Connecting the Local with the Global: Transnational Feminism and Civic Engagement

Abstract

Several years ago, the University of Victoria’s1 student newspaper ran an ad recruiting students for international development projects. The ad featured a white, young, smiling female university student holding a sign stating, “I am the Change.” Next to the photo, the text read: “Be yourself. Be bold. Be the change.” The ad also claimed that “BC Youth are making a difference in the world. You too can be a global citizen.”2 That this ad appeared in the student newspaper is unsurprising as it parallels the increasing emphasis on internationalization and the production of global citizens by many North American universities. Contemporary conceptions of global citizenship in the North American academy emphasize fostering student awareness, responsibility, participation, cross-cultural competency/empathy, international mobility, and individual achievement (Schattle 25). In this sense, global citizenship is cosmopolitan in nature since it is associated “with an intellectual and aesthetic sense of openness towards peoples, places, and experiences with different cultures, especially those from different nations,” and stresses “moral and ethical commitments to a global community” (Matthews and Sidhu 53). Through this cosmopolitan lens, universities have prioritized community engagement, service learning, and civic responsibility as a praxis through which students can become “global citizens.” However, as many feminist and other scholars have noted, these priorities are fraught with complications, especially when the rubric of civic engagement emphasizes idealized concepts of citizenship and democracy (Davis; Jacoby; Musil) and fails to be properly informed by “historical and contemporary analyses of power and inequality” (Musil 240). The ad described above illustrates feminist concerns with the adoption of an idealized and cosmopolitan global citizenship, as it exemplifies how citizenship is marked by gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (Glenn; Lister). Although some might suggest that the photo depicts a certain kind of gender equality due to the young woman who is featured, Barbara Heron makes a persuasive case that young, white, middle-class Canadian women can only achieve full citizenship (and the full individual self) by leaving Canada to work

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