Global Study

(work in progress)

On the “Studying Globally at Bard” website, the first image the visitor is encountered with is a bird’s-eye view of the City Abroad. The densely-packed urban space is nestled around and between mountains, lit by the sun (of the southern hemisphere), extending toward the shore of a teal-blue and wavy ocean (ah, the unspoiled paradise of the 3rd world). The shot makes the earth seem round and small, though despite its familiarity to the student deeply entrenched in the global-village discourse of American liberal arts education, the view depicts something foreign, new, unfamiliar, worth zooming into. We are invited to learn more:

Why Study Abroad?

Study abroad can be a transformative experience in a student’s undergraduate education. Students return from abroad with fresh perspective on the Bard education, and other with ideas that serve as the foundation for their senior projects. Bard’s high expectations of student achievement extend to study abroad. Bard has developed a number of programs specifically designed to integrate students into foreign cultures and academic environments.

Especially when combined with related academic study and foreign language fluency, study abroad enables students to gain essential perspectives on the history, culture, and concerns of people around the globe. This includes such vital issues as globalization, democratization, human rights, development, culture, identity and the environment.

Marketed as an integral part of a Bard education, studying abroad promises a number of valuable assets to the motivated, high-achieving students and just as importantly, their primary sponsors (parents). Some obligatory/promising keywords include: perspective, integrate, culture, human rights, and globalization. Global Study is framed within the discourse of academia and educational enrichment, be it through its application in language acquisition, comparative economic and/or political systemology, or cultural fluency. These are the products being marketed, and sometimes they are also acquired. However, in mobilizing the imagination of the student of liberal arts, the experience is implicitly constructed as one that further equips him with the tools necessary to hold high-brow dinner conversation at the table with his elite cosmopolitan contemporaries.

Gayatri Spivak has enlightened students of globalization and cosmopolitanism in her articulation of the process of globality. Globality is the strategic rhetorical employment of globalization discourse that works to reaffirm and reproduce power hierarchies, be they neo-colonial, gendered, or otherwise. Spivak would urge us to re-read texts that employ the rhetorical devices of globality in order to make transparent these power structures and thus to see clearly the violent dynamics taking shape through talk of globalization. Thus, Global Study becomes less about the practical educational acquisitions it promises us and more about cultivating and enriching an elite class of globalists. Moreover, the marketing of the product only indulges in its superficiality until the moment of departure.