Globalizing Minds

Globalization has a profound effect on the mission and goals of education worldwide. One of its most visible manifestations is the worldwide endorsement of the idea of “education for global citizenship,” which has been enthusiastically supported by national governments, politicians, and policy-makers across different nations. Increasingly, the educational institutions feel under pressure to respond to globalization forces by preparing students to engage competitively and successfully with this new realm, lest their nations be left in the dust. What is the role of international schools in implementing the idea of “education for global citizenship”? How do these schools create a culturally unbiased global curriculum when the adopted models have been developed by Western societies and at the very least are replete with (Western) cultural values, traditions, and biases? This collection of essays attempts to grapple with these complex issues, while highlighting that culture and politics closely intertwine with schooling and curriculum as parents, administrators, teachers, and students of different backgrounds and interests negotiate definitions of self and each other to construct knowledge in particular contexts. The goal is to examine the complexity of factors that drive the global demand for “education for global citizenship” and de-construct the contested nature of “global citizenship” by examining how the phenomenon is understood, interpreted, and modified in different cultural settings. The authors provide not only a thick description of their cases, but also a critical assessment of various attempts to initiate and implement educational reforms aimed at the development of globally-minded citizens in various national settings.

. . . Eat not up your property among yourselves unjustly except it be a trade amongst you, by mutual consent . . . and help you one another in righteousness and piety. . . (Al-Hadid 4:29; Al-Ma’idah 5:2) There cannot be any doubt that the current ?nancial crisis, which began in the US, has gone global. This realization has fuelled the ?re of debate over globalization. Today’s globalization is no longer the globalization that Theodore Levitt, a former professor at the Harvard Business School, described in 1983 in his world famous article ‘‘The Globalization of Markets. ’’ Although, in old days, Levitt and his successors had not seen globalization as an utopian state free of problems, no- days globalization has been reshaped completely. Therefore, in the perception of the editors it is justi?ed to use the phrase ‘‘Globalisation 2. 0’’ for the range of effects interpenetrating global economic arrangements. Globalisation 1. 0 will never be restored again. Since the subprime crisis made its way to the global arena in the year 2008, companies and managers are confronted with the breathtaking speed of global, regional, and local changes. It is more than a provocation to divide dev- opments into cause and effects. Forecasts in strategic management are no longer valid even for the moment they are published. Uncertainty occupies the driving seats in global, regional, and local oriented companies.

Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry. Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess. A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

A Globalizing World? offers a clear and intelligible guide to one of the key debates of our time, introducing the theoretical positions to examine globalization in practice, from the films we watch to the way we are governed.

This book is about the need for an alternative to capitalism. But what does that alternative look like? And given the ever-increasing wealth and power of the 1 percent and the fact that corporations are given carte blanche to turn natural resources into profit, is an alternative possible? Tom Webb argues that a massive shift to social enterprise, primarily co-operatives, is required. More than 250 million people around the world work for co-operatives, and co-operatives impact the lives of three billion people. This model reduces almost every negative impact of capitalism — it is a model that works. Webb outlines the principles co-operatives need to hold to if they are to be a successful alternative to capitalism and examines the public-policy changes needed to nurture such a transition, but he remains neither wildly optimistic nor unduly pessimistic. A better world is possible, but it is not inevitable.

Humanity is now faced with an array of global challenges we are ill equipped to handle. Climate change and nuclear proliferation, food security and global pandemic disease each concern us all. But we lack the global institutions through which they might be solved. And these institutions are lacking because most people put the needs of their own groups first. While the great challenges of the twenty-first century are largely global, few people think of themselves as global citizens. And few bring the same balance and maturity to global issues that they do to more national concerns. The world is vast and overwhelming. Making sense of it requires greater knowledge, greater empathy, and greater ethical commitments. This process might best be described as the globalization of mind, and it is just getting under way. But thinking globally will become easier as global interconnectivity increases, as global institutions grow in scope, and as more people are exposed to greater human diversity and devote themselves to solving global challenges. "Convergence: The Globalization of Mind" is a magisterial exploration of the challenges that lie in wait, raising as many questions as it answers, and all the while deepening the readers' own global thinking.

It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves. For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases. In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug. But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

Globalised Minds, Roots in the City utilises empirical evidence from four European cities to explore the role of urban upper middle classes in the transformations experienced by contemporary European societies. Presents new empirical evidence collected through an original comparative research about professionals and managers in four European cities in three countries Features an innovative combination of approaches, methods, and techniques in its analyses of European post-national societies Reveals how segments of Europe’s urban population are adopting “exit” or “partial exit” strategies in respect to the nation state Utilises approaches from classic urban sociology, globalization and mobility studies, and spatial class analysis Includes in depth interviews, social networking techniques, and classic questions of political representation and values