Dr April Biccum1
1Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
April Biccum is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, her research focus on political communication and political mobilisation in the study of Empire and Global Citizenship, looking specifically at the conceptualisation and theorisation of empire and imperialism and the politics of knowledge embedded in Global Citizenship Education. April's books include Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire (2013) Routledge.
Abstract:
With its inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals, Global Citizenship Education has enjoyed increased legitimacy in multilateral education governance. Critical scholarship in education using post and decolonial paradigms have argued that global citizenship education is colonial owing to its epistemic ordering of self and other. None of this scholarship makes their accusation by referencing directly theoretical, conceptual or comparative scholarship on empire. Drawing upon new work in political science, history and archaeology this paper critically interrogates the claims that Global Citizenship Education is imperial. It argues that accusations of colonialism/empire/imperialism must not rest with cultural or epistemological understandings of empire coming from the decolonial school but must include growing cross-disciplinary comparative world historical scholarship on empires as a particular kind of politics. If global citizenship education has anything to do with empire, it would be the preparation for the crossing of an ‘Augustan Threshold’.