Introduction

The editors’ charge to connect global citizenship education and the theme of activism —as a key issue in learning and teaching about and for global citizenship—presents us with an imperative to theorize how we act and become global rather than just learning about it. Thus, we explore activism as/in/for global citizenship theoretically, historically, and in practice. However, as education can be overly practice-based and under-theorized, we do not offer a curriculum guide, “what works”, or a “to do” list of best practices (Daza 2013b). In our view, there is no magical formula for educating the future—no one, simple or best way of teaching and learning activism and global citizenship education because contexts, histories, and socio-political dynamics complicate them both (Maira 2009; Verma 2010). Instead, we focus on the long-term project of ‘decolonising the mind’ (wa Thiongʼo 1986) towards more complex, nuanced and critical global citizenships (Subedi and Daza 2008).

To become an educated human, including an educator, one necessarily learns hierarchical violences that disconnect the world and self from the so-called Other. Therefore, to think more relationally and outside of regimes of truth requires a radically different way of knowing, that does not simply follow our usual habits of thinking (Foucault 1980; Spivak 2012). Therefore, we argue that un-learning is an important activism for educating a future global imaginary—for inculcating authentic global-thinking citizens. Un-learning is activism because it implies educators’ bringing the un-learning into educational practice, and it further implies the ‘self-transformation’ of the educator, the students and the field and actions of education. We argue that activism as/in/for global citizenship asks educators and students to be unlearners—because to interrogate their location within the global power structure and requires radically different ways of thinking about self, world, other.

What Does It Mean to Un-Learn to Think Differently?

As we write this chapter in 2016,“Black Lives Matter ” (BLM) 1 banners and die-in demonstrations block major motorways and access to airports across the USA and the UK. Arguably, BLM has grown into a trans/national movement (McKenzie 2016), and serves as a visible, albeit North/West example, of activism as/for/in global citizenship education. BLM, and our use of it as an example here marks how what might be considered global is simultaneously limited by localities, as well as English-language —and USA—centrism. 2

Additionally, our use of BLM shows how activism, global, education, and citizenship are entangled and complicated by sense-making that emerges from who and where we are and can be. Because we are always inside our own sense-making, it is difficult to see how we make sense of the world. We argue that un-learning can help us see our habitual ways of thinking and thus how thinking, habitualized through power -laden frameworks, goes on to shape our relationships with people and the world. In contrast to un-learning, the concepts of activism, global, and citizenship are used widely in societal and educational (policy) practices, often in neutral, apolitical and ahistorical ways that erases, both intentionally and unintentionally, the traces of power relations from which they emerge (de Oliveira Andreotti and de Souza 2012). As we have written elsewhere, salient models of nation-building and democracy (Daza 2013c), global education curriculum (Subedi 2013) and social justice (Subreenduth 2013a, b) may be well-intentioned but ultimately undermined by the habitualized thinking that undergirds them (Spivak 2012). Unfortunately, many salient forms of thinking are inherently hierarchical and insidiously laden with a humanism that actually de-humanizes us (discussed in the next section). And too often, narratives on citizenship privilege human lives and discount the violence against ecology and non-human subjects, as well as forget the interdependent relationship between social and ecological justice (Martusewicz, Edmundson and Lupinacci 2015).

For example, one’s entry point may make it easier to recognise BLM as activism than as education and citizenship, but BLM educates and illustrates different citizenships and learned frames of references. In a “Herstory” (not history ) of BLM, Alicia Garza explains why Black freedom is world freedom:

When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty , control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free… (http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/)

Under the learned ideology of white supremacy, making sense of the BLM logic, which puts Black people at the center, not at the margin, requires un-learning white-black hierarchy (Daza 2009, 2013d; Merryfield and Subedi 2001) and ways in which the world has been divided (Willinsky 1998). Because of this lack of un-learning we see that a dominant response has been “all lives matter” (May 2016).

What we can learn from the plethora of articles and blogs trying to interpret, explain and analyze the hashtag “all lives matter” in response to BLM is that the distinction is not simply linguistic 3 but deeply onto-epistemological and difficult to address across and beyond the varying frames of belief (e.g., learned regimes of truth) that shape our thinking and being. In our view, ontology and epistemology cannot be separated (Daza and Gershon 2015); while space disallows a full discussion, onto-epistemology in a nutshell is how our sense of sense is generated: how we come to know/understand what world/beings/objects/selfs are, or what we think they are through our specific being/existence. This shows the immense challenge of translating across onto-epistemologies boundaries and the unlearning required to recognise multiple worlds (Spivak 2012). To understand the meaning of both thinking and being at the same time is to keep in tension simultaneously multiple ways of being and imagining/knowing the world, and relationships to it and within it—as in our example above of BLM, where alternate world views animate two phrases “black lives matter ” and “all lives matter.” The chapter brings forth these issues of onto-epistemological differences as we theorize global citizenship education through activism .

Although in our view we can never fully grasp all the frameworks within which we live and work, efforts to make our learning visible are not in vain (Kumashiro 2015). To be able to learn, un-learn, and re-learn is to notice, even if only sometimes and partially, how thinking, being, and imagining is being learned, both somatically/physically and socially. Keeping with Gregory Bateson (b. 1904–d. 1980), we learn to learn; so, thinking, being and acting is not neutral, ahistorical, linear, or simply natural—but learned. In this same way, we cannot simply, linearly, or completely un-learn who we are, where and when we live, or how we think. Nevertheless, to notice these onto-epistemological dilemmas is education. When we can notice that there is no non-complicitous subject position, then we can better notice our interdependent relationships (e.g., why Black lives must matter for all lives to matter) and thus understand the limits and possibilities of global—this is activism .

Global citizen/ships are not outside of learned ways of being in (and dividing) the world (Willinsky 1998). In particular, it is a challenge to think citizenships outside of “nation”—Spivak (2012) refers to this as “nation-think”. And we must remember that nation-states privilege certain identities /markers of citizenship (Banks 2004). Thus, our move is to engage with the current debates on citizenship in transnational (and unavoidably international ) contexts and foreground how we un-learn to become global-national -local with tensions, privileges, and contradictions. To do this, we begin by outlining some of the assumptions that inform global citizenship education, such as humanism and nation-think. We also explain what we mean by “activism as/in/for global citizenship”, reflected in our chapter’s title. Then, our section on learning and teaching offers three frameworks that shape what activism looks like and the meaning or purpose of global citizenship. Each framework offers a different engagement with curricula material, concepts, and pedagogy .

Education as Becoming Human

Education may have many guises and it may play out differently in different geographies, but often formal education in the global North /West (USA, UK and Europe), and elsewhere via (neo)colonialism and globalization , is rooted in humanism, produced by Enlightenment/colonial ideas. Consequently, the production of the knowing/knowable subject (i.e., an educated subject) has a strong relationship with “becoming human”—developing, transmitting, training, and educating what is/can be cognitive , social, political, moral/ethical, physical/biological, and so on. This “becoming human” project, or the project of civilization, has served as the epistemological foundation of European coloniality: racism , capitalism, heteropatriarchy, etc. Therefore, while education is often touted as “the great equalizer”, we ask readers to remember that it has served as a tool of both liberation and oppression (Subreenduth 2013a) . Now, in the regime of a global capitalist economy , which some call “new imperialism ” (Rhee 2009; Tikly 2004) , nation -states educate citizens for the global market; becoming human means being consumers (Black 2010). The importance of these old and new histories cannot be overstated in global citizenship education, as we underline how the analytical category of citizenship is not natural/neutral. Global citizenship education, akin with other attempts to educate differently (See Daza 2013a; Merryfield and Subedi 2001), is complicit with nation-think and the imperial legacy of becoming human.

Thus, we take up Spivak’s charge: “we must learn to do violence to the epistemological difference and remember that this is what education ‘is’” (2012, p. 10). Our task here is to displace such underpinnings and re-imagine what it means to be a human citizen subject (before Enlightenment dictated humanism). We are very concerned with noticing and un-learning deeply embedded and largely elusive transcendentalized frameworks, such as nation-think, as a means towards activism . Spivak (2012) argues that nation-think always already worlds spaces, bodies, and imaginaries. In the continuing yet new process of (post)colonial 4 worlding (Spivak 1985; Willinsky 1998; Coloma 2013), through the establishments of the Bretton Woods Agreements , the United Nations, and General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (Read these examples not only as institutional, but also at the level of episteme.), we have learned to divide the world. For recent examples, Scotland is already its own nation with its own citizens but yet Scotland’s referendum to become a separate nation-state from the UK failed, while the UK’s referendum to withdraw from the European Union succeeded. The irony of these examples show the epistemic depth of nation-think in practice and that the nation is still prominent in understanding global citizenship and activisms.

For postcolonial nation-states, nation-think has been a way towards decolonizing and claiming their independence (e.g., Bandung Conference ). However, as Tuhiwai Smith (1999) argues, in the context of Maori Indigenous knowledge , the very concept of “global citizenship” can easily recolonize those who are marginalized in society, such as Indigenous people who often are not included in conversations about “global”. Likewise, refugee subjects, often seen as non-citizens of the world (or as stateless), are not part of the conversation on citizenship or global citizenship. Thus, we, as people and educators, often make sense of global citizenship education through nation-think. Rather, we argue for de-transcendentalizing “nation” and working through the politics on who and how we speak about global citizenship. Otherwise “global” risks being a new name for old (colonial, imperial, national ) violences.

However, to de-transcendentalize modern notions of “citizen” and “nation” through which we have to think can prove impossible. Yet, being able to notice the limits helps us imagine different ways to think global and citizen, as you can’t imagine what you already know (Spivak 2012). Also, foregrounding complicity moves towards un-learning habitual thinking, doing, and dividing (Daza 2012). In the face of the imperial legacy of becoming human, our central query is: How can we mobilize global citizenship to promote decolonization? For us, activism as/in/for global citizenship education is about engaging in anti-oppressive practices that can create a more equitable world (Kumashiro 2015). As demonstrated in BLM, when Black Lives Matter , all lives can matter, because being as free as we can be is through interconnection, not individualism (see also Relativist section). Heeding to the historical understanding of how education has always been part of nation-state building projects, we invite readers in diverse geographies to work with questions: when educational institutions include global citizenship education, how does it work and what does it look like vis-a-vis its nation-state building project? How can activism be a new imagination for (making) global citizens? What are the limitations and dangers of activism as/for global citizens? What are other ways we can think of activism as/in/for learning? And in doing so, what possibilities emerge for making different global citizens differently? Rather than try to get away from complicity and contradictions, we embrace a more complicated sense of activism, global citizenship, and education.

Why ‘as/in/for’

Most discussions in the public domain assume there is one, best/right/real truth to be told, but when relationships and meanings are “on the move”—fluid, multiple, contested—then activism and global citizenship education may imply, as well as mobilize, different educations: different learning, teaching, curricula, and assessment for different purposes. In this way, “global citizens” themselves and the processes of engaging with global citizenship, including in/formal education, are activism—actors shaping an interdependent society, whether within or beyond formal/State structures governing citizenship.

Activism within global citizenship and education often focuses on specific issues, such as immigration , aid , equity and access, climate change , literacy , BLM in itself and so on, that are transnational. In this way, people and groups in different geographies are not simply showing solidarity with, and support for, the issues of others, but the issue itself is transnational. In this case, structural racism does disproportionate violence to Black Lives. Although minoritized, people of colour are the majority of the world’s population. The UK BLM movement is NOT about the USA but about State sponsored violence against Black lives that has deep roots in colonial white supremacy and anti-black racism. Social movements that desire to be heard in the global context can be seen as an exercise to claim citizenship rights that have been violated, whether historically or presently. They are often organized around how the everyday citizenship rights are being suppressed by people or organizations in power , as well as by epistemic regimes of power (e.g., white supremacy, heteronormativity, androcentrism, anthropocentrism, etc. (Martusewicz, Edmundson and Lupinacci 2015). Like the call to de-transcendentalize nation-think, identity politics offer both limits and possibilities. Consider how BLM’s explicit support of Palestinian sovereignty can be seen as a way to ally with struggles of people of colour globally, especially against States that use language , religion, white supremacy and other markers to suppress citizenship rights. (Un)Learning (about) oppression within and beyond nation-states can be useful sites to engage with different meanings and impossibilities of global citizenships, as well as how to become a critical ally, rather than a so-called liberator or white saviour, in global contexts across the planet (Rhee 2009, 2013; Subedi 2013) .

Finally, activism for global citizenship might best be understood as a double desire for people to be both more planetarity and more worldly. According to Spivak (2012, p. xiv), global citizenship presents a double-bind between ‘the uselessness of human life (planetarity) and the push to be useful (worldliness)’:

If we imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us, it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away—and thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. (p. 339)

In other words, “to re-imagine the subject as planetary accident” (p. 339) interrupts “globalization [a]s achieved by the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere,” as well as us/them (self/Other) binaries (p. 335). In the planetary–global bind, the Other and self contain and repel each other equally, which provides a different onto-epistemological engagement (Thinking with our previous onto-epistemological example; “All Lives Matter” is imposed as origin/al in response to BLM). In contrast, often what/who is imagined as Other in our habitual thinking is positioned as derived from the self and in a deficit-bind with what/who is imagined as the original source. In this way, the Other is falsely disconnected from the self as the self is positioned as superior, more advanced, civilized (human), normal, and/or the animator and standard-bearer. The following section addresses how educators can put unlearning to work vis-à-vis activism as/in/for global citizenship in education.

Three Frameworks that Shape What Activism Looks Like and the Meaning and Purpose of Global Citizenship in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

In this section, we present three major ways that activism as/in/for global citizenship is approached in classrooms (Subedi 2013; Subreenduth 2013a) . It is important to emphasize that the first two dominant frameworks are discussed through our critiques as they rarely involve unlearning. The third framework offers our possibility for activism through global citizenship education. We utilize Marjane Satrapi ’s (2003) graphic novel Persepolis as an example of how we can do un-learning by providing different ways of inquiry into a curricular text, which may offer opportunities of un-learning habitualized thinking. While thinking with theoretical frameworks has limits, including the pretense of seeming more complete, distinct, and straightforward than they actually are, we believe providing analytical frames of inquiry through which to engage curricula material, concepts, and pedagogy can help educators and students notice how and what we learn.

Deficit Model

As discussed at the end of the last section, otherness (alterity) is precisely when an Other is imagined as derived from a source (e.g., the self as origin/al, superior, standard-bearer) and consequently is subordinate, deviant, isolated, and disconnected. The deficit model rests on these taken-for-granted assumptions about so-positioned original sources of animation against which anything else is positioned as deficient. The Other becomes a problem to be fixed and the solution is to be more like its source. However, like a vicious circle, the Other can never be the source within this overriding deficit framework. Unlearning deficit-thinking is to think the Other is already whole, complete and connected.

Under the deficit model, activism is not focused on unlearning frameworks or changing systems and societal structures. Rather, it is myopically focused on helping, liberating, civilizing/humanizing, or saving deficient Others (cultures, groups, individuals). For example, rather than examining how a problem in a particular local setting interconnects with structural issues or with other communities and societies, a deficit approach treats each problem as if it is contained and often self-inflicted. Then, the deficient, undeveloped or underdeveloped, uncivilized, and/or undemocratic Other (individual, nation-state, etc.) is viewed as the root cause for the problem. Under a linear model of development and a modern discourse of progress, this deficit approach sees “whiteness ” and North/Western, English-speaking, and capitalist/industrialized societies as more progressive and democratic. Consequently, the global majority is positioned as less civilized (Subedi 2013). Under a deficit framework, the solution is to be more like the so-positioned originals, in this case North/West societies, and to take up Euro-American (colonial/imperial) notions of becoming human. For example “universal human rights ” are part and parcel of the Enlightenment project: rights, human, individual, and constitutional are differently operating, and interweaved with local –national –international–global histories and politics that deny and grant humanity, rights, land, and status such as citizen (Spivak 2012).

Because people and groups endowed with full humanity as agency (can) act on problems (Martusewicz, Edmundson and Lupinacci 2015; Subreenduth 2013a, b) , under the deficit model, the activist struggle is to gain human, individual, and civil rights to protect the Other, rather than questioning how these concepts exclude vast peoples in the first place. It may include the desire to save the Other or make the Other a (lesser) version of the self: a thinking that is deeply implicated in colonial racial discourse, civilizing missions, etc. When activism is approached as a rescue, charity, service, aid , or development project, Freire (1970/2000) has warned that “one cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding” (p. 95).

We return to BLM for another example of how the deficit model works. As justifications for police killing black people or State violence against Black people, one of the dominant counter arguments against BLM includes high black-on-black crime rates and Black people’s non-compliant attitudes and behaviors toward law enforcement. This deficit approach works by trying to make State violence against Black people their own fault and by consequently implying that it is something Black people can fix themselves, if they change themselves, which is sometimes referred to among people of colour as “acting white .” However, a deeper analysis can reveal how inherently biased societal institutions disproportionately target and impact Black people because they are Black; e.g., US Department of Justice report (2015) on the Ferguson Police Department shows racial bias and revenue generation were integral to institutions.

The deficit model is well entrenched. Most of us must actively and continuously un-learn deficit-thinking. In this way, un-learning is pedagogical and activism . In teaching and learning, we can start by imagining Others as complete and not problems to be fixed. We can notice issues are rarely isolated but rather local -national -global all at once. We can notice deficit-thinking in ourselves and the world by examining current and historical events and asking who/what is Othered/centered. We can refuse binaries and static categories. We can engage in broader structural analyses that do not blame victims and survivors for their own oppression. We might better question how humanism mobilizes benevolence and other activisms based on deficit-thinking about humans and localities.

Relativist–Pluralist–Neoliberal Multiculturalist Model

In attempts to move away from a deficit model, the relativist, pluralist, or neoliberal multiculturalist approach emphasizes understanding the existence of different solutions, perspectives, and approaches to a problem. It seeks to include as diverse perspectives as possible in the process of inquiring an issue, soliciting ideas and solutions, and making decisions about how to bring changes. However, this approach misses how our habit of thinking, in which we do not examine our own habit of thinking (Spivak 2012), contributes to ever-increasing inequality.

A simple move for inclusion and plurality , which appears to be a new (and thus better) thinking, has become a new habit of thinking (and neoliberalism thrives on proliferation). Yet, this valorization for diversity that pretends to redress the existing unequal structures of differences such as race , gender , and nation-state cunningly masks how it supports and rationalizes neoliberal (or new imperial) violence (see below and Rhee 2013, for theorizing neoliberal multiculturalism ). The binary between self and Other is often indeterminate, economic, political, and cultural; inequality and discrimination continue. By assuming “we are all the same” or “we are all different but the same,” Western orientation toward universal human rights (Subedi 2013, p. 630) and individualism based in humanism is reinscribed. Through this inclusive model—fixated with an individual/private self as a choice maker with free wills—certain members of our planet are systematically excluded and become disposable. We lose the ability to account for historical and structural matrices that allow the existence of such a self who is responsible only for one’s self. Individual freedom of choice, disguised as a tool for achieving global equity, is in fact a neoliberal concept that plays a pivotal role in managing difference through subjectification, humanization, and dehumanization (Subreenduth 2013a) .

Under this framework, global citizenship becomes a “neoliberal racial project” (Rhee 2013); individuals and/or national citizens, as markers and extensions of nation-states—being able to compete and consume (the Other) in the global market. Often, becoming global is to consume or exploit in order to benefit the individual self (and this happens at different levels of self, i.e., individuals, institutions, and States). Un-learning this framework is crucial for educators like us, who work in institutions that promote global citizenship education, sometimes as a way to learn how to compete and exploit rather than be more planetary and interconnected.

For example, when Western liberal discourse problematically equates Africa n female genital mutilation with female cosmetic surgeries in Western (industrialized) societies and then both of these phenomena are framed simply as individual choices, this logic presents neoliberal individualism (Sensoy and Marshall 2010) . When consuming/appropriating/eating the Other’s culture and traditions including spiritualities is considered as activism for self-salvation from capitalism’s malaise (e.g., the popularity and Westernisation of yoga), it perpetuates neocolonial individualism (Rhee and Subedi 2014) . Neoliberal individualism is epitomized when an elite from any cultural/ethnic group marketises one’s cultural identity to claim a Self that automatically generates the Other, e.g., “Tiger Mother” (Rhee 2013) or erase/denies historically and structurally institutionalized conditions of life to claim “we are (all different but) all the same” [e.g., Prince Ea’s (2017) music video and Ko and Ko’s critique (2017)]. What binds the above examples is that they reinforce a habit of thinking through which we learn to think that individuals can make different choices and triumph anything and everything (history , institutionalized power differences, materiality, policies, international politics , military violences, climate change , etc.). This puts individuals as primarily responsible for our condition of life but inevitably sustains hierarchical, deficit-thinking. Due to space limitations, we refer readers to the above references that work to un-learn neoliberal/multiculturalist thinking rather than delineating those critiques here. Below, we take up Marjane Satrapi ’s (2003) Persepolis to present a decolonising approach for activism as/in/for global citizenship education.

Decolonising Pedagogy

A decolonising framework queries how histories shape the present articulations of (global) citizenship. It also provides anti-essential perspectives on how we have come to understand concepts such as culture, nation, and citizenship through how the Other has been written in dominant imagination (Subedi 2013). By sharing the value of contrapuntal reading (Said 1993), educators can help students unlearn the complex relationship between local and global and how politics shape the articulations of global citizenship.

As a way to discuss this approach, we use Marjane Satrapi’s (2003) Persepolis 5 to explore the complex meanings of national and global citizenships as analytical categories. Written as a memoir of growing up in Iran, the author as narrator is a 13-year-old girl who shows how the political events and the socialization of children in schools/society cannot be separated from broader historical events that are integral parts of colonial and neocolonial formation. Educators/students may notice how they, too, cannot be separated from historical formation. By touching upon national and international citizenship politics and power differences, sex/gender, and religion , the text can enable readers to see the realm of international in contrapuntal ways and un-learn how one is situated in local –national–global citizenship narratives. In this way, the memoir offers a way to examine how global citizenship is a contradictory identity /category: it is both inclusionary and exclusionary and has the potential to critique nationalistic and oppressive ways of conceptualizing citizenship ideals.

Persepolis is a text that can enable students to think through how one is situated in the broader colonial and neocolonial history and contemporary white politics on racism and Islamophobia . A postcolonial (un-learning) pedagogical approach is not simply about understanding a text but using the text to understand one’s own self, world, and Other, as habitualized through nation-think, race/identity politics, etc. This is a project of deep un-learning. As Satrapi explores how she is situated and shaped, educators/students can explore their own habitualization. When used as a decolonizing pedagogy , Persepolis enables students to do the following:

  1. 1.

    Engage the inter/national realm of activisms , politics , cultures, educations, and citizenships, and particularly explore how the concept of “local ” in a given place is complexly intertwined with the national and global;

  2. 2.

    Un-learn how one has learned global, especially about other societies, and particularly about Iran, a nation-state that has been consistently demonized in US textbooks and media;

  3. 3.

    Notice how complex citizenship narratives are and particularly how this story about growing up in Iran disrupts stereotypes of culture and religion ;

  4. 4.

    Explore complicity through the characters, particularly regarding socioeconomics , gender, religion and State/political oppression and violence ;

  5. 5.

    Study ourselves and critique our own learning and positionality in the world and particularly notice our complicities, whether or not intentional, in local /global oppressions.

Below we outline a decolonising (un-learning) pedagogical approach using Persepolis . What we highlight here is that readers may engage the text in different ways, while the text itself may NOT do the work of unlearning (activism) unless educators and learners interrogate their own self-other-world relationships, assumptions, sense making, and participation in the realms of activism as/in/for global citizenship. Thus, while we offer how Persepolis as sample material can be used for decolonising and un-learning, we do not suggest prescribed curricula or offer any specific lesson plans or other prescriptive methods of teaching. Rather, questions are posed as a potential means for un-learning to take place. In our view, activism cannot be prescribed. As we discuss in the BLM example at the beginning of the chapter, one’s entry point may make it easier to recognise BLM as activism than as education and citizenship, but BLM educates and illustrates different citizenships and learned frames of references. Similarly, one’s entry point may make it easier to recognise Persepolis as education (and global citizenship education, in particular). However, as we posit herein, a decolonising approach to unlearning offers the means of activism, precisely because we cannot fully untangle activism as/in/for global citizenship education. Once we approach the concepts as if they have their own territory—metaphorically—we risk falling into our habitual thinking. Below, we try to show how the concept of global citizenship (education) has more critical pedagogical usefulness when it is theorized as an act of engaging how one is implicated in inter/national history and contemporary political formations (e.g., globalization, Islamophobia , etc.) and as a practice of a complex identity that enables the self to critique how, and what, one has learned what s/he knows and who s/he becomes (Table 37.1).

Table 37.1 Teaching and learning pedagogy/possibilities
Full size table

Conclusion and Future Research

No lives matter, until black lives matter…when black lives matter, then all lives matter….

When we can begin to imagine the Other as not from the self (e.g., ‘them’ as not from ‘us’) is to begin to un-learn agency and activism underpinned by the becoming human project that can reinforce us/them and deficit-thinking about the Other. However, planetary subjectivity is not to become one whole or be the same as, neither is it to be separated and disconnected (i.e., the impossibility of non-complicity is not homogenization or the reduction of difference) nor is it neoliberal individualism . Activism as an inherent part of educating for, and unlearning as an inherent part of activism for global citizenship, is to rethink agency, activism, and education regarding who can act, how and what it means. Global citizenship in such (post)Enlightenment ruins is necessarily within nation-think but must also transgress it—to interrogate the taken-for-granted and critically engage with global histories, politics , structures.

Activism in this chapter presents (un/re)learning as transgressive. Thus, this chapter emphasizes if (and how) we might engage people in learning to learn doubly—being, thinking, and acting both planetary and worldly. Part of this work is helping educators and young people notice how we are always already local , national , and global. When we notice the relationship among our local selves/lives, the planet, and the local-national-global, then we have the chance to learn doubly or otherwise. This chapter suggests how we might learn and teach this “peculiar mind-set” (Spivak 2012, p. 339) by approaching global citizenship education as/in/for activism and vice versa by approaching activism as/in/for global citizenship education.

Notes

  1. 1.

    In 2012, the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” was created in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, in the US. BLM has continued to grow through social media as a response to racist policing and violences against Black lives (see blacklivesmatter.com). It also has entered formal political dialogue on the national stage, inciting the US presidential race, for example (Rosier et al . 2016).

  2. 2.

    We might discuss “bring back our girls” in Nigeria (http://www.bringbackourgirls.ng/), the Arab Spring (see Jamshidi 2013), or other trans/national projects on which we publish (See Daza 2006, 2007, 2013a; Rhee 2009, 2013; Subedi 2013; Subreenduth 2013a, b).

  3. 3.

    Yet, we can see at surface-level how concepts are elusive and shaped. Pearce’s (2015) article “Why the term ‘Black Lives Matter’ can be so confusing” states: “the words could be serving as a political rallying cry or referring to the activist organization. Or it could be the fuzzily applied label used to describe a wide range of protests and conversations focused on racial inequality” (n.p.). According to BLMs Wikipedia entry “The phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ can refer to a Twitter hashtag, a slogan, a social movement, or a loose confederation of affiliated groups and organizations that advocate for multiple causes related to racial injustice” (BLM, n.d.).

  4. 4.

    Read the postcolonial as not after the colonial era but as “a reminder of continuously changing, adapting, persistent colonial and neocolonial structures and relations that have chained all of us (Rhee and Subedi 2014).

  5. 5.

    Providing alternative access to the curricular material, in 2007, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud directed a film based on the graphic novel.