Globalisation, Societies and Education

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Rethinking global citizenship education with/for

transnational youth

Andrea Dyrness

To cite this article: Andrea Dyrness (2021): Rethinking global citizenship education with/for
transnational youth, Globalisation, Societies and Education, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2021.1897001

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GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2021.1897001

Rethinking global citizenship education with/for transnational

youth
Andrea Dyrness
Educational Foundations, Policy & Practice, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper compares state-led approaches to global citizenship education, Received 12 February 2021
driven by the concerns of national security, with the kinds of citizenship Accepted 24 February 2021
formation transnational youth acquire through their experiences in
KEYWORDS
transnational social fields. I show that these transnational experiences— Transnational youth;
particularly their relationships with loved ones in their countries of diaspora; migrant youth;
origin—naturally foster the types of skills, competencies and global citizenship education;
awareness that are typically emphasised in global citizenship education, ethnography
but also a more critical engagement with global structures of power. I
suggest that diaspora third space pedagogies that build on these
experiences can address some of the shortcomings of state-led GCE.

Introduction
The present moment of intensified global suffering, uncertainty, and upheaval calls on educators
and education theorists to rethink how we respond to crises and how we educate for global inter-
connectedness and mutual responsibility. The COVID-19 pandemic and economic collapse, cli-
mate migration, a resurgence of nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric across democratic
states, and a global social movement against racialised state violence, have laid bare the underlying
inequalities and unsustainability of our global system. In particular, these events compel us to inter-
rogate forms of global citizenship education (GCE) that fail to critically engage with state power and
imperial violence and that reinforce, wittingly or unwittingly, global hierarchies of race, nation, and
culture. Inspired by this special issue’s question, ‘How can theories and practices of GCE be mobi-
lised in ways that enable ethical forms of solidarity, and foster different modes of relating to the
planet?’ this paper engages citizenship formation from the perspective of transnational and minor-
itized youth, whose lives expose both the limitations of state-led citizenship education and the pos-
sibilities for new forms of solidarity and education. I ask, How can the practices of transnational
young people, who experience both global connectedness and national marginalisation, help us
think more deeply about citizenship education for global solidarity? How can they suggest new
approaches where formal GCE programmes have fallen short?
This paper brings together discourses of state-led global citizenship education, represented in
national policies for public schools, intergovernmental organisation guidelines, and non-profit edu-
cational programmes that receive state funding, with ethnographic research on transnational youth
showing the kinds of citizenship formation they acquire through their experiences in transnational
social fields. I define transnational youth as young people whose relationships and affiliations span
more than one country, including their country of residence and their birth countries or their
parents’ countries of origin, regardless of whether they physically travel across borders or not

CONTACT Andrea Dyrness andrea.dyrness@colorado.edu Educational Foundations, Policy & Practice, University of
Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. DYRNESS

(Levitt and Schiller 2004). Key to this definition is the experience of displacement, as transnational
youth have been displaced from the communities of their birth or their parents’ origins. I argue that
transnational young people’s lived experience in transnational fields—particularly their relation-
ships with loved ones in their countries of origin—provides them with many of the skills, sensibil-
ities and global awareness that are typically emphasised in global citizenship education
programmes, but also with what is often missing from state-led GCE: opportunities to critically
engage with global structures of power and inequality, to reflect on their own identities in relation
to these structures, and to develop solidarity with others in the face of these structures. Drawing on
theories of diasporic citizenship and borderlands third space feminisms, I propose that diaspora
third space pedagogies that build on these experiences and cultivate these solidarities offer key
insights for a transformative global citizenship education that responds to the needs of liberation.

Methods and conceptual lenses: diaspora third space pedagogies

This paper draws on anthropological perspectives on citizenship and diaspora to bring the lived
experience of transnational youth into dialogue with dominant discourses of citizenship and
GCE. Anthropological views of citizenship as lived experience, rather than juridical status, highlight
cultural processes of identity formation: in Ong’s (1996) words, the ‘dual process of self-making and
being-made within webs of power linked to the nation state and civil society’ (738). For transna-
tional youth, these processes unfold both within and beyond the nation-state (Dyrness and Abu
El-Haj 2019; Lukose 2007). I use the lens of ‘diasporic citizenship’—defined as social and cultural
practices of belonging within webs of transnational relations (Siu 2005)—to examine how young
people experience membership and belonging across their multiple communities and what they
learn from this. Centreing the everyday experience of (un)belonging allows us to expose the ‘dis-
junctures’ between state policy categories and lived realities for diaspora youth, and the creative
ways youth are responding to these (Abu El-Haj 2015; Coutin 2016).
Borderlands feminism, or mestizaje feminism, emerges from the lived experience of women in
the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, one of the most contested, militarised and violent regions in the
world. Women in the borderlands developed unique political skills and sensibilities that Anzaldúa
(1987) called la conciencia de la mestiza, ‘the consciousness of the ‘mixed blood’ … born of life lived
in the ‘crossroads’ between races, nations, languages, genders, sexualities, and cultures’ (Sandoval
2000, 60). Chicana/Latina feminists and other U.S. feminists of colour building on Anzaldúa ima-
gine a decolonial feminist praxis as a ‘third space’, a ‘bridging house of difference’ (Sandoval 1998,
358), in which the experience of difference and being in between could cultivate a disciplined mode
of resistance to dominant social hierarchies and solidarity across struggles (Sandoval 1998, 2000).
Anthropologists using third space lenses have explored the ways migrants use their experiences
as the basis for reflection, relocation, and action, in what we have called ‘migrant third space ped-
agogies’ (Dyrness and Hurtig 2016). Third space pedagogies are located in between national, politi-
cal, and cultural communities, and emerge in response to the needs, vulnerabilities, and
contradictions of lives in between. In a similar vein, Shirazi (2019) theorises ‘diasporic counter-
spaces’ as sites of epistemic possibility where diverse transnational youth can critically engage
with racializing processes that construct them as outsiders (Shirazi 2019). Anthropologist Lok
Siu (2005) writes, ‘Being diasporic entails active and conscious negotiation of one’s identity and
one’s understandings of ‘home’ and ‘community’’ (11). I argue that this negotiation provides fertile
ground for a critical and reflexive global citizenship education, in ways formal citizenship education
has often failed to do.
In the first part of the paper, I examine dominant discourses of global citizenship education,
drawing on reports and websites from intergovernmental and government agencies and other scho-
lars’ critical analyses of these discourses. This analysis aims to illuminate the motivations under-
lying state-led global citizenship education and a fundamental tension between national security
agendas and goals for intercultural understanding and solidarity. I then turn to ethnographic
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 3

data on the lived experiences of transnational youth, from my own and others’ research, to analyse
the learnings that result from their participation in transnational social fields and the ways these
reflect or challenge dominant conceptions of global citizenship. My own data are drawn from a
study of citizenship formation among first- and second-generation immigrant youth of Latin Amer-
ican origin in Madrid, Spain. In 2013–2014 I conducted ethnographic research in two youth-serving
NGOs in Madrid, and with Latin American women (ages 21–35) in an activist women’s association
founded by exiled women from Guatemala. Elsewhere, I have analysed and described in detail the
research methods and contexts of Latinx diaspora pedagogies and the kinds of citizenship they fos-
ter (Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2020). My purpose here is to put these findings in conversation with
discourses of GCE in order to raise questions about the limits of state-led global citizenship edu-
cation and the possibilities of diasporic spaces of belonging.

State-led global citizenship education

Global citizenship education has received renewed attention by education policymaking bodies
around the world since its inclusion in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. The
2019 Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM), which monitors progress on education goals,
reported findings from 83 countries for Target 4.7 on Sustainable Development and Global Citizen-
ship. This indicator monitors students’ attitudes toward diversity and equality, and skills relating to
intercultural communication, alternative perspectives, conflict resolution and adaptability
(UNESCO 2019). However, showing a strong association between global citizenship education
and securitisation, exactly one-half of the chapter of the GEM on Target 4.7 is devoted to ‘education
to prevent violent extremism.’ The chapter quotes the UN Secretary-General’s report on the Plan of
Action to Prevent Violent Extremism for the ‘mitigating role education can play in promoting
respect for diversity, peace, and economic advancement as buffers against radicalization’ (UNESCO
2019, 194). Positioning education for peace and economic advancement as ‘buffers against radica-
lization,’ the report invokes the threat to security posed by dangerous Others: radicals or youth at
risk of becoming radicalised (who are often immigrants from poorer nations).
Such security reasoning has become a driver of state-led efforts for global citizenship education
around the world, shaping both efforts to promote global engagement, as seen in the internationa-
lisation of higher education, and efforts to manage the incorporation of immigrants and cultural
diversity at home (immigrant integration policies). In a comparative analysis of Jordan and the Uni-
ted States, Hantzopoulos and Shirazi (2014) argue that discourses of global citizenship and national
security are woven together by both states to justify neoliberal educational reforms that ultimately
reify the (economic) interests of the nation-state and maintain a global economic order that perpe-
tuates hegemony. In their analysis, the vision of U.S. global ‘leadership’ behind global citizenship
education is defined by military dominance and economic competitiveness. These efforts by states
to link citizenship education with articulations of national security are a consequence of the War on
Terror (Larsen 2008; Rizvi 2004), and have particularly dire consequences for transnational youth.
According to Shirazi (2017), practices of education as securitisation that were ‘pioneered and devel-
oped for youth in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other sites of the War on Terror are increasingly
materialising in European and American educational systems for Othered (specifically Muslim)
populations in response to fears of domestic terrorism.’ (Shirazi 2017, 3).
In Europe, the European Commission website presenting a Eurydice brief on ‘Citizenship Edu-
cation at School in Europe – 2017’ introduces the importance of national policies for citizenship
education ‘to deal with the current threats to fundamental European values.’1 The brief explains
that, in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, ‘the EU Education Ministers
and the European Commission signed the Paris Declaration, which called for action at European,
national, regional and local levels to reinforce the role of education in promoting citizenship and the
common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination’ (European Commission 2017, 3).
4 A. DYRNESS

Such justifications for citizenship education universalise ‘fundamental European values,’ and locate
presumed threats to security in youth from non-European backgrounds.
Goals for ‘appreciation of cultural diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ pair uneasily with the counterterror-
ism and securitisation agendas of state-led GCE plans, since the latter construct culturally diverse
youth as potential threats to security. This leaves teachers and students in diverse classrooms navi-
gating an impossible tension ‘between the welcoming of difference and a more tacit nationalist
impulse to discipline difference in the interest of preserving the nation’ (Ríos-Rojas 2014, 3). As
Anna Ríos-Rojas (2018) argues, citizenship education for immigrant youth is ‘an inherently disci-
plinary space where immigrant youth, both documented and not, [come] to be governed as particu-
lar kinds of subjects’ (3). Ríos-Rojas analyses civics textbooks and classroom interactions in a
citizenship education class in Spain to illuminate spaces where ‘inclusion-exclusion came to be
(re)produced’, showing how even a class that was meant to foster inclusion produced the Immi-
grant Other in relation to notions of the ideal citizen. Across democratic states, state-led citizenship
education designed to integrate and ‘liberalize’ immigrant youth aims to minimise and control the
‘risk’ presented by migrant subjects, who must be disciplined and transformed into acceptable sub-
jects of the nation-state (Abu El-Haj 2015; Jaffe-Walter 2016; Shirazi 2017). Taken together, the
logics and impulses of state-led citizenship education for immigrant youth are to contain, civilise
and reform, and serve as a corollary to the state’s efforts to surveil, detain, and deport those who
are deemed unworthy of liberal citizenship (Maira 2018; Ali 2017).
At the same time, the internationalisation of higher education in the global North promotes glo-
bal citizenship as a strategic national imperative. Many academic institutions now include ‘global
citizenship’ as a specific learning outcome or student development competency for undergraduate
students (Stebleton 2013; Zemach-Bersin 2009). These programmes typically aim to foster ‘intercul-
tural understanding’ (Deardorff 2009), global sensitivity, ‘transcultural communication, empathy,
and collaboration’ (Suarez-Orozco 2007). Darla Deardorff defines global citizenship as ‘understand-
ing the interconnectedness of the world in which we live … [and possessing] the ability to relate
successfully with those from other cultures; and engagement at the local and global levels around
issues that impact humanity’ (2009, 348). According to Deardoff, definitions of global citizenship
emphasise ‘the ability to see the world from others’ perspectives’ (349), or ‘global consciousness’,
in Mansilla and Gardner’s (2007) words, ‘a disposition to place [one’s] immediate experience in
the broader matrix of developments that shape life worldwide, to construct their identities as mem-
bers of world societies and … orient their actions accordingly’ (33).
However, critiques of GCE in Western nations highlight that GCE is implicated in the colonial
legacy of Western schooling more generally (Andreotti and de Souza 2012), and without careful
interrogation of its intentions, might actually reassert western domination (Pashby 2012, 14). Cri-
tiques of Study Abroad (Zemach-Bersin 2007, 2012) and English language ‘voluntourism’ (Jakubiak
2019) in the U.S. suggest that these programmes surreptitiously reproduce the logic of colonialism
and U.S. supremacy, serving to further accrue advantages to U.S. volunteers and doing little to pro-
blematise unequal power relations. According to Jefferess (2012), the framing of GCE as a project of
benevolent ‘helping’ less fortunate Others paradoxically limits who can perform global citizenship,
and echoes the rationale for the European colonial project: ‘control/uplift of a savage/primitive
Other’ (33). In this articulation of GCE, ‘We must be concerned with the insecurities of others inso-
far as they might threaten our own (national) security’ (33).
These examples of GCE espoused by institutions in the global North reflect what Andreotti
(2006) calls ‘soft global citizenship education’ as compared to ‘critical global citizenship education.’
In failing to address the roots of inequalities in power and wealth/labour distribution, ‘soft global
citizenship’ buys into the myth of Western supremacy and encourages young people from the global
North to project their values and beliefs as universal. Citing Gayatri Spivak (1990), Andreotti asserts
that the ‘sanctioned ignorance (constitutive disavowal) of the role of colonialism in the creation of
wealth’ in the First World (44) justifies the development of the Other as a civilising mission, as seen
in soft global citizenship education. While soft global citizenship can accomplish some good, it also
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 5

may result in the reinforcement of colonial assumptions and relations, privilege, and uncritical
action (48).
Soft approaches to GCE resemble Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) ‘personal responsibility citi-
zenship,’ emphasising personal values and volunteerism while avoiding the root causes of social
problems or the need for collective action. Notably, they offer little opportunity for reflexivity—
for participants to situate their own identities and experiences within larger global processes and
structures of power, or to think critically about global–national–local interconnectivity (Rizvi
2009; Engel 2014). It is important to note that not all formal GCE programmes fall within soft
or uncritical approaches. However, to the extent that state-led programmes are driven by concerns
of national security, cultural diversity is framed as a problem, and possibilities for examining the
state’s role in contributing to conditions of inequality and insecurity are foreclosed.

The global consciousness of transnational youth

In Madrid, as in many cities of the global North, it is often NGOs that are tasked with providing key
services for immigrant youth and families and become part of the state’s immigrant integration
apparatus. In 2013–2014, I conducted ethnographic research on citizenship education for immi-
grant youth in two publicly funded after-school programmes located in youth-serving NGOs. As
most immigrants in Spain come from former Spanish colonies, including Morocco, the Americas,
and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Spanish integration policies cannot be understood apart from
this colonial history. In these policy discourses, immigrant students’ cultures of origin were con-
structed as obstacles to integration and threats to social cohesion (Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2020;
Poveda, Jociles, and Franzé 2009; Ríos-Rojas 2014; Lucko 2014). In the citizenship education cur-
riculum for one youth-serving NGO, for example, students’ ‘culture’ appeared several times as a
‘risk factor’. In line with the state-led approaches described above, citizenship education in these
two sites focused on personal responsibility and behaviour management, emphasising above all
else social skills and ‘habits of health and hygiene’ (Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2020). This reflects
the colonial rationale underlying citizenship education for integration: that immigrants must be
‘civilised’ for Western liberal democracy. In fact, integration programmes in Spain have been a pol-
icy response to ‘fear-driven debate about immigrants’ (Caballero and Torres 2015, 5).
However, outside of schools and state-led programming—in their daily lives, on social media, on
the streets, and in their homes—transnational youth are learning and enacting new forms of citizen-
ship that respond to the exigencies of their lives. In doing so, they draw upon cultural resources for
responding to crisis that transcend national borders and the limitations of Western democratic
institutions. In what follows in this section, I describe the sensibilities and forms of knowledge
migrant youth acquire from participating in transnational communities that span their city of resi-
dence and countries of origin. I draw on findings from my own research in Spain, and on ethno-
graphic research by others on transnational communities spanning the U.S., Mexico, Denmark, and
the Middle East/North Africa.
The transnational youth and women in my research displayed many of the skills of global citi-
zenship described above, including global consciousness, cultural and linguistic flexibility, empathy
and solidarity, as I will detail below. However, they varied in the extent to which they had access to
spaces that cultivated these skills and supported them in learning from their transnational experi-
ences. In the final section, I analyse migrant women’s efforts at autoformación (self-education) as an
example of diaspora third space pedagogies that contribute to a transformative global citizenship.
1) Global consciousness
A global consciousness, understood as a disposition to place their immediate experience in a glo-
bal context and orient their actions accordingly, defined migrant young people’s daily lives. Ties to
family and loved ones living in their countries of origin shaped their identities and oriented their
actions and sense of responsibility. The youth in my study communicated regularly with extended
family through Skype and social media, and could describe the conditions of daily life there (in
6 A. DYRNESS

Venezuela, Morocco, or the Dominican Republic) in great detail. As Dyrness and Abu El-Haj
(2019) argue, transnational young people are not only aware of, but deeply affected by conditions
of violence, insecurity, and precarity in their countries of origin that threaten the lives of their
family members, and they often feel a strong sense of responsibility to alleviate these conditions.
Migrants have long been responding to crises and lifting their families back home out of poverty,
through the sending of remittances, post-disaster humanitarian relief (Irizarry, Rolón-Dow, and
Godreau 2018), and educational development (Dryden-Peterson and Reddick 2019). My research
suggests that youths’ awareness of their parents’ remittances, and the impact that these have on
impoverished hometowns, is a key resource in their global citizenship formation.
Awareness of the precarity facing family back home often led to an appreciation for scarce natu-
ral resources which youth said their autochthonous peers did not value, like potable water running
from the tap. In one group discussion Dominican youth noted that their cousins back home were
amazed that ‘we can bathe in drinking water!’ This awareness often motivated youth to take advan-
tages of the educational opportunities they had in Spain, to be able to contribute to their families’
future. For migrant women involved in activist associations, this sense of responsibility to family
back home motivated their activist work. The contrast between their lives in Spain and the realities
of their home countries was a constant tension that motivated their commitment to feminist
struggle (Dyrness 2020).
In her study of transnational Palestinian American youth in the U.S., Abu El-Haj (2015) found
that their ties to communities in Palestine living in precarious conditions translated into collective
practices to contribute to their well-being. The youth often contributed economically to their
families, regularly participated in demonstrations for peace in Palestine and the Middle East, and
held performances and fundraisers to raise money for Palestinian children living in refugee
camps, among other things. For the transnational youth in our studies, global awareness was nur-
tured through personal and collective responsibility for their far-flung communities.
2) Cultural flexibility
Cultural and linguistic flexibility, including ‘the ability to see the world from others’ perspectives’
(Deardorff 2009, 349) and to adapt to different circumstances, emerged naturally from young
people’s experience in transnational fields. In their daily lives, immigrant youth interacted with
multiple communities in their host and home countries, in which they contended with and
moved in between multiple sets of norms, perspectives, languages and communication styles. Latinx
Spanish-speaking youth often described how their speech and language shifted based on context
(e.g., Caribbean versus Castilian), and how they were judged by relatives in their home country
and Spanish peers in Madrid. Diaspora youth become adept at ‘navigating multiplicity’ (Naber
2012) as they broker and negotiate the perspectives and judgments of multiple ‘others’ across a
transnational social field. Although it was difficult and sometimes painful, the youth in my study
embraced their role as cultural brokers, translating and mediating between their distinct worlds
and debunking stereotypes each had of the other. They articulated multiple advantages of living
in between that reflect the goals of GCE, including learning ‘to have an open mind,’ speaking mul-
tiple languages and language varieties, and, ‘you can adapt more easily to situations that you face in
life.’ Importantly, this adaptability was embodied knowledge gained from their personal experience
of migration and surviving very difficult transitions.
Extended stays in their parents’ countries of origin often give transnational youth new perspec-
tives on social roles and identities in both places, with transformative implications for their own
identities and civic commitments. Sánchez (2007) followed three young second-generation mexica-
nas between their home communities in urban Northern California and their parents’ hometowns
in rural and semi-rural Mexico, documenting the cultural flexibility they developed that allowed
them to ‘respond fluidly to the different social demands each cultural community places on
them’ (503) Accompanying their female relatives in the gendered division of labour gave them
new awareness of the material limitations that restricted women’s lives in rural Mexico, challenging
U.S. stereotypes of Mexican women as inherently ‘traditional’ or ‘un-feminist’.
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 7

Similarly, Jaffe-Walter (2016) documents the role of homeland trips for Muslim immigrant
youth in Denmark in gaining a critical perspective on racism in Denmark. She describes how
one student’s trip home to Ethiopia gave her a new awareness of Danish discrimination against
immigrants, and motivated her to become a social worker to work with immigrant communities
and to become active in the fight for immigrants’ rights. Through participating in transnational
social spaces, youth learn that identities are not fixed, that dominant constructions are not true,
and that they can enact their identities in flexible ways.
3) Empathy and solidarity
As discourses of GCE in the global North emphasise the marketability of global citizenship skills,
notions of empathy and solidarity are subsumed under facile notions of ‘responsibility for the other’
(Andreotti 2006), and the basis for building relationships with others is obscured. As Jefferess
(2012) notes, ‘The notion of aid, responsibility, and poverty alleviation retain the Other as an object
of benevolence.’ (27). In contrast, the transnational youth and women in my research had been
socialised into forms of solidarity and communal living from their countries of origin, and often
spoke of this as what they most missed in Spain. Teenagers from rural hometowns in the Domin-
ican Republic spoke nostalgically of cooperative lifestyles where neighbours helped each other out.
The transnational activist women in my research emphasised that it was solidarity—networks of
mutual support and convivencia (living together)—that sustained them and nurtured their collec-
tive capacity to overcome crises. Latina women frequently remarked that Spaniards had a hard time
weathering the economic crisis because they lacked cultures of collectivity, comparing this to forms
of collective organising in their home countries. Repeatedly, they referred to the traditions of soli-
darity and collective action through which indigenous, peasant and urban communities in their
home countries had survived extreme poverty, state repression and violence, and they drew connec-
tions between forms of solidarity in Latin America and among Latin American migrants in Spain
(Dyrness 2020). Mercedes, who founded the Association of Guatemalan Women in Madrid,
addressed a Spanish public audience on the theme of the economic crisis this way: ‘I have been
breathing crisis since I was in the womb,’ she said, explaining the history of state violence in Gua-
temala. She went on: ‘Crisis is overcome by networks, by weaving networks of solidarity.’
Other research in Spain shows how transnationals mobilise global communication apps and
internet technology for mutual aid and solidarity across borders. Mendoza Pérez and Morgade Sal-
gado (2018) describe the relationships of care and love that are sustained through WhatsApp
between undocumented, unaccompanied minors in Spain and their families in Morocco. In spite
of their juridical designation as ‘unaccompanied foreign minors’, young people’s families continue
to play a very important role in their lives through their mobile phones, invisible to the Spanish
social institutions charged with their care. Through WhatsApp, unaccompanied migrant youth
and their families create networks of solidarity that help them survive.

Critique of state violence

For both transnational youth in the youth-serving NGOs and the migrant activists in my research,
their sense of belonging (or not) in Spain and their relationship to the Spanish national identity was
conditioned by their personal experiences of exclusion and discrimination, including especially
racialized police harassment and abuse. They and their families were followed, stopped, questioned
and searched in parks, malls, Metro stations and on the street. Their experiences as racialized, min-
oritized youth gave them a critical perspective on Spanish narratives of democracy and citizenship.
In our discussions, teenagers reflected on personal experiences of racial harassment and used them
to challenge narratives of Spanish superiority. Through their experiences, they critiqued the myth of
Western supremacy and the false promises of equality and inclusion in their adopted country.
The activist women were more outspoken about these contradictions. Sara, who had come to
Spain from Peru for a graduate programme in Human Rights, was indignant at the mistreatment
of immigrants by the Spanish authorities and the violation of migrants’ human rights: ‘They have
8 A. DYRNESS

jails for people simply for being undocumented!’ she exclaimed, referring to the Centros de Inter-
namento de Extranjeros (immigrant detention centres). In their interviews, migrant activists cri-
tiqued police raids against immigrants and the hypocrisy of Spanish social movements that
excluded immigrants. They subverted the Spanish national discourse of immigrant criminality as
a justification for harsh policing, pointing instead to the ‘criminalisation of immigration’ by the
Spanish state.
In my analysis, the women’s critique grew from their lived experience of racism and abuse, which
fuelled their empathy for other immigrants. This critique led them to distance themselves from
national identity and citizenship, although most of them had obtained Spanish nationality, and
to insist on new forms of identity that were not tied to the nation-state (Dyrness 2020).

Discussion: diaspora third space pedagogies

Questions of identity and belonging are central to GCE (Pashby 2012) and the ability to reflect on
one’s identity and history in the context of larger global processes is central to a GCE that aims to be
decolonising. While not all migrants adopt a critical orientation to global processes, migration and
the experience of displacement creates the conditions for a reevaluation and redefinition of one’s
identity, and makes the search for community and belonging a central preoccupation. As diaspora
scholar Roniger (2017) notes, ‘Exile prompts reflexivity, a deep review of consciousness on what
went wrong and decisions to be made about alternative loyalties and allegiances’ (233). The activist
women in my study noted that the experience of being ‘in limbo,’ the space in between, of not
belonging anywhere, ‘te concientiza’ (makes you aware) (Dyrness 2020). Borderlands feminism
helps us understand this in-between space, born of multiple exclusions across different axes of
inequality, as generative of critical consciousness and a rejection of any supremacy. Migrants’
lives defied the fictions of Western exceptionalism. While the women experienced greater gender
autonomy as women in Spain than they had in their home countries, and both women and
youth experienced material privilege and safety compared to their families back home, they also
suffered racism as immigrants in Spain, which they had not experienced in their home countries.
These experiences teach migrant youth that structures of inequality and oppression operate across
national borders, and that the ideals of equality, opportunity and freedom espoused by their
adopted (Western) countries have not been realised. However, transnational youth need spaces
to reflect on these experiences and process them together with others in order to develop critical
analyses of structures of power and inequality and to take action for change.
In my research, diaspora spaces of solidarity and convivencia (being together) allowed migrant
women from different backgrounds to reflect on their experiences together, to analyse how they
were positioned within multiple identity categories and create their own identities from a place
of difference and resistance. As spaces of autoformación (self-education or self-directed learning)
these spaces were driven by participants’ own needs to make sense of their experiences of margin-
alisation and find community with others in the margins. Through autoformación, migrant women
could not only analyse their experiences of exclusion, but also mobilise diverse cultural resources
for transcending violence and inequality. For example, Latina activists in my research drew on
Latin American feminist and indigenous epistemologies that emphasise collectivity and solidarity
as an alternative to neoliberal individual economic rationality. Far from the state-led GCE agendas
that aim to socialise migrants away from the presumed violent traditions of their homelands, trans-
national Latina activists summoned traditions of non-violent resistance from their home countries
to survive and overcome ongoing state violence against women, indigenous and immigrant
communities.
When compared to state-led GCE programmes, these diaspora educational spaces show that
building solidarity with others and a critical engagement with global structures of power are not
only necessary, but inseparable components of a global citizenship education that responds to
the needs of the most marginalised. A critical engagement with state violence and histories of
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 9

colonialism and imperialism, precisely what is missing from ‘soft global citizenship education’, was
at the centre of transnational women’s efforts to educate themselves in their own activist spaces and
to make sense of their own experiences. Learning about different women’s experiences of violence
and strategies for resistance formed the basis for empathy, solidarity, and respect for diversity.
While discourses of GCE mobilise fear or pity towards (Black and brown, non-Western)
Othered populations as the basis for action, the collective reflection in diaspora spaces brings
people together around shared experiences of oppression. The centreing of experiences of exclu-
sion and displacement nurtures both empathy for others and a deeper understanding of struc-
tures of power that have influenced their lives. Sepúlveda (2011), describing his work with
undocumented Mexican migrant youth, calls this process acompañamiento (accompaniment),
or ‘improvisational practices of relationship and community building’ that allow undocumented
youth to ‘survive and adapt, to bridge cultural worlds, and to love and live with dignity’ (Sepúl-
veda 2011, 559). He reminds us that borderlands pedagogies are collective—communally
oriented, relationally based, and dialogic—creating community around shared experiences in
the borderlands. Acompañamiento is ‘both a response to globalisation and a cultural resource
for fostering authentic webs of relations … It [is] a sociocultural practice of solidarity’ (2020,
p. 65). Nuñez-Janes and Ovalle (2016), building on Sepúlveda (2011), document the important
role of spaces of acompañamiento in nurturing undocumented youth activism in Texas. Their
study illustrates how undocumented youth create networks of solidarity to support ‘organic acti-
vism … informed by lived experiences and collective self-reflection that results from taking
action’ (Nuñez-Janes and Ovalle 2016, 190).
In all of these spaces, the practices and actions of the group are oriented towards the collective
needs of marginalised communities. This orientation distinguishes them from state-led pro-
grammes of GCE. In order to respond to the needs of those living in between, migrant third
space pedagogies are ‘deliberately constituted as spaces of belonging, self-definition, and contesta-
tion’ (Dyrness and Hurtig 2016, 3). As spaces of contestation they ‘foster critical examination of and
challenges to dominant representations of their group and dominant social and spatial practices’
(3). They are characterised by a focus on life experiences and a collective approach to knowledge
production based on relationships of mutuality and equality. Building on the life experiences of
transnational migrants, which naturally furnish many of the ‘competencies’ of GCE, third space
pedagogies nurture new forms of solidarity and global social action.
Unfortunately, the youth in my study who were still enrolled in Compulsory Secondary Edu-
cation did not have access to diaspora pedagogies. Their global experiences and competencies
were squandered by integration regimes bent on erasing any aspect of cultural difference. Like
migrant youth in many locations, they lacked opportunities to discuss their experiences of
migration, or issues of diversity, identity, race and racism, in their schools or after-school pro-
grammes (Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2020). Rather than supporting diaspora youth to develop their
critical understandings and engage in their multiple countries, school-based citizenship education
too often frames young people’s transnational connections as a threat (Maira 2018; Abu El-Haj
2015; Ali 2017). Abu El-Haj’s (2015) study, cited earlier, found that Palestinian American youths’
transnational experiences nurtured a critical engagement with U.S. imperialism and U.S. foreign
policy, but their critiques were censored by teachers citing tropes of terrorism, disloyalty, and intol-
erance. Understanding the censorship of diaspora youths’ critical citizenship requires confronting
discourses of US exceptionalism and Western liberalism that pose the West as the bearer of peace,
tolerance and equality, and taking seriously the aspirations of transnational youth for a more just
and peaceful world.

Conclusion
Observing citizenship formation from the vantage point of transnational and minoritized youth,
who experience both global connectedness and national marginalisation, offers a view that
10 A. DYRNESS

challenges and subverts Western exceptionalism. As Maira (2018) observes of the counterterrorism
regime, ‘Muslims must be made ‘safe’ and acceptable/assimilable for Western modernity and U.S.
liberal democracy. But the United States and many Western nation-states are no longer ‘safe’ for
Muslims’ (or immigrants) (405). We see this truth in the dramatic rise in hate crimes and domestic
terrorism against Muslim, black, and Latinx communities in the U.S. since 2016, and increased state
violence against immigrants across Western states. In this context, more than ever, inhibiting young
people’s ability to critically examine processes of racialisation, violence and inequality in a global
context must be seen as a real threat to global sustainability. Arshad Ali (2017), recognising the
danger and increased surveillance facing transnational Muslim youth in the U.S., provocatively
asks: ‘Is the erasure of global connectedness for Muslim communities … a potential way for Muslim
Americans to be accepted as full citizens?’ (115). My research findings suggest an inverse provoca-
tive question: Is the rejection of Western (neo)liberal citizenship regimes a potential way to make
modernity ‘safe’ for the planet?
The forms of diaspora third space pedagogies detailed here reveal much about the limits and
contradictions of state-sponsored GCE and the formal citizenship regimes undergirding it. It is
doubtful that state-led citizenship education focused on assimilating or ‘civilizing’ migrant youth
will allow a critique of state power and violence and how this operates across borders through
imperial formations of U.S. and European nation-states, and without this young people are pre-
vented from understanding a major force that threatens their communities and the planet.
When immigrant youth begin to question this power, through their transnational experiences on
the receiving end of injustices (including economic, racial, cultural, political) and abuses (including
police brutality, deportation and military aggression), they are labelled ‘radical’ and their global
consciousness becomes a threat (Maira 2018; Abu El-Haj 2015; Kwon 2018).
Just as they are excluded from Western liberal citizenship regimes (Ali 2017), immigrant youth
are cast outside the bounds of global citizenship, as Othered bodies who must be contained. While
they practice the same competencies that are promised (but not delivered) by GCE, they are framed
as threats to national security. The censoring of immigrant youth who are critical of the state as
‘radical’ and ‘anti-American’ (or anti-Spanish) obscures the fact that state-led GCE is ultimately
about preserving Western dominance in the world, and that Western liberal citizenship regimes
cannot in fact tolerate cultural diversity. GCE thus engages an impossible contradiction between
promising intercultural understanding, solidarity, and tolerance, while buttressing violent regimes
of exclusion and inequality.
Within this context, diaspora third space pedagogies must exist at the interstices and margins
of state institutions, in spaces controlled by migrants. While some insights of these pedagogies
could be incorporated into school-based citizenship education (see for example Jaffe-Walter
and Lee 2018), diaspora pedagogies must remain autonomous to be driven by and answerable
to the needs and exigencies of displaced communities. In spaces dedicated to the learning they
need to advance their own liberation and collective healing, diaspora youth point the way to
the structures that limit social transformation. I suggest that researchers pay more attention to
these diasporic spaces as fertile ground for a citizenship that that nurtures global solidarity, jus-
tice, and peace.

Note
1. Retrieved from: https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/eurydice-brief-citizenship-edu
cation-school-europe-%E2%80%93-2017_en7/23/2020

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Cori Jakubiak for encouraging me to explore the intersections between transnational youth’s experi-
ences and GCE.
 GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 11

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Spencer Foundation: [Grant Number 201300130].

ORCID
Andrea Dyrness http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3997-545X

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