Author: Brendan Hogan
This post grows out of my recent experience as a professor teaching abroad in London for three years, and Paris and Florence before that for one year each, respectively, and in the same university. A few questions I have been trying to measure the pedagogical sense of are, “How do the anticipations of the student engaged in study abroad support or inhibit developing a cosmopolitan sensibility?” “Is a cosmopolitan sensibility desirable and even integral to the mission of study abroad programs?” and “How does the concept of a global network university work with respect to these commitments?” I approach these questions from the pedagogical perspective of learning through the interplay of texts, works, cities, and the imaginative orientation our students bring with them and how it alters their sense of themselves, their possibilities, in short, the imaginary in which they live.
One of the more interesting developments in philosophy in the last few decades is the elevation of the human power of imagination into a core focus of philosophical reflection once again. The wider philosophical and social theoretical community has produced a large amount of literature on the various ways in which imagination not only impact such traditional projects of metaphysics (knowing reality) and epistemology (knowing how we know), but also the very structure of human agency itself. This focus on imagination has emerged after a long period of relative neglect, outside of a few relevant treatments such as those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gaston Bachelard, and Cornelius Castoriadis and other figures, mostly located in continental Europe. One of the streams of this development I introduce here because it throws into relief one of the key features of the imaginative orientation students inhabit I mentioned above. Specifically, I would like to call attention to the way in which certain thinkers inaugurated a ‘practical’ turn in philosophy, chief among them John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These thinkers have helped lay the groundwork for the redescription of the human power of imagination and resituated the human being, both in terms of their own learning processes and in terms of their social fabric in which they live. These articulations of this new vision of the human being in the natural world have been multiplied in the social sciences through the employment of the concept of an ‘imaginary’. A simple search in any research database can show just how widespread this term has become. It evokes a social field in which certain shared assumptions facilitate a common understanding of the social world. I would like to suggest several features relevant to the question of how students can see their own experience studying abroad as inducting them into a new kind of ‘imaginary’. Specifically, I will focus on an ‘urban imaginary’ that oscillates between the transcendent and frame dissolving experiences of studying in a new city and yet provides paths that connect individuals back up to a self-consciously cosmopolitan project such as study abroad.
Imaginaries: social scientific and philosophical
Benedict Anderson is well known for detailing the role of imagination in the construction of nationalism in his work, Imagined Communities1. There Anderson offers a reconstruction of the ways in which different historical and material conditions led to the possibility of developing a sense of identity and a nation out of peoples who never had, nor ever would, see each other so geographically distant were their lives. In several cases of the construction of nations, peoples brought into union were actual enemies in previous generations. The printing press, the spread of markets, and mass media technologies each served indispensable roles in creating an ‘imagined community’, cemented by the creation of the concept and institution of a binding national language.
Anderson carefully constructs his use of the concept of imaginary in a social scientific way. He marshals a great deal of evidence in a variety of contexts to generate convincing support for the thesis – that though many were at a loss to explain the triumph of national identity over class identity in such major events as World War I – it is nonetheless possible and necessary to offer alternative explanations that invoke elements of our material culture. These explanans include the impact of the material forces of production upon the symbolic order of reproduction.
In a more philosophical vein, Charles Taylor has articulated a sense of ‘imaginary’ that moves closer to the concern here, to provide a link between the imaginative features of human agency and pedagogy in a global network. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor writes:
By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions that underlie these expectations2.
John Dewey in Reconstruction in Philosophy, like Charles Taylor, has a philosophical anthropological account of the origin of an ‘imaginary’, as opposed to Anderson’s historical account. For Dewey, humans identify themselves with a tradition or a community in earlier times, one that is directly rooted in narrative, its intensification over time, and the development of what he calls, a ‘framework of imagination’: Dewey here establishes a fruitful pivot through which to analyze a number of issues related to envisioning how the ‘framework of imagination’ that informs global study abroad:
But some experiences are so frequent and recurrent that they concern the group as a whole. They are socially generalized. The piecemeal adventure of the single individual is built out till it becomes representative and typical of the emotional life of the tribe. Certain incidents affect the weal and woe of the group in its entirety and thereby get an exceptional emphasis and elevation. A certain texture of tradition is built up; the story becomes a social heritage and possession; the pantomime develops into the stated rite. Tradition thus formed becomes a kind of norm to which individual fancy and suggestion conform. An abiding framework of imagination is constructed. A communal way of conceiving life grows up into which individuals are inducted by education. Both unconsciously and by definite social requirement individual memories are assimilated to group memory or tradition, and individual fancies are accommodated to the body of beliefs characteristic of a community. Poetry becomes fixated and systematized. The story becomes a social norm. The original drama which re-enacts an emotionally important experience is institutionalized into a cult. Suggestions previously free are hardened into doctrines3.
Taylor’s own expressivist model of human agency has much overlap with this Deweyan suggestion as the source of how we make sense of our trajectories. The ethics of articulation that Taylor calls for, his emphasis on the overcoming of epistemology in constructing our model of philosophical anthropology and human experience, the difference between weak and strong evaluation, and the primarily meaningful character of experience all resonate with a pragmatic model of agency. It is a model beyond the scope of these remarks but perhaps worth further reflection as it also offers an alternative mode of understanding the prospects of cosmopolitan education.
Dewey offering an account of the emergence of what is understood today as an ‘imaginary’, though his starting point is one that is prior to philosophical reflection and logical examination of the dominant body of beliefs in early pre-scientific cultures. Here a subtle distinction must be introduced. On the one hand, Dewey is critical of those frameworks of imagination that become so hardened as to be hypostatized and impervious to ‘logical clarification’ or experimental reconstruction. In short, they become fixed opinions impervious to change even in the face of contradicting evidence. But, on the other hand, his understanding of human creativity and the meaningful environment of doing and undergoing inflected by future consequences retains a holistic character. This environment is suffused with shared meanings in a linguistic community that are implicit and serve as a ‘background’ analogous to the phenomenological sense of that term, for practices to take shape and continue with success. We share a great deal with those who appear to us as strangers in the university environment, simply by virtue of taking up the project the institution exists to carry out.
There are perhaps two aspects to this particular conceptual innovation, the concept of the imaginary, that I think are relevant to teaching at different sites in a globally networked university. In particular, there is a sense in which the community of the global sites must be imagined, if it is to gain shape as a particular, coherent whole. And at the individual student level in terms of those students studying abroad in their first year especially. They are stepping into a world which is doubly foreign to them: life as a university student and life in an international city.
Global Education and the Urban Imaginary
With respect to the imagined community of the globally networked university, students seem very drawn, in my experience, to those discourses which at once resonate and challenge intuitions drawn from their own, often very achievement-focused, experienced. Likewise, in teaching at institutions whose projected self-image ties the university unequivocally to a city in ever-expanding ways, students are encouraged to imagine a certain experience. That is, there is a deliberately cultivated anticipation with respect to students as to ‘what’ they are going to be participating ‘in’ and ‘where’ they are going to be engaged in the project of their undergraduate experience. This only kaleidoscopes into all sorts of entertained possibilities when students discover they are going to be spending a year abroad in London, Paris, or Florence. The temptation to envision a grand and glorious, utterly Instagram-worthy experience is strong. Of course, this vision is constrained by their previous experience and the admissions materials that prime their projections.
The key element here to highlight is that the agency of students, and of human beings generally on this reading of imagination, is constituted in great part by the anticipations and projections of how experience should unfold, and what sorts of features that experience ought to have. After teaching abroad for five of the last ten years, however, I began to entertain the image of a banner that ought to be nailed across the entryway of every global site engaged in international education. With time and further reflection, however, I now believe it should span the entryway of every institution that purports to educate an individual in any meaningful sense given the centrality of imaginative projection to our experience: ‘Abandon all expectations ye who enter here’. I mention this nexus of student experience, anticipatory projections, specific cities, and the Global Network University because it serves as an appropriate analogy to the city and the confluence of cosmopolitan elements mixed with local cultures and traditions in a single space, a polis.
My invocation of the urban imaginary throws into relief an inevitable occurrence in attempting to fulfill the aims of education. This is a moment that reflects the idea that it is indispensable to understand how disappointed one’s expectations will be- that this ‘disappointment’ is a necessary moment of education. This is because all education changes us in unexpected ways. Put positively, it is a quest. One aim of education in a global network would be, then, to articulate and make explicit how the cities in which students are taking up the great works they are absorbing, and the experience of being a university student, mismatch their expectations. By making explicit the mismatch, the work of becoming aware of one’s existential and cultural presuppositions comes to consciousness in a way integral to their university experience, to their education, to their own process of becoming. Disappointment, then, can bear fruit.
Finally, the reliance on the concept of an imaginary begs the question of reality. How are imaginaries-social frameworks of interpretation- to be informed by the conflicting realities of experience? This is yet another version of the appearance/reality distinction so hallowed in the history of philosophy, now applied to education in an urban setting. I have no comprehensive answer to this particular question, but will only add a few more for further reflection.
A good starting point to encourage situated reflection on the part of students at study abroad sites might consist in tracking several questions throughout the year. I take my own experience and curriculum to provide examples. Questions such as “What is Florence?” and “Is Paris France?” can be productively entertained and connected to questions in Plato, St. Paul, Lao Tzu, and Aurelius such as “What does it means to be a ‘citizen of the world’ or ‘in harmony with the ‘way’ or ‘the cosmos’? In addition, such pedagogically relevant queries as “What counts as a cosmopolitan sensibility today, in a globally tele-technically mediated environment?” and “How do we balance the imperative of immersion against the background of a cosmopolitan project?” can supplement these curricular questions in specific institutional contexts. A final question I pose in closing, “How do we nurture a sense of critical cosmopolitanism in our students that is in tune with the mission of a global education, even as their imaginative projections of their world traveling are continually, fruitfully disappointed?”
Footnotes
1 | Anderson, B. R. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
2 | P. 23. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
3 | P. 84 Dewey, J., Boydston, J. A., Walsh, B. A., & Ross, R. (1982). The middle works, 1899-1924 (Vol. 12). Carbondale: Southern Illinois university press.