Cosmopolitan sensitivities, vulnerability, and Global Englishes

Abstract

This paper is the outcome of an afterthought that assembles connections between three elements: the ambitions of cultivating cosmopolitan sensitivities that circulate vibrantly in connection with the internationalization of higher education, a course on Global Englishes at a Danish university and the sensation of vulnerability. It discusses the challenges of sensitizing students of business communication to the real or imagined connectivities that bind individuals and societies together, and the ethical responsibilities and dilemmas that follow. It shows how language courses that focus on culture and the ownership of English provide fertile grounds on which to rearrange students’ prior knowledge and perceptions of distant people in distant places in new formations. The result of the afterthought is twofold. First, it claims that the sensation of vulnerability that surface in learning contexts, with its paradoxical potential to harm on the one hand and to be productive and generative on the other, can be a key experiential element in provoking movements in perspectives. Second, by privileging the notion of ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, it claims that the tasks and responsibilities related to the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensitivities are ethical issues shared by student and teacher.

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