Educating Critical Citizens for an Alternative World-System

Abstract

Referring to the institutionalist branch of global studies, whose educational variant is discussed in preceding chapters, world-systems scholars Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000, 25) presented the interstate system as promoting and developing over time a world polity, with “shared cultural definitions of what is legitimate among states and other global actors…institutionalizing the parameters of what is a goal worth pursuing.” The ensuing world polity is both defined by and defines the operation of the interstate system, and the logics of the world-system that underpin them. Boswell and Chase-Dunn’s (2000) interest was in associated strategies for transforming the capitalist world-system by changing the world polity, or in Wallerstein’s terms, the geoculture of the world-system.

These are our times, and it is the moment when social scientists will demonstrate whether or not they will be capable of constructing a social science that will speak to the worldwide social transformation through which we shall be living. (Wallerstein: 1999c, 201).

Critical pedagogy isn’t formulaic, it isn’t stagnant, and it isn’t an is. I believe it is what isn’t…(Steinberg: 2007, x)