistic scholarship.
Highlights
It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization
This paper seeks ways to integrate the theory and practice of eco-citizenship into various cross-disciplinary aspects of higher education, with a focus on curricular adjustments steered by World Languages and Cultures programs
World citizenship is often understood as some sort of sci-fi supranationality that would overrule the supremacy of nation-states as vectors for social, political, cultural, and economic identity
Summary
It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization. Contemporary scholars in the humanities, such as Peter Critchley, Noam Chomsky, Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Charles. Universities are caught in a contradiction between a corporate/political call, which imposes that they meet the demands of the “real” world by preparing workers and leaders for the offers of the capital system, and an ethical mission, which would have them educate citizens capable of steering the world toward a sustainable future, which itself remains to be clearly defined They are caught in a second contradiction between, on one hand, a commitment to protect the diversity of their student population and, on the other hand, the need to develop an overarching cohesiveness within and between populations. World Languages and Cultures programs have a key role to play not merely in teaching individual world cultures, and in engaging students into a genuine reflection on what it means to belong to one world and to act from it, rather than upon it, as world citizens with common cores, emotions, wishes, needs, resources, paths and ideals that lie in full harmony within the fundamental and innately comprehensive purpose of life on earth
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