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Abstract

When we, as authors, first started writing the papers in this special issue, the competing and colluding forces of nationalism, misogyny, Islamophobia, Western elitism, inequality, and discourses of ethnic purity had not reached the force that they have as this issue goes to print. These papers were originally thought of as a way to give voice to counter-narratives that push against Western colonial norms and expectations around gender and education; they were meant to inform a conversation about women and education at American Educational Research Association. These themes still exist in the papers as the issue goes to print, but now the papers have taken on increased force and meaning as the authors have worked and reworked the papers within a context of a rising turn toward ethnic nationalism and misogyny. The papers argue for an understanding of policy and ideology that is based in a local context. The papers push against the idea that there is a “global context” for policy and ideology because—most often— “global policy” is a shorthand way of saying Westernized policy and expectations. Thus, the papers challenge the Western-centrism of a “global” lens. However, the authors also see their work as part of a conversation—a conversation that needs to be truly global. The polarities of global conversation and attention to local contexts have shaped the articles in this special issue.

Keywords

Counter-narrative feminism global politics nationalism

This special issue explores the intersection of gender, globalization, and education. We foreground the boundaries, divides, hybridities, and counter-narratives of women and their access to education, power, human rights, and resources. Location and positionality are important for our work as we interweave contesting voices and experiences together to create a unique portrait of women and globalized education. Specifically, we pinpoint the myriad ways that traditional Western notions of women’s work, schooling practices, online education, and human rights narratives, do not fit with actual events in non-Western spaces. A priority or focus on gender equity is not universal. Western academics must be clear on this: that feminist US-centric writing is deeply problematic, and that Westernized version of ‘what counts’ as feminism and development need to be problematized.

This special issue comes at a time when highlighting counter-hegemonic, competing, and non-Western perspectives and worldviews are particularly important; and where an issue that engages in conversations on gender and education that take place across continents and within a globalized space seem particularly meaningful. Nationalist policies and a turn to nationalism have engendered a turn away from connecting to and listening to global perspectives. It is a paradoxical time. There are still powerful Westernized expectations of how to understand gender, policy, education, work, etc. And yet, in addition to continued colonial effects and affect, there is also a turning inward by many countries in an attempt to move away from policing the world, advising the world, but also a turning away from attempting to communicate and collaborate as a global world. There is a turn to insular policies and insulating politics that partake of a logic that suggests that the rise of the nation can only happen at the expense of a global conversation.

This rise of ethnic nationalism and the supporting structures of xenophobia, prejudice, and misogyny have been reported on in various global presses. Shiller (2016) writes in The New York Times that there is an increasing turn to nationalism in Europe, Russia, the UK, and the US, and that this rise can be tied to the fall of traditional masculinity and increased bigotry and resentment toward both women and non-whites—particularly those perceived to be immigrants or outsiders. Shiller (2016) writes:

It appears that a sense of falling behind economically among a substantial segment of a population does encourage ethnic nationalism and conflict.

The rise in inequality in our time represents a seismic shift in economic power away from the working class. Its cause is many-faceted, including globalization, the decline of labor unions, changes in political alignments and advancing information technology that is replacing jobs.

Even those who have not lost out yet in terms of economic power are fearful that they might. The causes of inequality, particularly advances in information technology, are not going away soon. These perceptions have damaged people’s sense of economic security, even beyond what economic data reveal to be objectively true (Shiller, 14 October 2016).

This argument is echoed in other presses. Ulansky and Witenberg (2016) of The World Post argue that it is the intolerance of non-citizens and outsiders that is driving this rise toward ethnic nationalism. There is a discourse of fear that validates the idea that state governments have sacrificed the interests of the “average” citizen in favor of benefits for the global (and globalized) elite. This discourse has racial and gendered undertones as the “average” citizen is automatically and discursively constructed as male and white. These average citizens believe that organizations such as NATO and the EU have come at the expense of working class male expectations of success. Roubini (2014) of The Guardian, too, highlights the turn toward nationalism. Roubini (2014) writes:

This new nationalism takes different economic forms: trade barriers, asset protection, reaction against foreign direct investment, policies favouring domestic workers and firms, anti-immigration measures, state capitalism, and resource nationalism. In the political realm, populist, anti-globalisation, anti-immigration, and in some cases outright racist and antisemitic parties are on the rise. These forces loath the alphabet soup of supranational governance institutions – the EU, the UN, the WTO, and the IMF, among others – that globalisation requires. Even the internet, the epitome of globalisation for the past two decades, is at risk of being balkanized (Roubini, 2 June 2014).

Marine Le Pen of France, Nigel Farrage of the UK, and Steve Bannon of the US, have all gone on record in various presses (notably, The Washington Post) arguing that nationalistic political movements are not local, but represent a global rejection of globalization and the global elite in favor of a return to traditional national sovereignty. There is a global move to protect borders and reassert nationalism at the expense of global policy and collaboration. (The Washington Post, 9 November 2016). Each of these voices have combined toward an ethnic nationalism, language and identity politics, and a story of growing inequality to argue that we need fewer global collaborations and conversations—and more assertion of a nation’s dominance.

While women’s roles, as warriors and activists both for and against nationalism, complicate the discourse that women are—in general—fighting the rise of nationalism, there is, nevertheless, some evidence that there is actual data to back up this idea of women being, generally, against the rise of ethnic nationalism. There are a number of reports and research studies arguing that, in general, women have been on the forefront of confronting and pushing against the turn to nationalism. A recent report by the United Nations University (UNI-GEST, 2017) notes that women’s movements and marches have erupted globally, and that these women’s movements have worked to challenge isolationism and ethnic nationalism. As a UN report (UNI-GEST, 2017) notes, “xenophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, and anti-establishment positions” have all seemed to go hand-in-hand, and women have fought against this nationalism as a way of fighting the misogyny that has been linked to it.

The alarm at the rise of nationalism is not just something that we see in the popular press and reports by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Academia, too, is sounding the alarm around ethnic nationalism. Intriguingly, it is within scholarly writing that the connections between ethnic nationalism, xenophobia and misogyny are most abundantly called out and expounded. Hozic and True (2017) argue that nationalism has unequal effects on women, and that it has been gender, and changing gender roles, that have become touchpoints for global nationalism trends. The rise of ethnic nationalism is part of the politics of fear, and one of the most prominent fears has been the emerging power of women. Postelnicescu (2016) agrees that it is the fear of immigrants, women, and the combined “infiltration” power of immigrant women, that has been driving ethnic nationalism worldwide. Wigger (2016), too, argues that there is an intersectional agenda on the far right that combines nationalism, anti-immigration, anti-Islamism, religion, and gender in ways that validate traditional masculinity and challenge cosmopolitanism, globalism, and international collaboration and the notion of global human development.

In many ways, the papers in this special issue also challenge traditional notions of cosmopolitanism, globalism, and international collaboration toward global human development. These papers push against the idea that “Westerners” should come in to “save” other nations, or prescribe solutions for other nations. We, too, as authors, see the problems inherent when a group of Western global elites create policies and expectations that tend to benefit the powerful and concretize woeful inequality for others. But, the papers in this issue also act as a voice of hope: calling on all to engage in conversation around difference, push against colonial and post-colonial lenses of inquiry, and work together to create policies and research agendas that benefit a wider array of people and places, and that give voice to a wider array of people, places, and research agendas. We, as writers, each have gender as a touchstone of our scholarship, and this allows the papers to wrestle with gender and global policies in a rich way: embedded in and responding to the politics and misogyny of our time, while also insisting on rich and complex descriptions of lived, material conditions and experiences of gender. These papers call out entanglements and multiplicity, while still arguing for the need to learn from each other, and not to turn toward isolationism and nationalism.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. Her research emerges at the intersection of Educational Technology, Pedagogical Innovation, Diversity and Equity Issues, and Global Studies. She is particularly interested in the ways that embodiment, materiality, and glocal forces shape the ways we think about, use, and learn with digital technologies. Greenhalgh-Spencer explores practices of using technology and pedagogical innovation to create engaged learning in both formal and informal learning spaces, and in both national and global contexts. She explores diversity and equity issues in the STEM pipeline, and also researches embodied and transdisciplinary learning practices that increase engagement for underrepresented populations in STEM courses. Greenhalgh-Spencer also researches blended/personalized learning (BL/PL) and the ways that BL/PL can create diverse pathways and increased opportunities for all students. She is the chair of the graduate certificate program in BL/PL. Greenhalgh-Spencer has published in multiple international journals of education. She teaches courses on e-learning, blended/personalized learning pedagogies, diversity ideologies and policies, and educational philosophy.

Sarah Jane Aiston is a senior lecturer in the Department of Education and Social Justice at the University of Birmingham, UK. Prior to joining Birmingham she worked at the University of Hong Kong. Her research expertise is the study of the position, status and experience of women in higher education, both as staff and students, and from a historical and contemporary perspective.

References

Hozić

True

(2017) Brexit as a scandal: Gender and global trumpism. Review of International Political Economy 24(2): 1–18.

Postelnicescu

(2016) Europe’s new identity: The refugee crisis and the rise of nationalism. Europe's Journal of Psychology 12(2): 203–209.

Roubini N (2014) Economic insecurity and the rise of nationalism. The Guardian, 2 June, 14. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/jun/02/economic-insecurity-nationalism-on-the-rise-globalisation-nouriel-roubini.

Shiller RJ (2016) What’s behind a rise in ethnic nationalism? Maybe the economy. The New York Times, 14 October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/upshot/whats-behind-a-rise-in-ethnic-nationalism-maybe-the-economy.html?_r=0.

Tharoor I (2016) Trump’s victory places U.S. at the front of a global right-wing surge. The Washington Post, 9 November. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/09/trumps-victory-places-u-s-at-the-front-of-a-global-right-wing-surge/?utm_term=.4d9eff92e5cd.

United Nations University (2017) Feminist resistance to the rise of nationalism and populism. Available at: http://gest.unu.edu/en/education/feminist-resistance-to-the-rise-of-nationalism-and-populism.

Ulansky E and Witenberg W (2016) Is nationalism on the rise globally? The World Post. A Partnership of The Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elena-ulansky/is-nationalism-on-the-ris_b_10224712.html.

Wigger I (2016, July). German society between ‘open doors’ for refugees and ‘the end of tolerance’? Representations of migration in contemporary Germany and the rising tide of populist nationalism, anti-immigration and Islamophobia. Paper 81242. In: 3rd ISA Forum of Sociology (10–14 July, 2016). Vienna: ISA.