REFRAMING CRITICAL COSMOPOLITAN LITERACIES FOR JUSTICE-ORIENTED YOUTH ACTIVISM

Abstract

This theoretical dissertation juxtaposes cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2009; Hansen, 2011, Nussbaum, 1999b), the social imagination (Greene, 1995), and love ethic theory (hooks, 1999) as a novel, synergistic response to the precarity (Butler, 2009) that youth face from violent and inequitable conditions (Goldstick et al., 2022; Morton et al., 2018; Wolfe et al., 2018). Cosmopolitanism holds the potential for “better” (Hansen, 2011, p. xiv) solutions to education’s challenges in a globally interconnected world (Rizvi & Choo, 2020). Its six thematic groupings—philosophy, mobility, alterity, openness, relationality, and generativity—provide thoughtful entry points into scholarly dialogue on human worth and interaction. Hawkins’s (2014) more critical version of the tradition examines power relations. The social imagination (Greene, 1995) similarly addresses and makes visible the structural, social, and historical forces influencing injustice. Equally illuminating, love ethic theory (hooks, 1999) provides thoughtful clarity to transformative, emotional human engagement. Upon this three-part framework, I argue that youth may resist injustice (Tuck & Yang, 2014) by employing critical cosmopolitanism’s conceptual tools (Oikonomidoy, 2018). The mobilization of these resources is akin to literacy practices (Street, 1984) where youth highlight sociocultural identities through their actions as they participate in the world (Gee, 2015). This dissertation’s unique contribution proposes justice-oriented youth literacies, especially to scholars working in critical participatory action research (Fine & Torre, 2021). A clearinghouse of annotated resources to advance individualized empirical trajectories is also presented. In this text one finds a garden offering fertile soil in which to cultivate imaginative possibilities as the food for thought that will oppose cultures of lovelessness (hooks, 1999). Hope thus remains to reply to youth’s local and global issues, to contribute to international youth policies (UNCIEF, 2018a), and to provide opportunities for youth’s agentic design of their social futures (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007; NLG, 1996).