Emotion, Space and Society 23 (2017) 16e25
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Learning to feel global: Exploring the emotional geographies of worldschooling Jennie Germann Molz, PhD Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 30 June 2016 Received in revised form 2 December 2016 Accepted 14 February 2017
Worldschooling is a small but growing alternative education and lifestyle practice adopted by families who take their children out of conventional school settings and educate them while traveling the world. Many worldschooling families document their journeys on blogs and in social media forums, where they explicitly embrace the educational potential of travel and claim the world as their classroom. Drawing on a mobile virtual ethnography of worldschooling, including analysis of online materials along with interviews and field notes from seven months of fieldwork as a worldschooling parent, I explore the intersections of emotion, learning, mobility, and global citizenship in these accounts of worldschooling. While many parents design their mobile curricula around destination based content, they emphasize the repertoire of social and emotional skills their children learn while traveling around the world, often aligning these skills with aspirations of global citizenship. In this sense, global citizenship is about emotions as much as it is about exercising certain rights and responsibilities. In this article, I chart the overlapping emotional geographies that emerge around these performances of ‘feeling global,’ focusing especially on the tensions between individual emotions and broader affective climate of neoliberal globalization. © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords: Affective citizenship Emotional geographies Families Global citizenship Neoliberalism Structures of feeling Worldschooling
1. Introduction Carissa1 is a middle-class professional writer and mother of two school-aged children. She normally lives in New York with her husband, a tenured professor, but during his recent sabbatical, the family spent nine months traveling the world. Armed with books, projects, and plans for educating her children while on the road, Carissa soon found herself participating in a new phenomenon called worldschooling. Worldschooling sits at the intersection of alternative education movements, like homeschooling or unschooling, and forms of educational travel, such as study tours and study abroad programs. Worldschooling families, most of whom come from countries in the Global North, take their children out of conventional school settings to travel the world, sometimes for an academic year, like Carissa and her husband, and sometimes indefinitely. In an article she wrote for an educational website, Carissa describes some of the initial challenges she faced while educating her
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E-mail address:
[email protected]. The names of all respondents have been changed throughout the paper.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2017.02.001 1755-4586/© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
son and daughter on the road: A year ago last fall, I sat among huge potted ferns and birds of paradise on the patio of a guesthouse in the self-styled adventure town of Jinga, Uganda, with my then eight-year-old daughter. We were both crying. I was trying to get her to write an essay about an arts organization we had visited outside Kampala, Uganda's capital city, a week earlier, and she didn't want to do it. We (my husband, my daughter, my five-year-old son, and I) were barely a month into a nine-month trip around the world, and I'd already lost my patience for homeschooling. I'd been hoping that our travel through Africa and Asia would inspire my kids to learn more about what they were seeing, but each time we sat down to ‘do school,’ there was more resistance, and now tears. Discouraged by her daughter's resistance, Carissa decided to seek guidance online from other worldschooling families. The advice she received was to set aside the worksheets and let her children's interests determine what to study. Instead of meting out ‘hard-and-fast rules about how to worldschool or any set curriculums or pedagogies,’ Carissa writes, parents advised her to ‘trust
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that children by nature want to learn and that the world is the best classroom one could ever hope for.’ Carissa was encouraged by other worldschooling parents' examples of nine- and ten-year-old kids conducting independent research projects on currency markets, foreign political systems or irrigation techniques, but she was especially inspired by stories of ‘daily demonstrations of compassion e the trait American parents say they value most in their children e and grit.’ And she concludes: ‘What these traveling families had in common was the context for learning d the world around them d and the goal of preparing their children to live in an increasingly global and diverse world.’ Starting with her daughter's tears and Carissa's own aspirations and impatience with homeschooling, moving on to worldschooling's commitment to interest-led learning and outcomes of compassion and grit, and ending with a reference to the common goal of preparing children for a global and diverse world, Carissa's story hints at worldschooling's complex and layered emotional terrain. Emotion, especially as it relates to children becoming global citizens, is a central theme in worldschooling parents' accounts of traveling and learning, and I take the emotional geography of worldschooling as the key focus of this article. I propose the orienting concept of ‘feeling global.’ This concept refers to several things: the emotional skills children acquire on the road, the emotional climate of globalization in which these families travel, and the affective global citizenship that arises at this intersection. My aim in this paper is to explore the interplay between these layers of an explicit emotion curriculum and the implicit structures of feeling that shape the landscape of worldschooling, and to examine the global subjectivities and forms of global citizenship that this landscape enables. In the sections that follow, I begin by outlining the theoretical context and methodological approach on which my analysis is based. Next, I describe the ‘emotional curriculum’ of worldschooling and detail the emotional learning outcomes parents ascribe to traveling. I then place this curriculum in a larger affective context by reflecting on the ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) that characterize the current mood of neoliberal globalization. I conclude by examining the limits and possibilities of political agency in affective global citizenship. 2. Emotional geographies of education and citizenship The analysis I offer in this article is informed by several theoretical frameworks, beginning with the concept of emotional geographies, and more specifically emotional geographies of education. As Bondi et al. (2005: 3) describe it, the concept of emotional geographies draws attention to the way emotions mingle with places: Indeed, much of the symbolic importance of … places stems from their emotional associations, the feelings they inspire of awe, dread, worry, loss or love. An emotional geography, then, attempts to understand emotion e experientially and conceptually e in terms of its socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorised subjective mental states. In the case of worldschooling, emotional geographies are not exclusively connected to specific places, but rather to the mobile geographies of travel, to the spatial symbolism of the world as a classroom, and to feeling at home in the world as a global citizen. Worldschooling thus presents an intriguing case study of the emotional geographies of education and citizenship in the context of mobility. At stake here are questions of how emotion, learning, and belonging fold into one another across multiple spaces and scales and on the move.
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2.1. Emotional geographies of education In a special issue of Emotion, Space and Society, Kenway and Youdell (2011) extend the concept of emotional geographies to the field of education (and see Holloway et al., 2011; Gaztambidendez et al., 2013; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015). Recognizing a void Ferna in educational theory where questions of space and place should be, and seeking to resist the tendency of mainstream educational discourse to privilege rationality over emotion, Kenway and Youdell call instead for a socio-cultural-spatial analysis of education and emotion. Their introduction highlights three aspects of emotional geographies of education that are salient for my analysis of worldschooling: first, emotional geographies of education are multiscalar; second, they entail both articulated feelings (such as love, hate, or compassion) and pre-discursive affects as embodied sensations; and third, in these educational landscapes, emotions are experienced as both individual and social phenomena. In this section, I elaborate on these three aspects of emotional geographies of education and draw on relevant literature on transformative learning, structures of feeling, and affective citizenship to establish the theoretical basis for my analysis. 2.2. Multiscalar and mobile geographies Rather than assuming that educational spaces are merely passive containers for a set of reasoned and logical learning practices, Kenway and Youdell's socio-cultural-spatial approach pays attention to the various scales through which emotions are produced (2011: 132). The studies collected in their issue span from conventional educational places (desks and classrooms, campuses and playgrounds) to spaces outside of school (such as a class excursion along a canal tow-path) and to scales that extend beyond, and yet shape the emotional climate of, schools (such as educational policy reform measures at the national level). The result is what Kenway and Fahey (2011), following Appadurai (1990), call ‘emoscapes’ e ‘the movement and mobilization of emotion on intersecting global, national and personal scales’ (Kenway and Fahey, 2011: 187). The emotional geography of worldschooling is similarly multiscalar and mobile. Learning takes place on guest house patios, as we s, at historical sites, and anywhere saw in Carissa's story, in cafe families happen to be. In turn, these places are all constituted as educational spaces, as are sites of mobility, such as aboard trains or ferries or in bus stations and airport waiting areas. Learning also takes place within larger geopolitical contexts, for example against a backdrop of national educational policies that promote neoliberal educational agendas or, in some cases, prohibit alternative education movements like homeschooling or unschooling. But perhaps most revealing of this interweaving of personal, national, and global scales is the worldschooling philosophy that the world itself becomes a classroom. Presumably, every destination and every social encounter, and especially the act of moving between places, holds the possibility of learning something new. 2.3. Emotion and affect Kenway and Youdell observe that emotion enters educational theory in various ways, circulating through discourse and spaces both in the form of articulated feelings and as pre-discursive affects. On the one hand, scholars conceive of emotion in somewhat rational terms as one of multiple ‘intelligences,’ as a form of literacy, or as a ‘language of emotions in which feelings are identified through words e love, hate, fear, joy and disgust’ (133). Kenway and Youdell worry that framing emotion as a form of literacy merely corrals emotion within the confines of rational logic, effectively validating some emotions and emotional subjects while
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pathologizing others. Echoing this concern, Erica Burman (2009: 151) argues that the enterprise of ‘emotional literacy’ lends itself too readily to the neoliberal tendency to equate private emotional skills with economic prosperity and social inclusion. The task of feminist and transformative agendas, she cautions, is not to become literate about emotions, but rather to critique the project of emotional literacy as a discourse (150). The idea that emotion is a learned skill or competency becomes quite relevant in the way worldschooling parents write and talk about emotion and education. Thinking of emotion as an intelligence or a kind of literacy points toward the possibility that emotion is both an outcome of learning and a mode of learning, which I refer to in my analysis as the ‘emotional curriculum’ of worldschooling. However, following Burman's note of caution, I interrogate this curriculum as part of a power/knowledge discourse in which certain emotions are validated in performances of global citizenship. To understand how parents see traveling as the basis for this emotional curriculum, I turn to the concept of transformative learning as it has been applied in the context of volunteer tourism (Coghlan and Gooch, 2011). Based on the theories of Jack Mezirow (1978, 1991), who argued that potentially radical shifts in worldview could be achieved through critical examination and selfreflection in educational settings, transformative learning is, essentially, a consciousness-expanding shift in thought, feelings, and actions. In their review of the literature on volunteer tourism, Coghlan and Gooch note the affinity between travel and transformative learning. They found that most voluntourists regularly achieved the first step in Mezirow's process of transformative learning: experiencing a disorienting dilemma and coping with the resulting confusing emotions. Immersion in a new environment and the subsequent culture shock were important catalysts for selfreflection and a reappraisal of personal values and lifestyle choices that could then lead to ‘a changed way of looking at the world’ (2011: 721). When applied to the context of worldschooling, this theory highlights important links between traveling and the cultivation of certain self-reflective and affective competencies and ties together the strands of experience, learning, and emotion that surface as worldschooling parents refer to the pedagogical potential of travel. As families move from place to place, the mobile geographies of worldschooling inspire certain emotional outcomes e a repertoire of emotional competencies that I describe below as the emotional curriculum of global citizenship e derived through travel. While transformative learning requires subjects to observe and articulate emotion as a mechanism for learning, the emotional landscape of worldschooling cannot be reduced to conscious outcomes or explicit emotional skills. As Kenway and Youdell explain, emotional geographies of education are also affective, in the Deleuzian sense of ‘pre-discursive, pre-personal … affective intensities [that] flow through educational sites and encounters in ways that exceed any notion of a unitary subject, even an emotional unitary subject’ (2011: 133). Inspired largely by the works of Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari, a rich body of scholarship has culminated in an ‘affective turn’ in social theory (see inter alia Clough and Halley, 2007; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), with scholars like Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007), Watkins (2006, 2011) and Pimlott-Wilson (2015) bringing the ‘affective turn’ to bear on studies of emotion, education, and space. For my part, and for the purposes of this paper, I trace affect through Raymond Williams's (1977) concept of ‘structures of feeling.’ With this concept, Williams argues that each generation or particular historical period has a certain feel to it that connects people's inner emotional worlds to a broader social atmosphere. Although emotions appear to originate within individuals, they are actually external and coercive (and see Hochschild, 1983; Ahmed,
2004a). This leads to a third important aspect of the emotional geographies of worldschooling: they are both individual and social. 2.4. Individual and social Whereas some education scholars understand affect and emotion as part of the interior world of the individual subject, others conceive emotions as social; they ‘flow between people, they animate social, cultural, political and economic collectivities and travel across time, place and space’ (Kenway and Youdell, 2011: 133). Emotions seem natural, interior, and individual but they are actually intersubjective and socially patterned, and often not even in a discernable or conscious way. In this sense, affect is not reducible to personal feelings, but rather refers to the more abstract dynamic that emerges when emotions flow across the social field (Ahmed, 2004b: 120). For some scholars, the focus on emotional geographies of education is an opportunity to balance empirical studies of children's personal, everyday experiences with concerted attention to the wider processes, such as ‘neoliberalisation, social reproduction and globalization,’ that shape those experiences (Holloway et al., 2011). With Williams's concept of ‘structures of feeling,’ I aim to capture these unarticulated tensions and intensities e the ones that exist in between the self and the collective e that shape the emotional terrain of worldschooling. More recently, several scholars have sought to tease out the mood of the current historical period characterized by the rise of neoliberal capitalism, unprecedented technological advances, and unparalleled levels of global mobility (Bauman, 1998; Wittel, 2001). These accounts of ‘the emotional consequences of globalization,’ as Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert (2006) put it, inform my navigation through the affective qualities of social life in this age of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000). In other words, what does this global moment feel like and how does it shape and propel practices of worldschooling? 2.5. Affective citizenship In tracing the overlapping emotional geographies of worldschooling I engage finally with the literature on affective citizenship to ask how feeling global becomes a marker of global citizenship. The scholarship on affective citizenship reveals how civic and national identities are formed through an emotional register of appropriate and desirable ways of feeling about oneself and others (Berlant, 1997; Mookherjee, 2005; Johnson, 2008; Fortier, 2010). According to these scholars, the relationship between the subject and the state is premised on intimate and familial relationships, on cultivating feelings of loyalty and affection toward the nation, and on the practice of compassionate or empathetic responsibility toward others as a basis for good citizenship (Berlant, 1997, 2004; Johnson, 2008; Fortier, 2007, 2010). In other words, citizenship entails a kind of emotional labor, where the nation and its citizens produce and manage normative emotional expressions and attachments toward the state, toward fellow citizens, or toward ‘others’ in the context of democratic multiculturalism. Much of this literature has analyzed affective citizenship at the national rather than global scale. To the extent that global citizenship has entered the discussion, the focus has tended to be on managing citizens' emotional responses to the cross-border flows of people, ideas, objects, and images that come with globalization (Hung, 2010), a project that nevertheless reproduces citizenship and the citizenry at a national scale. In the literature on cosmopolitanism, however, we do find accounts of emotion in the realm of global citizenship. In her defense of cosmopolitan education, for example, Martha Nussbaum (1996) counters the assumption that
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only national citizenship can provoke a richly textured sense of patriotic loyalty, in contrast to the necessarily bland, colorless detachment of global citizenship. On the contrary, Nussbaum argues, the loyalty and affection we feel for the nation can extend to the world of human life as a whole (1996: xiii). To be a global subject, then, is not only to feel certain feelings (such as love or loyalty) but to direct those feelings toward certain others (not just toward fellow national citizens, but to all members of the global community). The point here is not to argue that global citizenship is or should be just as affective as national citizenship, but rather to highlight how citizenship itself, at both national and global scales, slides from a premise of rights and responsibilities into the realm of emotion and affect. What happens when global citizenship is understood almost exclusively in emotional terms? After all, this is how worldschooling families seem to understand it, both in the emotional learning outcomes they promote through travel and, more obliquely, in their emotional response to the shifting terrain of neoliberal globalization. Before turning to this analysis, however, I provide an overview of the study's methodological approach. 3. Study methods Although we do not have precise numbers on the size of the worldschooling community, the growth of homeschooling in the U.S. and among expat families abroad suggests that more and more families are opting for alternatives to conventional public or private schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2016; Mitic, 2016). The term ‘worldschooling’ has also proliferated in mainstream media outlets (Hsia, 2015; Choat, 2016), online, and in social media forums since 2011. A facebook group called ‘Worldschoolers’ added more than 6000 members in an 18-month period between 2014 and 2015, and similar groups have appeared online in the past few years. Not all of the families in these groups are currently traveling e some have returned home, some are in the planning stages, and many are just dreaming e but these numbers suggest that worldschooling is taking hold as an idea and as a practice. My study of the emergence of worldschooling is based on a ‘mobile virtual ethnography’ (Germann Molz, 2012) that combines online, face-to-face, and on-the-move research. I spent twelve months following and studying the travel blogs that worldschooling families published online. The database of 50 blogs represents a purposive sample generated through online search engines and virtual snowballing (Noy, 2008; Baltar and Brunet, 2012). I also engaged in social media forums, such as the facebook groups mentioned earlier, where worldschooling communities congregate to share advice and inspiration. I gained access to those sites by virtue of traveling as a worldshooling parent myself. For seven of the twelve months of field work, I traveled the world with my husband and our son, who was ten years old at the time. Along the way, I met, traveled with, and interviewed a dozen worldschooling families in person in Argentina, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States. Here, too, my status as a fellow worldschooling parent, not to mention as a white, middle-class professional, positioned me as a member of the community, which facilitated my access to these families. Transcripts from these interviews, along with content from the travel blogs and ethnographic field notes, were coded, categorized and analyzed using Atlas.ti, a computerassisted analysis software program. Triangulating these various sources of data yields a deeper understanding of the cultural context that shapes the personal meanings parents attribute to traveling and learning. In coding the data, I used qualitative and inductive techniques to identify recurring themes and discern patterns in and across the data. During this process, explicit and implicit references to emotions appeared as a significant theme
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that merited further examination. It is worth noting that some of these themes surfaced in light of my own experiences as a worldschooling parent. Like Carissa, I felt anxious about keeping my son on track academically. Unable to maintain a daily schedule for schoolwork in the midst of traveling, I eventually adopted a less structured approach to his education that focused more on developing social and emotional skills than on achieving standard curricular goals. As we will see in the next section, this emerged as a common narrative in my data as well. Due to the terms of my institutional human subject research approval, I only interviewed parents and children above the age of 18, and so the perspectives on emotion and affect presented below primarily represent parents' accounts of, and aspirations for, their children's emotional accomplishments. This is not meant to discount the views and experiences of the children themselves, who make massive emotional investments in their families' worldschooling projects. Literature foregrounding children's perspectives of migration, expatriate lifestyles, or third culture upbringings is evidence of the profound insights children bring to bear on the emotional aspects of mobility and place attachment (see, inter alia, Eidse and Sichel, 2004; Nette and Hayden, 2007; Laoire et al., 2010; Lijadi and van Schalkwyk, 2014). In worldschooling, too, there is a rich vein of children's emotional narratives that I hope future research will mine. For now, my analysis focuses on their parents' narratives. All of the names associated with the data extracts presented below have been changed. Who, precisely, are worldschoolers? After all, who can afford to take their kids out of school and travel the world for a year, and in some cases indefinitely? Some of the families are, like Carissa and her husband or like me, working in professions that offer paid sabbaticals. Others are recently unemployed (not always by choice) or have become self-employed (and self-proclaimed) digital nomads whose freelance work is online and portable. A few parents are able to travel on their savings, or they find temporary local work teaching or housesitting along the way. As many travelers point out on their blogs, their cost of living is often far cheaper traveling and living outside of their home countries, and so they are able to make do on much smaller incomes. The majority of parents in my blog sample and those I interviewed in person are white, middle-class, professionals in their 30s and 40s. Their children range in age from infants born on the road to teenagers entering university, though most of the children are around elementary and middleschool age. While most of the families in the sample fit the heteronormative definition of a nuclear family, there are several singleparent and same-sex parent families, as well as blended and adoptive families, including several families traveling with children who have special needs. Throughout this article, I sometimes refer to respondents generally as ‘parents’ or as ‘families,’ and at other times as ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers.’ While a systematic analysis of gender is beyond the scope of this particular article, it is worth noting that parenting among worldschoolers, as in other forms of alternative education, involves gendered forms of emotional labor, with mothers often shouldering a sense of anxiety and responsibility for their children's educational achievements (Lois, 2012). For the most part, these families' original countries of residence are in North America, Europe, or Australia. Of the 62 families in my blog and interview samples, 37 have their primary original residence in the U.S.; 10 in Australia; 8 in Canada; 1 in France; 2 in the U.K.; and 1 each in South Africa, Italy, Bulgaria, and Holland. Breaking these numbers down by country of residence does not account for the fact that several of the families represent more than one ethnicity or nationality (for example, one parent may be from the U.S. and the other from Japan), so it is difficult to generalize the demographic details by family. What is evident, however, is the fact
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that these families primarily come from positions of cultural, national, racial, and/or class privilege, which is important to keep in mind as I describe the subjective performances and emotional geographies of feeling global in the sections that follow.
My dream for my girls is that they come back not just well educated and more globally aware, but more confident and selfassured. More ready for the trials of adolescence. More digital e real 21st century learners. More empathetic. More worldly. More everything.
4. The emotional curriculum of global citizenship
(Alison, blog post)
Parents have high hopes about what their children will learn from worldschooling. Like Carissa in the opening vignette, they often set out with ambitious curricular goals, imagining that their children will learn math, science, history, and writing and become fluent in foreign languages against an ever-changing cultural backdrop as they travel the world. To some extent, this does happen. More commonly, however, parents report abandoning curricular plans, textbooks, and worksheets once the logistical realities of traveling set in. Indeed, Carissa's story mirrors my own experience educating my son on the road and reflects a common refrain in my data. What her story also captures is the idea that even if children aren't completing a standard academic curriculum, they gain ‘life lessons,’ namely the social and emotional skills e like compassion or grit e needed to live in a global and diverse world. This is the claim I interrogate in this section. On their blogs and in interviews, many parents emphasize the emotional competencies their kids are learning, perhaps as compensation for their anxiety about what their kids aren't learning. One example is Bev, a mother of two children and a former teacher from the U.S., who reluctantly gave up the prescripted curriculum she had packed. As she explains on her blog: ‘We decided to make the world our classroom instead of imposing some kind of classroom on the road.’ A few months later, reflecting on the question ‘What did we really learn on the road?’ Bev writes: ‘Did we learn any Math or Science or Writing skills? Absolutely! Was it what they would [have] learned if we had stayed at home? No way!’ Bev devotes the rest of her blog post to outlining her children's ‘Unconventional Syllabus.’ The syllabus includes topics such as ‘perspective,’ ‘play,’ ‘communication,’ ‘resilience,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘respect’ and ‘gratitude,’ emotional skills that her children learned through the hardships of travel, according to Bev's explanation: [W]ith every night spent sleeping on the floor, encounter with strangers, longer than expected hike, or mysterious food item we have grown. My worrying child now has lots of examples of how she made it through. We found that laughing about what seemed so dark at the time moved the incident quickly into part of family lore. For us, newfound resilience and confidence have come from dealing with disappointment, overcoming obstacles, and finding the joy (or at least the humor) in each day. (Bev, blog post) In posts similar to Bev's ‘Unconventional Syllabus,’ parents, usually mothers, often conceded that they only covered a portion of the standard content skills, but emphasized that their children were learning social and emotional skills: how to be confident, how to cope with change, how to be compassionate, and how to be global citizens. Elsa, a mother from the U.S., posted a list of things her son and daughter had learned while traveling. After briefly mentioning content skills in biology, geography, math, and languages, Elsa describes at length her kids' ability to read other people, to be in tune with others' emotions and feelings, to live simply and in the moment, to be aware of their responsibility to help others, and to be flexible. And Alison, a mother from Canada, who traveled with her husband and their three daughters, wrote on her blog:
Posts like these suggest that parents' hopes for their children's learning extend beyond the curricular standards of formal education to include emotional and self-reflexive skills as well. After reading many similar narratives emphasizing what I refer to as the emotional curriculum of worldschooling, I began to compile a list of the emotional skills and competencies parents highlighted in blog posts and interviews (see Table 1). This list raises more questions than I have space to address here, but I do want to make three points. First is the combination of self-oriented and other-oriented emotions. Children are encouraged to relate to themselves through self-reflexive emotions such as resilience, confidence and gratitude and to others through compassion, empathy and respect. To borrow from the literature on ‘affective citizenship,’ to be a global citizen is to feel a particular way about yourself and others; and it is to develop a set of emotional skills or a kind of emotional intelligence about one's place in the world. In this case, however, the ‘other’ toward whom emotions like respect or tolerance are directed remains an unspecified any other. These emotions seem to be less about actual social relations than they are about cultivating a kind of emotional subjectivity that can travel around the world and across cultural differences with relative ease. In other words, it is ndez, Cairns and Desai's about feeling entitled. Gaztambide-Ferna (2013) research on entitlement in elite schools is informative in this regard. In their interviews with students at exclusive schools, they found that as young people internalized feelings of comfort, belonging, and entitlement within the space of the school, they developed a sense of agency ‘first, in relationship to the self and to a sense of endless possibilities for success in the future, and second, [in] the sense of endless capacities to influence the lives of others, particularly through charity work’ (2013: 43). For GaztambideFern andez, Cairns and Desai, ‘feeling entitled to act in the interest of “Others” … secures privileged students’ sense of their own capacity’ (44). Similarly, the emotions that worldschooling children are encouraged to feel (for example, it is appropriate to feel tolerance or empathy toward others, but not envy) reinforce their privilege while the agency they exercise helps them internalize a sense of entitlement. A second and related point is that this list frames global citizenship in almost exclusively emotional terms, thereby obscuring the expression and reproduction of privilege that underpins the practice of worldschooling. While traveling through different countries abroad, children are not held to civic obligations like
Table 1 The emotional curriculum of worldschooling. Adaptability At home anywhere Caring-at-a-distance Communication Compassion Cross-cultural understanding Empathy Flexibility Global awareness
Grit Independence Perspective Resilience Respect Responsibility Self-awareness Self-confidence Tolerance
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paying taxes nor can they exercise civic rights such as voting, owning property, or accessing government welfare programs. If citizenship, broadly defined, entails certain rights and obligations, the global citizenship encouraged in worldschooling children entails a sense of entitlement (e.g. to feel at home anywhere) or a sense of obligation toward others (e.g. responsibility or tolerance) in place of constitutionally codified rights and responsibilities. This brings me to the third point, which is the emphasis on positive emotions, at least according to middle-class, western values. Compassion, empathy, gratitude and tolerance are all framed as desirable and legitimate emotional responses to encounters with difference. Absent from the lists parents post are emotions like anger, disgust, hate or even homesickness. This gives us a clue to the emotional parameters within which global citizens are expected to operate. Of course, parents do mention negative emotions elsewhere on their blogs, with references to discomfort, frustration, homesickness, breakdowns, fear, culture shock, and anxiety, but these negative emotions are seen as crucial steps toward transformative learning. Pain and discomfort are means to an end, not emotional outcomes in themselves. In fact, parents often describe deliberately pushing kids out of their comfort zones. As one parent explains: [W]hen a child steps out of her comfort zone and is immersed in new languages, cultures, and customs, she significantly increases her scope of opportunity. … If you want to raise a globally-minded child, you must travel outside your country and culture. (Tracy, blog post) In this passage, Tracy, who travels the world with her husband and nine children, explains how learning to be ‘globally-minded’ stems from the embodied and emotional lessons of discomfort. The notion of pushing kids out of their comfort zones relates to the transformative potential of experiencing a ‘disorienting dilemma’, as O'Sullivan (2002: 11) explains: Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and irreversibly alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender; our body awarenesses, our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy. According to this definition of transformative learning, children learn through feelings, and even through pain and disorientation. Emotion is thus a conduit for, as well as an outcome of, learning. Elsa and Ben, two parents from the U.S. who were traveling through Asia with their twelve-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter, reflected this notion in our interview. Ben described some of the emotional breakdowns and difficulties their son and daughter experienced while adapting to other cultures and to life on the road, to which Elsa commented: ‘Not that I want them to go through any pain, but through that, that's when you grow, that's when you figure things out’ (interview transcript). Worldschooling parents often cited physical and social discomfort e the lack of material amenities, encounters with strangers (especially in a different language), being confronted with unfamiliar foods or environments, or coming face-to-face with material poverty (often through volunteer experiences; see Germann Molz, 2015) e as mechanisms for producing these emotional competencies. Pushing children out of their comfort zones helps them develop emotional
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skills like adaptability, flexibility, or empathy that will allow them to feel at home anywhere in the world. The emotional difficulties of homesickness, missing friends, or constant movement are reasonable risks in light of the potential rewards. But why these emotional competencies? Why are social and emotional skills like flexibility, adaptability, tolerance, or an ability to read people seen as the emotional core of global citizenship? One way of answering these questions is to consider the research on volunteer tourism where scholars have drawn insightful connections between travel and emotions in the new economy (Lyons et al., 2012; Jones, 2011; Smith and Laurie, 2011; Vrasti, 2013; Allon and Koleth, 2014). This research reveals that, in addition to wanting to help people, many volunteer tourists express a desire to cultivate certain emotional and social sensibilities, like open-mindedness, intercultural communication skills, flexibility, and a global outlook; qualities that give individuals a competitive edge in a neoliberal labor market that values people who can move fluidly across borders, are emotionally flexible, and adapt easily to rapid changes (Lyons et al., 2012: 370). As Allon and Koleth put it, the ‘performance of emotional labour and the accumulation of emotional intelligence and competence … are indispensable to the ideal neoliberal workplace’ (2014: 63). In her study of voluntourism, Wanda Vrasti (2013) suggests that we must consider the neoliberal conditions under which travel, emotion, and global citizenship collide. In the current neoliberal moment, where economic policies and government practices corral all aspects of social life within a logic of market rationality, citizens are encouraged ‘to give their lives entrepreneurial shape’ (Vrasti, 2013: 21). Among the marketable skills that workers should develop are social and emotional competencies, like the ones that travel yields. As Vrasti (2013: 130) explains: Being ‘at home in the world’ is no longer the mark of the cosmopolitan aristocracy … but a requirement for all workers who wish to enter the ranks of the middle class. Because it places young adults in trying circumstances and foreign settings, volunteer tourism … can help individuals amass scarce social capital, demonstrate their cognitive and communicative skills, and become the transgressive, risk-taking subjectivities multinational capital thrives on. In this passage, Vrasti argues that voluntourists are complying with a neoliberal imperative to work on themselves, including developing their emotional toolkits, as objects of entrepreneurialism and responsibility. In the case of worldschooling, this work falls to parents; children's emotional states and skills become objects of parental intervention, care and responsibility. It would be a stretch to suggest that worldschooling parents are deliberately trying to build their children's CVs. (Although more than one parent noted that their children's travel experiences would likely show up on college admissions essays.) Most voluntourists are in their early twenties, much closer to the working world and therefore more likely to focus on distinguishing themselves on the job market. Nevertheless, this imperative extends to younger children, as emotional sensibilities are increasingly codified and commodified in state curricula and standardized tests that promote and assess children's emotional and character skills (Millei, 2007; Ecclestone, 2013; Miyamoto et al., 2015). And worldschooling parents are certainly not the only ones hoping to develop their children's emotional repertoires through exposure to cultural otherness. In their study of white middle-class families who opt to send their children to inner-city comprehensive schools in London, Reay et al. (2007: 1044) found that middle-class parents felt ‘passionate about the need to produce well-rounded, tolerant individuals.’ Like worldschooling parents, the parents in Reay et al.’s study described their children as ‘socially fluent and
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adaptable,’ ‘more resilient,’ and able to ‘access, know, take part in, and feel confident about using a wide variety of cultures,’ all valuable skills gained through encounters with the racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse composition of the comprehensive schools (1044e1046). Furthermore, Reay, et al. point out that parents are not just accruing emotional capital for their children; they also ‘display their liberal credentials and secure their class position’ (1046). The same may be said about worldschooling parents who consolidate their own self-image as open-minded and adaptable, perhaps as justification for their children's difficult emotional experiences. In both cases, it is important to note that diversity, whether experienced in a comprehensive school setting or through travel, becomes a source of ‘multi-cultural global capital’ (1051) that enriches the present and future lives of white, middleclass children for whom ‘global-mindedness’ is a competitive advantage in the neoliberal labor market. Nevertheless, I want to resist the temptation to claim that emotional curriculum of worldschooling merely reflects the ideology of a neoliberal regime; after all, these emotional competencies e empathy, flexibility, resilience, and open-mindedness e may be just as useful for radical activists seeking to build solidarities or imagine alternative futures as they are for advancing neoliberalism's free market imperatives. And as we will see in the next section, many parents opt to worldschool as a way of rejecting the neoliberal exigencies of modern western lifestyles. But there is a quote in Vrasti's book that stays with me, and that pushes me to consider the emotional geographies of worldschooling from another angle. She writes: ‘it is not that we have acquiesced to neoliberalism; rather we have become emotionally attached to it’ (2013: 55). In other words, the political and economic milieu of neoliberalism has a certain feeling to it. Pulsing beneath the lists of children's budding emotional skills is another emotional geography, an atmosphere of welling tensions, yearning and uncertainty. 5. Mapping the emotional climate of globalization The emotional curriculum I've just described appears when we zoom in on worldschooling families and map their personal travels and stories of feeling global. If we zoom out, however, another emotional terrain comes into view, if not necessarily into focus. Or perhaps a better metaphor than zooming in and out is switching filters. The emotional curriculum of worldschooling is like a digital map's standard filter, displaying roads as tidy white lines with their names spelled out in sharp fonts. The satellite filter, by contrast, depicts the same terrain but gives us a moodier account, not quite so straightforward or legible. Through this filter, we can sense a more amorphous emotional geography that shapes the worldschooling project. This affective landscape makes itself felt in various ways as parents and families negotiate their personal feelings of discontentment, hope, or regret within a broader atmosphere of an overscheduled, materialistic, competitive modern life. This dimension of worldschooling's emotional geography, where private emotional experiences overlap with the collectively shared feelings of a particular historical moment, is what Raymond Williams refers to as a ‘structure of feeling.’ For Williams (1977: 132), a structure of feeling is ‘a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.’ Structures of feeling entail ‘all the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts, and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and confusion’ (1977: 129e130) and the ‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone’ (132) that infuse and influence social life, but remain unnamed. They are the formative and embryonic, but unarticulated and even unconscious, ways of thinking and feeling that give a social experience or historical
period its particular quality. And even though structures of feeling are not the ‘formally held and systematic beliefs’ of a culture, they ‘exert palpable pressure’ from the outside in (Williams, 1977). In other words, emotions that manifest at the level of subjective experience e that feel like they emanate from our private, inner worlds e are really collective and structural. It is through structures of feeling that private emotional experiences intersect with the collectively shared feelings of a specific historical period (Best, 2012). Collective desires and anxieties are felt as personal hopes and fears, and vice versa. For example, Carissa's story at the start of this article joins a litany of implicitly emotional confessions from parents who grasp for words and metaphors to express why they decided to uproot their families to travel the world and what it feels like to teach their children on the road. Their stories, which I return to later in this section, open a window onto the ‘structures of feeling’ that shape worldschooling as a strategy for, and as a symptom of, living in the midst of neoliberal globalization. Understanding the feel of this particular moment is at the heart of an essay, and later a book, in which Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert (2006) explore the ‘emotional climate’ of globalization. The protagonist of their essay is a self-made millionaire named Larry who seeks therapy for a range of psychological and emotional complaints e anxiety, insecurity and depression e brought on by his cutthroat, globe-trotting corporate lifestyle. Although tremendously successful in the tech industry, Larry suffers the ‘souldestroying’ effects of constant travel, mass consumerism, and ‘prepackaged scripts for living’ that have become the background hum of daily life in the Global North (Elliott and Lemert, 2006: 75). The way Larry ‘feels global’ echoes the parents in my study, many of whom remark on the numbing effects of modern life. For example, Mia and Jay, both educators from the U.S., wrote this blog post explaining why they decided to leave their jobs and take their two children out of school to travel: To Escape e We are getting away from our over-scheduled, overstimulated, suburban-American lifestyle. A break from school, work, lessons, meetings, events, housework, and people (you know we love you!). We are escaping the stresses that clouded and weighed down our daily lives. It had become clear that we weren't our happiest selves, that the kids were growing up too quickly, that we needed to change our path and pace. So we left what we knew e to see life elsewhere e to get a grip. Maybe you can relate? (Mia and Jay, blog post) Apparently many worldschooling parents can relate. They use metaphors like ‘hamster wheel,’ ‘rat race,’ and ‘rat trap’ to capture the sense of monotony, competition, and limitation they associate with their prototypically corporate work lives and modern lifestyles. Other parents write about feeling trapped by an ‘overweight anchor’ of material possessions, ‘living life by default, watching the years pass and the regrets add up,’ and spending every free moment wondering if ‘there was more to life’ (various blog posts). Experiences with public education also generate a sense of personal angst in some parents who worry about the rise of highstakes testing, standardization, and control in their children's classrooms. Jay, the father cited above, explains that: A major angst-factor that nudged me toward this trip was EDUCATION. In a nutshell: 1. Our kids' school experiences have been heavy on paper-pencil rigor/quantity of content, and light on choice/open-ended learning. 2. Our public school system prioritizes standardization/high-stakes tests. 3. My own
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teaching/parenting style conflicts with the current priorities of public school, BUT, I believe in public education e that it should be and can be the best education for all kids. What to do? Flee. Observe my kids learning outside the classroom. Cross my fingers that a resolution to my school-angst will fall from the Southeast Asian sky right in my lap. (Jay, blog post, emphasis in original) Clearly, there is a motif of escape in these extracts, but it is one that plays out in the context of family life rather than in the pure individualism Elliott and Lemert identify. In this sense, the desire to escape intertwines with other tensions that come with the climate of ‘anxious parenting in uncertain times’ (Nelson, 2010). As Nelson argues, modern parents e especially the kind of middle-class, cosmopolitan-oriented parents in my study e are detached from traditional prescriptions for parenting and therefore are free to experiment with different ways of raising and relating to their children; but in a neoliberal society they are responsible for the consequences of those choices, all of which leads to anxiety and uncertainty. In blog posts explaining their decision to travel, parents come to terms with the emotional stakes of the tension between freedom and responsibility, as evident in the following comments from these two fathers from the U.S.: You only live once. The phrase is so overused. But if you really stop and think about it, you realize that you had better make the most of life because chances are pretty good that this is the only one you're going to get. … I recognize that this change that we're making is a huge responsibility but I also know what a privilege it is and I don't intend to take it for granted or to waste it. I know we can't live like there's no tomorrow but we're also not going to live like we know there is. (Mark, blog post) So much freedom, so much choice, so many opportunities to do something amazing. And yet, it is our natural instinct to find a place to hold us, a spot where we are safe from the obligation/ opportunity to choose. Because if we choose, then we are responsible, and we have to take risks, and risks are scary, because they make us vulnerable. (Kyle, blog post) In these passages, we can perceive a confluence of emotions that flow around uncertainty. There is a sense of privilege, but possibly also guilt; a sense of hope for new opportunities; a desire to nestle, to be safe, and even to avoid the opportunity and obligation to choose; and a sense of fear and vulnerability. In a world where past ways of doing things no longer dictate what is possible today or tomorrow, identity becomes a matter of self-reflexivity and personal responsibility. On the one hand, Elliott and Lemert note, these are ‘identities with a wondrous capacity for continual change and instant transformation’ (2006: 97). On the other hand, they note that we now ‘live in a time when there is no choice but to make continual choice (from lifestyles and careers to travel and relationships)’ (Nelson, 2010) Grappling with the simultaneously freeing and terrifying effects of this individualism, they say, leads people down ‘a labyrinth of self-doubt and uncertainty’ (99). And uncertainty, with its potentially liberating and potentially catastrophic possibilities, is perhaps the quintessential feeling of our time. These blog passages also suggest a sense of urgency. You only live once, children grow up so fast, and dreams can quickly turn into regrets. As one mother put it after realizing that her eleven-yearold twins were ‘hurtling into tweenhood’: ‘The desire to slow the
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clock, quiet the tick tock of the daily grind and expand all of our horizons beckons’ (Stephanie, blog post). Instead of accepting these realities as the natural order of the life cycle, the parents I cite here experience them as an existential wake-up call. It is an urgent reminder that you can't just live your life; you have to create it and cultivate it and make it amazing. And your children's lives, too. Many scholars have observed that making our way in the precarious landscape of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) will require a new set of social and emotional competencies to navigate these uncertainties and urgencies (Wittel, 2001). This is precisely what Paula Bialski (2011, 2012) found in her work on the mobile intimacies of hitchhiking and Couchsurfing. She suggests that life in a mobile world, where we are constantly moving in and out of social constellations with strangers, requires certain kinds of emotional skills and labor. She argues that ‘negotiating interaction between strangers, … avoiding intimacy, anticipating closeness, becoming attached and then detached e these are all skills people have to acquire and adapt to as they increasingly become mobile and come into contact with mobile others’ (2012: 127). This is another node where the emotional curriculum of worldschooling and the emotional climate of globalization map onto one another. The emotional curriculum of global citizenship may not just be about preparing children for future work in the neoliberal economy, but equipping them to cope with the social and emotional costs of globalization. 6. Affective global citizenship and the politics of emotion It is difficult to know whether feeling global is a way of rejecting the emotional fallout of neoliberal globalization, a strategy for escaping from it, or merely another way of acquiescing to its logic. Does the emotional curriculum of worldschooling simply feed into the neoliberal labor market's demand for emotionally flexible workers? Is learning to ‘feel global’ a way of cultivating in individuals the emotional wherewithal to cope with the brittle, ephemeral socialities and soul-destroying symptoms of globalization? Or can it equip them with the emotional fortitude to demand structural change? Which brings us to a final question: what is the political capacity of affective citizenship or feeling global? On the one hand, scholars critique the de-politicizing effects of sentimentality in neoliberal forms of governing. For example, in an analysis of government policies aimed at managing race relations in the U.K., Fortier (2010: 22) explains how instead of tackling the ‘economic, social and historical forces that structure inequalities and tensions,’ such policies favor individual feelings as measures of community cohesion. The result is a public domain that endorses only good personal feelings e those stemming from ‘fun, cool, easy and meaningful interactions’ e but prohibits any ‘negative feelings that might be at the heart of political contestation, conflict and debate’ (27). Elsewhere, she observes that positive feelings like tolerance and multicultural intimacy create an illusion ‘that power relations and conflicts will be somehow suspended through intimacy, and that the distance and hierarchy between those who tolerate and those who are tolerated will dissolve’ (Fortier, 2007: 111). Positive emotions toward others may appear to be evidence of democratic communities, but in fact hold little capacity for undoing structural inequalities. This is similar to worldschooling, where the global subjectivities being produced are not necessarily focused on democratic rights or obligations, but on emotion as an end in itself. A parallel critique emerges in the literature on volunteer tourism, where instead of exercising political agency in the public realm, voluntourists are encouraged to focus on transforming themselves emotionally and pursuing ‘morally justifiable lifestyles’ (Butcher and Smith, 2010: 30). Likewise, Conran (2011) finds that western volunteers in Thailand want to experience intense
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personal emotions, especially feelings of intimacy with the young children in their care. In her critique of this desire for intimacy, Conran argues that ‘the focus on intimacy overshadows the structural inequality on which the encounter is based and reframes the question of structural inequality as a question of individual morality’ (2011: 1455). The result is that emotions like ‘intimacy, goodwill and compassion are used to justify and depoliticize the volunteer experience’ (1465). In other words, by shifting the focus away from the historical or political roots of global inequalities and onto the emotional experiences of individuals, the discourse of sentimentality precludes radical, political solutions to structural inequalities. On the other hand, these scholars and many others (Ahmed, 2004a; Berlant, 2004; Massumi, 2015) also argue that emotion and affect are political. What is at stake in affective global citizenship, then, isn't a dichotomy between sentimentality and politics, but rather deeper questions about whose feelings and which emotions are validated or elided in discourses of feeling global. To paraphrase Fortier, it is not just a matter of developing a sense of tolerance, but a question of who gets to feel tolerance and who must be tolerated. Moving back and forth between the explicit emotional curriculum of global citizenship and a broader structure of feeling reveals that the emotions children learn are not natural or neutral, but rather are part and parcel of the feel of neoliberal globalization. Rather than accepting or advocating certain ‘good’ feelings, such as tolerance, respect, or compassion, as emotional markers of global citizenship e and even these seemingly appropriate responses to global conditions of inequality must be interrogated closely (Berlant, 2000, 2004) e we can ask which feelings and whose feelings do, and do not, make the list and how this reflects the intensities and mood of this particular moment of globalization. Against a backdrop of uncertainty, worldschooling children are encouraged to enact certain affective ties and emotional responses as they move through the world. They learn to call up particular emotions toward themselves (as self-reflexive, confident, and resilient subjects), toward others (as objects of compassion, empathy, tolerance, and respect), and toward their own privileged position in the world (such as gratitude, responsibility, entitlement, or feeling at home anywhere and everywhere), emotions which come to stand for global citizenship. ‘Feeling global,’ then, is about feeling one's way through a fundamentally unequal and uncertain world. As children cultivate these global feelings, not only do they learn the emotional skills they need to navigate in a world of difference, but they also internalize a sense of entitlement regarding their own positions of privilege within that world (Gaztambidendez et al., 2013). In other words, their emotional skillset e Ferna the ability to feel tolerant, adaptable, or open-minded e is evidence that these white, middle-class children are occupying their rightful place in a global and diverse world. These feelings justify their entitlement to the world as their classroom and to the agency and privilege they enjoy there. 7. Conclusion In this article, I have charted the overlapping emotional geographies of worldschooling in an effort to understand how travel facilitates learning to live in a global and diverse world, how emotions are both a conduit for and an outcome of this learning, and how these lessons unfold within an affective atmosphere of neoliberal globalization. While there remains much research to be done to bring children's feelings into this picture, to account for gendered forms of emotional labor among mothers and fathers, and to make sense of the contested and disjunctive flows within and among worldschooling families, this article advocates for an
approach that sees these emotional geographies as mobile, multiscalar, and simultaneously individual and social. Beginning with Carissa's story of abandoning a set curriculum and instead seeing the world as a classroom, I examined the emotional curriculum many worldschooling parents attribute to traveling. Children are encouraged to relate to themselves and to others through ‘appropriate’ emotions that align with the kind of emotional labor neoliberal capitalism requires of workers and that count for global citizenship. In this sense, when children learn to ‘feel global’ through worldschooling, they may simultaneously be learning to participate in the global neoliberal labor market they are likely to enter one day. I then explored the less explicit ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) that pulse through contemporary life in the Global North. Drawing on Elliott and Lemert's critique of the emotional consequences of globalization, I suggested that the emotional curriculum of worldschooling unfolds within the affective atmosphere of this particular historical chapter we are living in, one dominated by neoliberal globalization and extensive mobility. For some parents, escaping the pressures of modern life to worldschool their children becomes a viable, and even enviable, response to the uncertain and suffocating emotional climate of globalization. Shifting between the layers of worldschooling's emotional geographies exposes how individual emotions (and individual aspirations to feel in certain ways) are connected to broader social relations and collective affects. In other words, feeling global entails both individual and collective strategies for handling the emotional costs of globalization. It is telling that emotions become problematically de-politicized precisely when they are viewed as the domain of autonomous individuals and therefore as a matter of self-development and personal responsibility (Fortier, 2007; Conran, 2011; Burman, 2009). When this happens, people resort to personal solutions e for example, working on one's own emotional skillset or escaping from an emotionally exhausting lifestyle e to the collective problems of living with neoliberalism. As Reay et al. (2007) argue in their analysis of white, middleclass families who send their children to multi-ethnic comprehensive schools in London, parents' capitulation to such individual strategies, like cultivating their children's emotional competencies against a backdrop of cultural difference, is neither surprising nor, ultimately, transformative. A choice that appeared to signal a civic commitment to liberal ideals of multi-cultural solidarity actually served parents' personal interests; their white children inevitably benefitted from multi-ethnic mixing in ways that their nonmiddle-class and non-white classmates did not. Yet, Reay, et al. acknowledge that these parents were left in a quandary given that individual efforts to behave ethically can do little to address structural inequalities (1054). They observe that ‘ethical behavior is only partially achievable in a society which is structurally unethical in the way it distributes resources and opportunities, and with the, possibilities for equal recognition’ (1055). The worldschooling families in my study are similarly trapped in a neoliberal system that accrues value to them on the basis of their privileged race, class, and national identities regardless of their conscious efforts to cultivate empathetic and egalitarian sensibilities in their children. In response to this dilemma, Reay, et al. challenge to scholars to ‘develop critiques which, while recognizing how people negotiate inequitable situations, also constantly keep in play the structural injustices within which they are situated’ (2007: 1055). My analysis here has sought to do precisely this: to keep in play the tension between worldschoolers' individual emotional strategies and the structural inequalities and uncertainties wrought by neoliberalism. With its focus on individual feelings, affective global citizenship may close off alternative forms of public discourse (Fortier, 2010: 28), but if viewed within a broader social context, it may also contain lessons about solidarity and oppositional politics, lessons
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that necessarily foreground emotions like anger, confusion, intolerance and outrage alongside compassion, respect or adaptability. Charting the emotional geographies of worldschooling offers a fuller understanding of how ‘good’ feelings may reinforce individualism, exclusivity and entitlement rather than finding collective strategies for weathering the emotional climate of globalization together. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Zsuzsa Millei for her thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to the participants of the Mobile Geographies of Learning panel at the 2016 Association of American Geographers annual meeting where a version of this paper was presented. The author is also grateful to Meg Taing for her careful and creative research assistance. The fieldwork for this project was funded in part by an O'Leary Award from the College of the Holy Cross. References Ahmed, S., 2004a. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Ahmed, S., 2004b. Affective economies. Soc. Text. 79, 117e139. Allon, F., Koleth, M., 2014. Doing Good: Transforming the Self by Transforming the World. In: Lean, Garth, Staiff, Russell, Waterton, Emma (Eds.), Travel and Transformation. Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 57e72. Appadurai, A., 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Cult. 2 (2), 1e24. Baltar, F., Brunet, I., 2012. Social research 2.0: virtual snowball sampling method using facebook. Internet Res. 22, 57e74. Bauman, Z., 1998. Globalization: the Human Consequences. Columbia University Press, New York. Bauman, Z., 2000. Liquid Modernity. Polity, Cambridge. Berlant, L., 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Berlant, L., 2000. Intimacy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Berlant, L., 2004. Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Routledge, London. Best, B., April 2012. Raymond Williams and the structure of feeling of reality TV. Int. J. Humanit. Soc. Sci. 2 (7), 192e201. Bialski, P., 2011. Technologies of hospitality: how planned encounters develop between strangers. Hosp. Soc. 1 (3), 245e260. Bialski, P., 2012. Becoming Intimately Mobile. Peter Lang, New York. Bondi, L., Davidson, J., Smith, M., 2005. Geography's Emotional Turn. In: Davidson, Joyce, Bondi, Liz, Smith, Mick (Eds.), Emotional Geographies. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 1e18. Burman, E., 2009. Beyond emotional literacy in feminist and educational research. Br. Educ. Res. J. 35 (1), 137e157. Butcher, J., Smith, P., 2010. ‘Making a difference’: volunteer tourism and development. Tour. Recreat. Res. 35, 27e36. Choat, I., January 2016. The rise of travelling families and worldschooling. Guard 29. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/jan/29/is-worldschooling-kids-selfish-family-travel-edventures. Clough, P., Halley, J., 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke University Press, Durham. Coghlan, A., Gooch, M., 2011. Applying a transformative learning framework to volunteer tourism. J. Sustain. Tour. 19, 713e728. Conran, M., 2011. ‘They really love me!’ intimacy in volunteer tourism. Ann. Tour. Res. 38, 1454e1473. Ecclestone, K., 2013. Confident individuals: the implications of an ‘emotional subject’ for curriculum priorities and practices. In: Priestly, Mark, Biesta, Gert (Eds.), Reinventing the Curriculum: New Trends in Curriculum Policy and Practice. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 75e98. Eidse, F., Sichel, N., 2004. Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global. Nicholas Brealey, London. Elliott, A., Lemert, C., 2006. The New Individualism: the Emotional Costs of Globalization. Routledge, London. Fortier, A.-M., 2007. Fortier. Fortier, A.-M., 2010. Proximity by Design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease. Citizsh. Stud. 14 (1), 17e30. ndez, R., Cairns, K., Desai, C., 2013. The Sense of Entitlement, in Gaztambide-Ferna Privilege, Agency and Affect. In: Maxwell, C., Aggleton, P. (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 32e49.
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