Susan Talburt

What's the Subject of Study Abroad?: Race, Gender, and "Living Culture"

Based on an ethnographic study that focused on the relations of students’ in- and out-of-class cultural learning during a 5-week study abroad program in Spain, this article analyzes processes of teaching and learning in a Spanish culture and civilization class, the experiences of the only African-American student on the program, and students’ responses to a class meeting in which race was overtly problematized. In contrast to the shared construction of cultural knowledge that characterized the class, discussion of race and gender was limited in its complexity, despite signs of new understandings among students. Given a need for all students to gain multiple cultural perspectives and growing evidence that peer groups constitute sources of identity and cross-cultural understanding for students abroad, we suggest that study abroad curricula incorporate sustained discussion of students’ sociocultural differences and resulting particularities in their experiences in the host culture as part of the formal curriculum.

‘After‐queer’ tendencies in queer research

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers’ visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.

Spatial imaginaries: universities, internationalization, and feminist geographies

In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of the strategic plans of two universities, one from the global South and the other from the global North, to understand how the constitution of space and place reconfigures human experience in the two institutions. We argue that universities do not simply respond to dominant logics of globalization but are active participants in its production. We draw on feminist geographers to elaborate how these universities’ discourses of internationalization reify a division of higher education as local ‘place’ and globalization as abstract global space, ‘out there’. This imaginary spatiality obscures the work of the ‘local’ in producing the ‘global’ with important implications for the redefinition of the student-citizen, useful knowledge, and managerial practices.

Reconsidering Learning Communities: Expanding the Discourse by Challenging the Discourse

This article draws on historical and philosophical lenses and interviews with students to question some fundamental tenets underlying the practice of freshman learning communities (FLCs): that they develop community and improve studentsÕ learning experiences. The article brings to the discourse of FLCs some critical questions regarding their value and practice.

‘After‐queer’: subjunctive pedagogies

This article offers a reading of the 2006 film The History Boys, which depicts eight male working‐class grammar school students preparing for exams to enter Oxford and Cambridge and two teachers who prepare them. I read the film’s subjunctive mood, which gestures to possibility and an ‘otherwise’, as connected to an analytic of ‘after‐queer’ that complicates linear understandings of youth, sexuality, development, and education. I elaborate three intertwined themes: the boys’ multiple relations to school knowledge; the blurring of categories of youth and adult through circulations of sexuality; and the dislocation of desire from predictable categories of identity. I connect the unpredictability and creativity of identities and desires to the need to open the research imagination to a subjunctive methodology that dwells in complicated temporalities, uncertain knowledges, and disorder that underlies seeming orders.

Producing global citizens for the future: space, discourse and curricular reform

This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education’s seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation’s next agents. In order to locate curriculum’s productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system’s attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about institutions, knowledges and subjects that furthers the production of a neoliberal global imaginary.