Unearthing the forces of globalisation in educational research

1. Unearthing the forces of globalisation in educational research David R Cole University of Western Sydney

2. Abstract • “The global system of post-industrial and newly industrializing worlds produces scattered and poly-centered yet always profit-oriented power relations which function not so much by binary oppositions but in a fragmented and all-pervasive manner. The rhizomic or web-like structure of contemporary power, however, does not alter fundamentally its terms of application. If anything, power relations in globalization are more ruthless than ever,” (Braidotti, 2012, p. 169).

3. ArjunAppardurai If globalisation is characterised by disjunctive flows that generate acute problems of social well-being, one positive force that encourages an emancipatory politics of globalisation is the role of imagination… On the one hand, it is through the imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlled—by states, markets, and other powerful interests. But it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life occur. (p. 6)

4. Cartographies… • “What I am precisely concerned with,” Guattari explained, “is a displacement of the analytic problematic, a drift from systems of statement [énoncé] and preformed subjective structures toward assemblages of enunciation that can forge new coordinates of interpretation and ‘bring to existence’ unheard-of ideas and proposals”

5. 4 division of the unconscious • The four divisions of the unconscious diagram deal with: 1) cut-outs of existential territories; 2) complexions of material and energetic flows; 3) rhizomes of abstract ideas and 4) constellations of aesthetic refrains. Perhaps more tangibly, one could say about these 4 zones that they are — i) the ground beneath your feet; ii) the turbulence of social experience; iii) the blue sky of ideas and; iv) the rhythmic insistence of waking dreams.

6. The group • This idea concerns the passage from a ‘subjected group’, often alienated by globalisation, to a ‘subject group’, that is capable of making its own statements. The theme occurs throughout Guattari’s first book, 1972, Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionnelle. La Découverte, Paris. For example in “Introduction à la psychothérapie institutionnelle.”

7. Abstract machines • Yet what the fourfold diagrams try to map out are not just the latencies and possibilities of speech on the edge of an all-absorbing state of anti-conditioning and strikingly revolutionary action, but more specifically, the material situations and logical steps that draw subjectivity out of its containment and into unfolding, globalised flows and inter-relationships which are themselves reshaped through their collisions with ceaselessly mutating operational diagrams that Deleuze & Guattari (1988) called ‘abstract machines’…

8. Escape routes… • The point of this method of participatory educational research is to resist, create, propose alternatives and to escape in terms of the evolving singularities of the group, despite the normalizing forces that are continually brought to bear on collectivism by aspects of contemporary capitalist society, e.g. the confinement of the bourgeoisie, or the oedipal family.

9. Meta-modelling • On the contrary, the meta-modelling of this article works from within to make difference happen in each example, so globalised subjectivities are not essentialised, but realised in terms of the inter-relationships between examples and in the singularities of the examples themselves that have no relations

11. Sudanese families in Australia • There has been extensive coverage in the Australian media and in the political arena about the ways in which the Sudanese have fitted in or otherwise into mainstream Australian society, and this coverage has not always been positive. See, for example, an ABC interview with the former Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, at: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s2057250.htm

12. Diagram i) the houses where the Sudanese currently live in Australia, which replicate the tribal and village spaces in the Sudan, and their convoluted journeys to get to these places from different regions in the Sudan, e.g. via Egypt; ii) the Sudanese community world, including the influences of Christian worship and their perspective on Australian social life taken from Australian media and their contact with Australians; iii) the idea of being Sudanese and what that means, for example, in terms of the strong gender divisions in traditional Sudanese society, and how the idea of being Sudanese is changing under pressure from the transition to life in Australia; iv) the aesthetics of becoming Sudanese-Australian, for example involving craft, needlework and dress codes, music such as rapping, dancing, religious worship and imagery, and hairstyling.

13. Literacies • Peer and youth literacies • The literacy of synthetic time • War literacies • Oral literacies • Tribal literacies • Physical literacies

15. Young Muslims in Australia on Facebook • … 82% of the 15-18 age group asked said that their primary focus on the Internet was to socialize. 63% of the 18-25 age group responded similarly, which points to the ways in which globalised social life is evolving under the influence of social media. The sample of 323 young Muslims was taken from the Sydney area, and the urban focus of the research prejudices the study in that all respondents should have access to computers…

16. Information Sources- Top five websites Muslim youth have consumed recently

17. 4 divisions of the unconscious • : 1) The Australia that the young Muslims inhabit, which might be Lakemba, Greater Western Sydney, or the suburbs in which they live, and the place where they go to study and work, e.g. Australian university campuses or the Sydney CBD; 2) Muslim identity as it is portrayed in everyday life in Australia, e.g. through media reports on Muslim countries, terrorism, issues to do with religious identity, differences between Muslim life, Christian life and secular life or the multiple cultures in Australia and the ways in which they interact with Islam, plus the contemporary political position of Islam in Australian culture and politics ; 3) the notion of being a Muslim and what that entails on an abstract level, for many young Muslims in Australia the interaction on Facebook encapsulate the search for abstract Muslim identity through social contact with youth from Islamic countries, readings from the Koran, teachings from the Mosque and the abstract ideas of what it means to be a young Muslim in Australia that is passed on by word of mouth amongst Muslim youth; 4) Muslim art, calligraphy, the style and essence of what it means to be a young Muslim, including the history of Islam, the teachings of the Koran and the 5 pillars of Islam and how they are played out in the lives of the young people, e.g. through the desire to go on the Hajj or Ramadan.

18. Literacies of Muslim youth • In terms of multiple literacies, the globalised young Muslims practise political, visual, rhetorical, religious and affective literacies online. The affective literacies are especially important to young Muslims using Facebook, as the affective contrast in environmental and digital realms is a powerful driver in their learning.

19. The politics of affect • There is a politics of affect, which is produced through young Muslims using Facebook in Australia. By excluding affect from their calculations, one could say that neo-liberal civil society may be at odds with the often-violent resurgence in contemporary revolts against the state…

20. History • In contrast, history may be cast as narrative that emphasizes regularity and predictability, in Massumi’s (2002) words, history comprises a set of “identified subjects and objects” whose progress is given “the appearance of an ordered, even necessary evolution… contexts progressively falling into order” (p. 218).

21. Conclusion • The results from this study show how globalised identities determine difference and complex, divergent imaginations, which follow desires and form new ways of looking at the world from changing perspectives. Both the Sudanese families and young Muslims in Australia face ongoing inter-generational and communal tensions, as the fracturing of globalisation continues to make the nodes and sources of their identities, such as tribal life in the Sudan or Islam, spread out further and harder to access in a society dominated by capitalism.