Culture and learning in the context of globalization: Research directions

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to lay out some new conceptualizations and research directions for understanding the relation of culture and learning in the shifting terrains of globalized economies and media flows, youth cultures, and transnational migration. In a time when young people’s experiences and life pathways are increasingly forged in the overlapping social and cultural spaces between economies and societies, there is a need to develop new approaches to working with issues of diversity that go beyond static, territorial, and state-bound categories to address the multiple kinds of intercultural transactions that characterize collective lives in the contemporary era. To this end, the author identifies the limitations of current formulations of cultural diversity that have restricted it to a “minority” issue within the locality of the nation-state. She draws on a social practice and transcultural perspective to discuss promising research directions for studying new formations of culture, community, identity, and processes of learning as young people interact with diverse others in the globalized spaces of media and migration. This discussion highlights the need to reconsider notions of culture and identity, of agency and learning, and of societal engagement and education of the multicultural youth population. In closing, she proposes some conceptual frames for developing an educational research agenda that engages with the new openings for cosmopolitanism and intercultural learning engendered by global conditions.