Lyceum Lectures

Be Like Water (就像水一样): Inside Stories from Fulbright Scholars in China

Shin Freedman, a Fulbright Scholar to China, examines how she balanced her teaching responsibilities with students, time with fellow Chinese colleagues, and cultural expectations in daily life in China. She analyzes and reflects her expectations against her actual experiences to offer insights for scholars, higher education administrators and students of study abroad programming. Her 2019 book, Narrative Inquiries from Fulbright Lecturers in China: Cross-Cultural Connections to Higher Education, is a road map for negotiating China's higher education network and cross-cultural education environment.  

Rethinking the Global Citizen at FSU

Toward the end of Framingham State’s Mission Statement, there is a significant but underexamined phrase, “global citizen.” FSU purports to cultivate “thoughtful, responsible local and global citizens,” but what does that mean in practice? Sandy will take up this question in the first half of his Lyceum talk in order to engage with the concept of global citizenship within the context of higher education, particularly at FSU, before moving into a discussion of the ways in which contemporary world literature pushes the boundaries of the idea of global citizenship to reimagine the concept outside of the context of neoliberal globalization.

With the demands for global competencies increasing, especially in the private sector, universities are responding with rhetoric that highlights the cultivation of these global skill sets. Subsequently, this aspirational language incorporated into official university documents has become common place, however, too often there is gap between a university’s vision of what it means to be a global citizen and the realities of day-to-day student learning. Furthermore, when these initiatives are driven by corporate sponsors, the danger increases that the term “global citizen” simply becomes a euphemism for transnational capitalist class.

In this talk, Sandy suggests that the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the notion of global citizenship adopted by many institutions of higher education frequently reproduce a troubling dynamic between those who are cultivated to feel at home in the world and those who are cast adrift in an unwelcoming global public sphere. He will turn to contemporary world literature as a space to work through these contrasting global identities. More specifically, Sandy moves away from the celebratory narratives of globalization and global citizenship embodied by Thomas Friedman’s naïve notion of the world being “flat” to examine the stratification of global spaces and the spectral populations that haunt these locations.