Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online

Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online

Author(s): Glynda A. Hull, Amy Stornaiuolo and Urvashi Sahni

Source: English Education , July 2010, Vol. 42, No. 4 (July 2010), pp. 331-367

Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/23018017

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Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online1

Glynda A. Hull, Amy Stornaiuolo, and Urvashi Sahni

Calls now abound in a range of literatures—philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies—to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such

calls is the ancient idea of "cosmopolitanism." Refashioned now to serve as a

compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected and increasingly

divided, a cosmopolitan point of view remains resiliently hopeful, asserting

that people can both uphold local commitments and take into consideration

larger arenas of concern. They can, more particularly, "respond creatively

to shifts in patterns of human interaction generated by migration, rapid

economic and political change, and new communication technologies"

(Hansen, 2010, p. 1). Most accounts of cosmopolitanism are theoretical,

outlining possible conceptual models or promising types of skills and disposi

tions. In contrast, this article animates theorizing about cultural citizenship,

identity formation, and communication with an examination of what might

be considered sites for cosmopolitan practice—an online international social

network and offline local programs designed to engage youth in representing

themselves and interacting with the representations of others. Specifically,

we report our initial research with a group of teenage girls in India, tracing

their participation online and offline and their cosmopolitan imaginings

of self and other. We hope that this work with young people worlds away

geographically, culturally, and ideologically will speak to English educators

in the United States who feel likewise compelled to support their students

in developing twenty-first-century literacies—both the technological compe

tencies and the values, knowledge, and dispositions—needed to participate

confidently and critically as citizens of local and global worlds.

English Education, July 2010 331

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English Education ,V 42 N 4, July 2010

Iii this project, youth from different hemispheres and countries, pos

sessing different worldviews, languages, and aesthetic principles, interacted,

communicated, and exchanged digital arts-based artifacts via the online

social network Space2Cre8.2 Adolescents in Norway, the United States, South

Africa, and India, many of whom had not previously had such opportunities

to participate i n new media contexts, attended an extra-school or afterschool

class, where their teachers attempted to foster cosmopolitan orientations

toward others as they helped youth engage in conversations across differ ences around the artifacts they created and shared. The hope that fuels the

project is that such social networking sites, along with the online and off

line experiences that accompany them, can be a digital proving ground for

understanding and respecting difference and diversity in a global world as

well as fostering the literacies and communication practices through which

such habits of mind develop (Appiah, 2006; Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009).

In this article, we foreground one site, an extra-school class in a city in

Northern India, where 15 young women attended a twice-weekly program for

18 months. The program was embedded in an existing tuition-free "afternoon

school" for girls living in poverty who must work in the mornings to support

their families. The education of poor girls is a longstanding problem in India,

for they occupy a bottom rung of the social ladder and are often excluded

from educational opportunities (Sahni, 2009). Their "afternoon school"

respected the exigencies of families who depended on their daughters' labor for their livelihood but simultaneously gave girls entree to a formal

education. Through a number of activities that took advantage of the various

modes available for communication and representation—drama, movies,

videos, music, poetry, blogs, photo essays, chat, wall posts, audio record

ings—the program invited participants to reimagine themselves in relation to their local communities and the world around them and to develop an

awareness of their positionality relative to and in conjunction with others.

This agentive redefining of themselves, or the creation of "new narratives

of the self" (Stevenson, 2003, p. 346; Hull & Katz, 2006) through creative

practices, involved the girls' examination of their place in their home society

and their relationship to a global community. Through critical dialogues,

creative digital arts production, and networked communication, the Indian

youth came to exhibit the beginnings of what might be called cosmopoli tan dispositions: hospitable and critical imaginings of self and other. This article will illustrate these redefinitions of self, drawing on ethnographic

observations and interviews, analyses of the girls' creative products, and

social networking archives.

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

Cosmopolitan Habits of Mind

Those who write about cosmopolitanism often use metaphors of welcome

and connectedness: an open door, a gateway or port of entry, an inviting host,

a dialogue, a conversation. Indeed, the primary tenet of this habit of mind

is that differences, no matter how stringent, do not prevent compassionate

connections. Viewing cosmopolitanism as a strategy, a challenge, and a

means for balancing difference and universality, Appiah (2006) foregrounds

our "obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom

we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a

shared citizenship" (p. xv). He believes that cosmopolitanism entails respect

for legitimate difference, and that when such difference results in practices

motivated by opposing and alienating values, our most important tool is

dialogue, as we attempt to construct a global ethic that constantly considers

what we owe to others as members of the human community. Cosmopolitan

ism, as Appiah and others currently conceive it,3 prompts a broadening of

notions of citizenship, allowing us to recognize new spaces for community

and new forms of civic engagement within them. Increasingly those spaces

are digital (Bennett, 2008; Burgess, Foth, & Rlaebe, 2006; Hermes, 2006), and

the activities that circulate within and across them are symbolizations that

draw on multiple modes, that are often compelled by emotion and desire,

that blur the domains of private and public, and that position participants

to be more aesthetically aware and ethically and morally alert. These ideas,

we believe, are compatible with a newly invigorated English education that

recognizes literacies as multimodal, identities as hybrid, and Englishes as plural in our shifting and increasingly complex and interconnected social

worlds (Barrell, Hammett, Mayher, & Pradl, 2004; Kirkland, 2010).

Providing a compelling theonzation of the nature and role of media

in such interconnected worlds, Silverstone (2007) articulated the need to

conceptualize personal and mass media as moral public spaces. Indeed,

these media constitute, he argued, the primary means by which we come

into contact with others. Images of strangers, mediated by television, com

puters, cell phones, radio, and the like, largely constitute our understanding

of "others" and their worlds. To suggest the changing directionality of such

contact, Silverstone recounted a brief interview that was broadcast oil BBC

Badio in the midst of the U.S. war in Afghanistan not long after 9/11 and the

World Trade Center attack. An Afghani blacksmith was asked to comment

on the destruction of his village. The bombs were falling, his translated

voice proposed, because "A1 Qaeda had killed many Americans and their

donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles" (qtd. in Silverstone, 2007,

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English Education ,V 42 N4, july 2010

p. 1). What interested Silverstone about the blacksmith's account was that,

for a brief moment, it reversed the "customary polarities of interpretation"

(p. 4) "in which we in the West do the defining, and in which you are, and

I am not, the other" (p. 3). If, as Silverstone believed, the quintessential

characteristic of media in our global and digital world is its potential to link

strangers across geographic, social, and historical space, then the important

question becomes, when we hear the blacksmith's voice, whether we are able

to listen, becoming "hospitable" readers of distant texts, able to "recognize

not just the stranger as other, but the other in oneself" (p. 14). Such a vision

for reading and interpretation befits a global and digital age and implies a

central role for a freshly conceived English education.

Current processes of globalization are characterized by increased and

intensified flows of people, capital, texts, and images around the world and

across national borders (Appadurai, 1996). The directionality of such move

ments as well as their effects may be debated, but not their existence—and

not the challenge of conceptualizing media as a moral space or developing

the cosmopolitan habits of mind that would allow understanding and com

munication across difference. It is interesting to note the frequency and

urgency, among a diverse collection of theorists, of calls for dialogue and

communication across differences in ideology, geography, and culture as

the only solution to a fractured and divided world. These include philoso

phers such as Appiah (2006) and Benhabib (2002), media theorists such as

Silverstone (2007), and sociologists such as Touraine (2000). Theorizing the

importance of "a school for the Subject" (p. 265) in a world adrift in both

the excesses of capitalism and the extremism of communal allegiances,

Touraine believes that our best hope lies in the development of social actors

able to communicate inter-culturally. We concur, adding that teachers of

English, as the educators most concerned with helping students develop a

critical consciousness around language use and cultivate related literary

and aesthetic sensibilities, have an important role to play in this regard. Much has been made of late of the recent advances in media and

communication technologies that would seem to make possible and even facilitate such crucial communication across difference. Jenkins and col

leagues (2006) have helpfully characterized the "participatory culture" that has accompanied increases in access to communicative and expressive

digital tools and networks. Similarly, youthful engagement, almost all of it

self-sponsored and peer-centric, in activities such as social networking, blog

ging, text messaging, and video- and photo-sharing, has been celebrated as

evidence of identity enactment, social interaction, and creativity through the

uptake and transformation of newly available digital means (Ito et al., 2008).

Burgess and Green (2009) suggest that the video-sharing site YouTube could

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

be considered a space for the enactment of "cosmopolitan cultural citizen

ship," given that it is a digital context in which "individuals can represent

their identities and perspectives, engage with the self-representations of

others, and encounter cultural difference" (p. 81). We share the hope that

the participatory culture that surrounds new media can facilitate engage

ment with a larger public good, fostering communication, understanding,

and tolerance across difference. We are not, however, so sanguine that such

habits of mind spring full-bodied from such cultures and tools, habitus free,

liberated from their cultural, social, and historical legacies (Bourdieu, 1977).

Recent studies have revealed that participation on social networking sites

mirrors the social segregation that occurs offsite, (e.g., Prinsloo & Walton,

2008) and that their most prominent use is to connect users to groups of existing friends, not distant or foreign others (boyd & Ellison, 2008; Ito et

al., 2008). Schools often eschew such sites altogether, blocking students'

participation in the name of safety and the avoidance of inappropriate

content and interlocutors (Clifford, 2010; Livingstone, 2008; Notley, 2008),

while English classrooms have generally not yet begun to imagine how to incorporate social networking within an overcrowded, test-driven curricu

lum (Ahn, 2010; Beach, Hull, & O'Brien, in press). It seems to us, then, that

the promotion of cultural citizenship, cosmopolitan habits of mind, and

conversations across difference requires an educational framework and is at heart an educative endeavor.

Hansen (2010), writing from a philosophical perspective, has described

the elements of an education animated by cosmopolitanism that is rooted

in everyday, local commitments and in broader arenas of concern that al low us to participate in the world—that is, the "fusion, sometimes tenuous

and tension-laden, of receptivity to the new and loyalty to the known" (p.

5). The elements of a cosmopolitan education include "a recognition of the

importance of local socialization as making possible education itself" and

"the recognition that a cosmopolitan outlook triggers a critical rather than

idolatrous or negligent attitude toward tradition and custom" (p. 1). To

practice such attitudes persons must improve or transform the self or "cul

tivate as richly as possible their intellectual, moral, political, and aesthetic

being" as well as "be responsive to the demands of justice toward others"

(p. 8). Notably, when Hansen describes the practices associated with such stances, he privileges language arts and further believes that concomitant

capacities to "perceive, discern, criticize, and appreciate" (p. 9) are most

likely to come to the fore during encounters with difference.

Hansen's (2010) emphasis on literate arts redolent with critical capaci

ties as a means of developing cosmopolitan points of view is compatible with

a sociocultural perspective on learning, language use, and identity forma

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English Education ,V 42 N4, July 2010

tion. Rooted in a social view of literacy that focuses on everyday situated

practices within cultural and historical contexts (Barton & Hamilton, 1998;

Gee, 2004; Street, 1984), our study is informed in particular by Bakhtin's

(1981) dialogic framework, especially his construct of "ideological becom

ing" as a process of identity formation. Bakhtin theorized that this process

is characterized by "struggle and dialogic interrelationship" (p. 342) among

discourses or patterns of thought, language, and values. Specifically, he ar

gued that authoritative discourses—those historically and culturally rooted

discourses distant from ourselves and fused with authority—exist in tension

with internally persuasive discourses—those discourses that combine our own

and others' words in personally meaningful ways, constantly recontextual

ized through "interanimating relationships with new contexts" (p. 546).

For Bakhtin, it is such struggles within ourselves, between discourses, and

with others in social interactions that enable the generative potential of the

individual and lead to ideological becoming (p. 354). Further, it is via the

process of ideological becoming that we come to learn through dialogues

with self and others that invite engagement with difference (Freedman &

Ball, 2004; Morson, 2004). At heart, then, ideological becoming is a process

of learning, one that we believe can helpfully be understood in relation to

cosmopolitanism as educative practice.

We have benefited from pairing Bakhtin s enduring insights into

how language processes constitute self in relation to other with theories

of cosmopolitanism, particularly Hansen's (2010) account of educative

cosmopolitanism that focuses on the promotion

itward-looking focus of t0|erance across difference through ethical opolitanism highlights an(j mora) projects of self. The outward-looking citizenship and critical focus of cosmopolitanism highlights cultural jinings Of the relations citizenship and critical imaginings of the rela self and other through tions between self and other through new forms

IS of civic engagement, of civic engagement. Hansen's (2008) educative project, which "presupposes individual and com

munity diversity" (p. 208), stresses the importance of community as well as

the individual, which for our purposes is a useful refocusing of Bakhtin's

emphasis on socially constituted individual consciousness. Bakhtin (1981)

emphasized the often confl ictual process of making others' words one's own:

"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the

private property of the speaker's intentions; it is popu lated—overpopulated—

with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's

own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process" (p. 294).

Hansen, in contrast, foregrounds the artfulness, enjoyment, and choice that

The outward-looking focus of

cosmopolitanism highlights cultural citizenship and critical

imaginings of the relations

between self and other through

new forms of civic engagement.

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

can characterize being receptive to new discourses—again an educational

turn helpful in our project.

Having joined certain tenets of cosmopolitanism with the process

of ideological becoming, we are positioned now to explore the following

questions: How do young people develop cosmopolitan habits of mind and

attitudes toward others? What are the social and cultural processes that

characterize the development of cultural citizenship? What kinds of educa

tive spaces, especially those otiline, might facilitate such processes? And

what forms and designs do communicative practices in such spaces take?

We address these questions by examining the participation offline and online

of a group of teenage girls from India who were a part of an international

social networking project designed to promote cosmopolitan habits of mind.

Site Development, Data Collection, and Data Analysis

The larger project on which this article is based involved (1) the develop

ment of extra-school or school-based sites4 in four countries, which we

call the "Kidnet" project, where youth create multimodal artifacts such

as digital stories5; (2) the construction of a digital social networking site,

which we call Space2Cre8, through which these youth communicate with

each other and share their multimodal artifacts; and (3) a set of research

studies investigating the evolution of this network, its impact on personal

identity and cultural knowledge development, and the roles that various

forms of communication—language, image, music, video, and multimodal

combinations thereof—play in these processes. Space2Cre8 has gone through four iterations thus far and continues to develop as youth use the site and

make suggestions about its functionality and design. It is similar to social

networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in that participants can

articulate lists of friends, make wall and blog postings, send private mes

sages, chat, post videos, form groups, and see recent site activities. It dif

fers by being a private site, having a data collection mechanism attached,

and most importantly for purposes of this discussion, by virtue of fostering

friendship networks that include online-only relationships (rather than, as

is the case for MySpace or Facebook, online networks that primarily index

offline relationships). Further, in contrast to most social networking sites

where place is implicit, on Space2Cre8 national and cultural identities are

represented overtly and frequently.

We used mixed methods for data collection and analysis. In part, the

quantitative data were collected via an automatic history-tracking system that

recorded each participant's contributions to and use of the network. Other

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English Education, f 42 N4, July 2010

quantitatively oriented data included questionnaires and skill inventories

that allowed us to broadly document shifts over the course of the project. The

qualitative data consisted of observational field notes of students' interactions

as they participated in program activities and created digital stories and other digital products; audio-tapings and video-tapings of group interactions

and conversations related to the use of Space2Cre8; periodic semistructured

interviews; and records of online participation automatically archived by the

site history tracking system. Research staff at each site were fluent in both

English and the respective local languages; interviews were conducted in

participants' preferred languages and later translated to English and tran

scribed. A third data set consisted of participants' creative work, including

stories, music, images, and multimodal compositions.

Our approach analytically involved triangulating multiple data sources

and carrying out several types of analyses. Using the results of our automated

tracking system, we tabulated the frequency and types of participants' post

ings to Space2Cre8—their digital products, commentary on digital products,

and their communications with other participants. A second type of analysis

was open-ended and focused thematic codings of observational field notes

and interviews (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) collected at

each site and organized and analyzed using the qualitative analysis program

Atlas TI. Such examinations shed light on the nature of individuals' and

groups' engagement with Kidnet and Space2Cre8 activities; their semiotic,

linguistic, and social choices, intentions, and aspirations; and their learning

about the technology, communication, themselves, and their international

peers. Finally, using previously developed techniques (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008), we analyzed the digital products that

participants created and shared via Space2Cre8 by focusing on how those

products conveyed meaning through different semiotic systems (such as

image, sound, and language) and through combinations of these systems,

i.e., multimodally.

India is at once a country of vast potential, hope, and energy and a

country that faces enormous challenges. Its literacy rate is among the low

est in the world, especially among women, at 46.8 percent (www.stats.uis.

UNESCO.org). Its government schools suffer low enrollment, high dropout

rates, and teacher shortages and extreme disengagement, while their infra

structure is so lacking that children are often without classrooms, and access

to computers and the Internet is almost beyond imagining (Sahni, 2009). Our

project took place in Uttar Pradesh (UP), the most populated of India's 30-odd

states and, despite its adjacency to the capital of New Delhi, one of the poorest

states in the country. The school at which we worked, which was founded

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

by Urvashi Sahni (author), is called "Prayas"6 or "Inspiration." It is located

in the capital city of Lucknow, which has a population of approximately 3

million, almost 80 percent of whom are Hindu and 20 percent Muslim. Cre

ated to provide a quality education for the underprivileged, Prayas served at the time of our study some 500 girls from the ages of 3 to 18. Within the

school but outside of regular instructional time,7 15 girls from grades 9 to

11 participated in the Kidnet program twice a week.

Female, lower caste, and poor, these girls occupied a bottom position

in India's complex and hierarchical social system. Bakhti, for example, a

lower-caste girl of 17, lived with her father and siblings in an abandoned

shack that had no electricity. After her mother died when Bakhti was 13,

she took care of her younger siblings, whose ages were 9, 7, 3, and newborn

at the time of her mother's death. Her father, a painter afflicted with alco

holism, did not support his family and in fact took from them, selling the

odd item from the house to support his addiction, including Bakhti's school

books. At the time of our study Bakhti had attended Prayas school for four

years; during that period she also had enrolled all of her siblings except for

her youngest sister. Bakhti's days began at 6 a.m. when she left her home

without eating breakfast to go to work as a domestic servant cleaning seven

houses, for which she earned 1400 rupees (or 30 U.S. dollars per month). After finishing her work by 12:30 p.m. (popping in and out of her home after

each job to check on the children), she cooked lunch for herself and the rest

of the family, and then attended school from 2-6 p.m. She returned home

to change out of her school uniform and get ready to work a second shift,

which continued until 8:30 at night. Returning home, she did the washing, fed the children, cleaned the cooking utensils, and began studying. Bakhti

earned good marks in school and was praised for her 100 percent attendance

record. She particularly enjoyed reading and writing poetry, and she played

basketball and acted in plays. While she originally had wanted to be a doctor,

after her participation in the Kidnet project, she also considered becoming a

software engineer—an understandable aspiration given her considerable tal

ent and deep interest in working with computers, as will shortly be revealed.

The story of 17-year-old Shushma, another girl in the Kidnet program,

reveals similarly daunting challenges. After losing her mother when she

was 4 and experiencing neglect and mistreatment from her father and step

mother, Shushma went to live with and care for an elderly grandmother.

Shushma's father, a plumber, was married to his third wife, and Shushma

had six younger siblings whom she enjoyed teaching. In fact, she wanted

to be a teacher, and she was determined not to marry until she finished

school and found a job—an aspiration that conflicted with the desires of

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English Education ,V42 N4, July 2010

her grandmother and parents, who were determined to see her married.

Shushma stood firm against this pressure. She worked at the school as a

computer lab intern, earning a stipend of 500 rupees a month (or 11 U.S.

dollars) for maintaining the computers, keeping the lab clean, and assisting

the technicians. She enjoyed school immensely and loved writing poetry and

participating in sports.

Bakhti s and Shushma s particular cases exemplify the challenging

circumstances of the Indian girls in our project. Indeed, each life story is at

once stark in its constraints and inspiring in its hopefulness—which for us

is the story in miniature of India writ large. While these girls, as their biog

raphies suggest, had limited control over their lives, earnings, and bodies at

home, they found solace, resources, friendship, and a measure of freedom at

Prayas school—a language, a vantage point, a discourse from which to view

their current circumstances and to imagine different selves and different

worlds. The Kidnet and Space2Cre8 project contributed a global dimension to

their critically turned curriculum and also provided a first access to certain

digital tools and semiotic resources.

Becoming "Our Own Simon": Critical Imaginings

The Kidnet India site, like each of its sister sites m the United States, Nor

way, and South Africa, developed its own local cultural and institutional

practices. These infused participants' instantiation of the Kidnet project

such that cross-site goals and shared activities were reimagined within the

Indian context and Prayas School. At Prayas a central organizing theme and accompanying participant structure were the critical dialogue (Freire,

1993/1970), whereby participants considered and debated the issues that

framed their lives as young Indian women, daughters, wives, students, wage

earners, and citizens. These included early marriage, domestic violence,

poverty, caste, and religion. As with other like-minded pedagogies that also

foster questioning stances toward dominant discourses (Janks, 2000; Lewis,

Enciso, & Moje, 2007; Luke, 2000; Shor, 1999), Prayas' critical dialogues

were intended to empower the young women to consider and address the

inequities in their lives.

Ever-presen I backdrops for these local dialogues were the potential

global conversations with youth from around the world that the Prayas girls

were asked to envision and enact via Space2Cre8. Accompanying one of their discussions about poverty in their own communities and families, for

example, was a video about poverty in the United States. "There are children

in the United States who are poor? [T]"8 they asked incredulously, as they

reconsidered certain assumptions about American youth. In this way, the

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

critical dialogues served as important resources for and contexts from which

the girls participated in the social network. We consider these dialogues

cosmopolitan gestures, ones that begin with local and personal issues that

participants eventually juxtapose to and recontextualize against similar is

sues from wider contexts of concern. Hansen (2010) helpfully reminds us

that "human beings can create not just ways to tolerate differences between

them but also ways to learn from one another, however modest the result

ing changes in their outlooks may be" (p. 4). In the case of the Prayas girls,

challenges to and changes in outlooks were often important and striking.

An especially important shift in the girls' senses of self in relation to the Indian context arose from their consideration of themselves as mem

bers of a society that traditionally has silenced poor women. As the youth

discussed a movie highlighting child labor that they planned to make and

share on Space2Cre8, some struggled with entrenched cultural beliefs about

the duty to respect one's elders even as they were generally critical of adults'

treatment of working children. In particular, they considered the plight of their classmate Bakhti, who often had to work extra hours without extra

compensation to clean her employer's house. Some girls felt that Bakhti

should "raise her voice|T|" and explain that she was not being treated

fairly. However, Bakhti demurred, worrying not about losing her employ

ment through perceived impertinence, but about disrespecting her elders

were she to speak up. A heated discussion among the girls ensued about the

nonnegotiable requirement in their cultural context to be respectful to their

elders and bosses, an example of what we, following Bakhtin (1981), would

call an "authoritative discourse" that "ventriloquated" or spoke through most of the girls. But this discourse also sat in tension with other internally

persuasive discourses, as evidenced by the girls' questioning of Bakhti's si

lence in the face of her treatment by her employer and their critique of child

labor in general. Through their teacher Samika's skillful questioning du ri ng

this critical dialogue and also through her sharing of stories from her own

experiences, the girls began to consider how to balance the need to respect

one's elders while still having a say in what they believed to be fair and right.

At Samika s behest, the girls turned to the game Simon Says (in which

one participant assumes the role of "Simon," whose directives must be

obeyed). At the end of the game Samika asked the girls who might be the

Simon in their lives. As many named their elder relatives, Shushma thought

to ask, "Aunty,9 can we not be our own Simon?[T]" Samika quickly agreed, "Of

course [Shushma], each one of us should be our own Simon.|T|" Shushma's

father had regularly objected to her participation in the Kidnet project, since

he saw no reason for girls to learn about computers, but Shushma resolutely

resisted his attempts to sequester her education. Thus, the issue of agency,

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English Education , V 42 N4, July 2010

autonomy, and self-direction had special resonance for her. Shushma s

question suggests that she and the girls were indeed learning to be their

own Simon, that is, to "become" ideologically in Bakhtin's terms, through

their participation in critical conversations. The conversations invited an examination of cultural beliefs and assumptions that often remain unques

tioned and a repositioning of self in relation to the roles and stances most

often available to them as young women in their particular social worlds. In fact, Nidhi, a 17-year-old girl who worked at the school as an intern in the

bakery, and who had resisted her parents' desire to arrange her marriage

the previous year, argued that these conversations were essential to helping

the girls claim a voice: "We could not have mustered the courage to express

ourselves i f not for those [dialogues]. [T]" The dialogues not only helped the

girls muster the courage to speak back to their elders and other members of

their community, they helped them as well to articulate their beliefs in the

context of the Space2Cre8 network.

The activities the teachers planned at Prayas, like the Simon Says

game, often incorporated Kidnet curricular goals within locally meaning

ful contexts and served as a springboard for the youth's participation in

critical dialogues not just within the group but also across the network. One

example of such an activity occurred early in the second year of the project,

as teachers foregrounded one of the concepts of the Kidnet program, the

idea of representation, to make available a wide variety of symbolic tools

as youth considered how to represent themselves online. To address this curricular concept, the teachers organized an activity that incorporated

familiar modes within the youth's everyday practices—drama and dance, two popular activities they regularly engaged in—and then extended those

familiar expressive modes to include gesture, written and spoken language,

and image. The activity also introduced the idea of representation using

communities within which the adolescent girls already moved—home and

school—and then extended the idea of community to the global in the form

of the Space2Cre8 community. In this way, the teachers worked to ground

the curricular goals around critical engagements with representation within

local contexts meaningful to the girls.

In the activity, youth considered the relationship between home

and school, a fraught relationship that emerged as a central conflict for

those Indian girls who had to sacrifice to attend school, including standing

resolute against family members who resisted their attendance. The first

activity required that they use only gestures to represent this relationship.

Their teacher began by holding her hand high, explaining that this gesture

meant that she wanted the girls to achieve heights. Padma then gestured

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

as though writing, indicating her love of learning; Sonal linked her fingers together to indicate togetherness; Bakhti touched her chest to show her love

of the school. The girls were next asked to represent these feelings in groups.

Some created an impromptu dance (e.g., a blossoming lotus to represent the blossoming of girls under teachers' and friends' influence), while others

created a short drama (e.g., scenes depicting family and school settings to

represent the hope that school provides and the violence that often plagued

their lives outside of school). Then, the girls were asked to reflect on their

feelings in a blog entry on Space2Cre8, where they created narratives about

their school or home lives, with one girl posting her response in the form

of a poem and others posting pictures in their blogs that represented these

ideas. While many employed pictures of themselves at school and focused

on how much they enjoyed and loved their teachers, Shushma included

an image juxtaposed to a poem in English and in Urdu (see Figure 1). This

poem, we later learned, was written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet

Rumi, whose work has had wide international appeal. It read:

I was dead, I became alive,

I was tears, I became laughter:

The majesty of love came,

And 1 became an everlasting majesty myself.

The poem was accompanied by an image of a woman's torso, her head tilted

back, eyes closed, and arms lifted as if in dance, surrounded by flowing and

tllJj uJjJ ili]jJ

■ /wfbi i/r<u/. ■ f' ierauur <Jiae>

■.y '<>«" /t*ir<j, ■ y /la-aiiu-/fwy/tle r;

■ //ir miypjij <•/ /eve rame,

JffaxuDC uu awfaiUsoy /4igutlfjf

(C dif/int: (■■ J/uwtu,

|>ii lii ^ <J_)£ p±i I jjj I'ji

Figure 1. Shushma's Blog Entry Figure 1. Shushma's Blog Entry

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English Education ,V 42 N4, July 2010

colortul garments resembling tlowers. I hrough her choice of this poem

about transformation through love accompanied by an image implying movement, Shushma appeared to respond multimodally and symbolically to her teacher's request to blog about the relationship between school and home. Through the choice of a poem with accompanying translations in

both Urdu and English and their respective scripts, she displayed graphically

what strikes us as a cosmopolitan sensibility toward her distant audience,

sending the sentiment of transformative love across language and culture, time and space.

I hrough a variety ot modes, then—gesture, dance, drama, speech, im

age, and written language—the girls articulated their relationships to school

and home and, increasingly, they attended as well to constructing and consid

ering their relationship to their online community. The girls' first ventures

on Space2Cre8 were selecting profile pictures and designing homepages.

Representing Self to Others: Space2Cre8 as Global Audience

Social networking sites are widely considered prime locations for youth to

construct and offer images of self—as sites, that is, for identity formation and

experimentation and the associated creation and exchange of social capital (boyd & Ellison, 2008; Knoebel & Lankshear, 2008). We were interested in

the forms that such processes might take cross-culturally, cross-linguistically,

and cross-nationally, especially among youth for whom access to such digital

tools was relatively new, as well as what opportunities for reflection and ex

pression they might afford. We consider self-conscious self-representation a

pivotal part of the project of cosmopolitanism, for this "practice of the self"

(Foucault, 1994; Hansen, 2010) can promote the consideration of self in rela

tion to others. In the case of Space2Cre8, self-representation was explicitly

encouraged in the context of communicating with a global group of, as yet, unknown but potential friends.

I he hrst sell-conscious representation we witnessed for the Prayas girls

was through the photographs they took and, to a lesser extent, the location of

images online. The girls shared a digital camera, taking multitudes of photos

of themselves, their friends, their school, their homes, families, workplaces,

and neighborhoods. They quickly became proficient at snapping pictures and

experienced the role of photographer-in-charge as a heady privilege, squab

bling routinely over whose turn it was to operate the camera. While the girls

had likely been photographed before as members of groups, especially on

formal occasions such as family weddings, the opportunity to be front and

center in an informal photo of one's design, and to be so again and again, was

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

a new and exciting pleasure. With the help of their instructor they compiled

hundreds of photos into a collective online photo bank, which functioned

as a shared semiotic resource for the group, with many of the girls access

ing favorite pictures—such as their first taken together with their teacher,

Nadia—for individual artistic and communicative projects. This photo with

their teacher appeared later in several digital movies, where it symbolized

the love of friends and teachers at Prayas school. Other photos that gained

currency in the group were images of flowers and other natural landscapes

that the girls considered beautiful. Thus, their exploration of the mode of

image through personal photographs expanded the girls' communicative

and representational repertoires beyond dance, gesture, or language, and

images became a popular mode for communicating with others on the social network.

At all of the Kid net sites, the first effort by youth to represent them

selves to the Space2Cre8 network, and thereby to imagine the youth at other

sites as audience and interlocutor, was the selection or creation of a profile

picture and the design and decoration of a homepage. We consider this

process of representing oneself to unfamiliar others as a courageous act,

one particularly so for the Indian girls who had just begun to use computers

and had never communicated with others from distant places before the Kidnet project began. They relied greatly on images to communicate and

represent—posting them to their homepages, uploading them as wallpaper

for their profile backgrounds, pasting them in blogs, and incorporating them

in their digital stories. In particular, the girls spent much time considering

what the different images might communicate and changing them accord

ingly as their communicative intent in relation to their imagined audiences shifted and evolved.

To provide an example of how profile and background photos worked

to communicate changing notions of self-representation to global audiences,

we trace one girl's aesthetic choices in relation to her participation on the

network. For her homepage on the first iteration of Space2Cre8, Shushma

chose a picture of a rainbow in a sky and coupled it with a photo of a popular

Indian actress (see Figure 2). This choice was in keeping with Shushma's

focus on freedom, hope, and beauty that similarly echoed throughout almost

all of her interactions and creative products on the social network. However,

in the second iteration of the site, when participants needed to redesign

their profile pages, Shushma shifted her aesthetic focus. She chose a photo

of herself (together with her "Aunty" Glynda, author) as her profile picture,

and for the background of her page she posted a repeating image of a blond

woman with roses (a favorite flower of the girls) entwined in her hair and

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English Education ,V 42 N4, July 2010

Fh«xJ«

Bnumfcrtcor

YturttwxJ*'

Figure 2. Shushma's First Self-Representation on Space2Cre8 Figure 2. Shushma's First Self-Representation on Space2Cre8

the words "Good Morning inscribed in pink at the bottom of the photo (see

Figure 3). With this busy and colorful repeating image, Shushma's page

reversed figure-ground expectations and as a resu It became more difficult to

read, its background image becoming the most salient feature of the page as

it overrode other text. Put another way, Shushma's page deemphasized the

Figure 3. Shushma's Evolving Representation forSpace2Cre8 Profile Page Figure 3. Shushma's Evolving Representation for Space2Cre8 Profile Page

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

linguistic text that communicated official social networking information,

such as status updates, lists of friends, and personal information, while it

foregrounded the personally created decorative wallpaper, which in this case

contained both language and image. Her design, privileging her personal

aesthetic sense over the functionality customarily achieved through more

traditional figure-ground relations between language and image, mirrored

choices made by other youth on the network, who filled their pages with

images that overrode and diminished the literal readability of most text.

It is both fascinating and important to consider how the opportunity to

multiplicatively combine and design image, color, and text on a page, thereby

exercising one's artfulness and imagination

as communicator and creator, can expand

meaning-making strategies, opportunities,

and motivations for youthful authors. On

Space2Cre8, young people's pages were

crowded semiotically, awarding multiplex,

nuanced meanings to those viewers and

readers sufficiently willing and able to read,

explore, and savor them. Shushma made

multiple distinctive choices that resulted in

different representations of herself to the

It is both fascinating and ii

to consider how the opporl

multiplicatively combine a

image, color, and text on a

thereby exercising one's ai

and imagination as commi

and creator, can expand m

making strategies, opporti

and motivations for youthf

global network. In the second iteration of her page, she not only reversed

figure and ground but privileged a particular image of femininity in her

wallpaper while doing so and elected to use a personal photo of herself and

a valued adult friend as her profile picture. These kinds of representational decisions—whether, for example, to use one's own photograph or someone

else's or a symbolic image as a profile picture, and what constituted an aes

thetically appealing choice for any of these—were much debated in India as well as at other sites. Shushma's new message, as we interpret it, conveyed

an effort to reach out, communicating "good morning" to the other youth

who were browsing her page, offering words in English rather than Hindi

coupled with her profile image. Her hospitable intention was conveyed as

well through an image-intensive design aesthetic that echoed the pages of

many other youth. Such choices suggest, if not a global youth aesthetic (Hull,

Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009), an emerging set of creative communicative prac

tices that signify an affiliation for the culture developing on Space2Cre8. We

consider these kinds of gestures—small moments of reaching out by youth to

communicate with and welcome others—cosmopolitan practices. The girls

in India tried out these gestures online as they simultaneously engaged in

critical dialogues with their teachers and peers offline, discussions that high

lighted the possibility of constructing different selves in relation to others.

It is both fascinating and important

to consider how the opportunity to

multiplicatively combine and design

image, color, and text on a page,

thereby exercising one's artfulness

and imagination as communicator

and creator, can expand meaning making strategies, opportunities,

and motivations for youthful authors.

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English Education , V 42 N4, July 2010

The use of images to convey representations of self to distant audiences

can likewise be found in the girls' digital stories. In these stories, however,

the images were narrated, as each girl composed a script in her own voice

to accompany the pictures, thereby directing their semiotic intent. Shushma

was especially alert to the communicative potential of image to bridge the

distance between life worlds: "You can illustrate what you mean better

with the stories because of the pictures,[T]" she noted. "People will really understand because they can see how we live. Otherwise how will they

understand?[T]" Her careful deployment of images is nicely illustrated by

one particular sequence from her digital story: an Internet picture of caged

birds, followed by a contemplative photograph of herself sitting alone, then an

Internet image of seagulls in the sky, followed by a photo of herself laughing

in the arms of her teacher and friends (see Figure 4). By juxtaposing, alter

nating, and pairing the re-contextualized images of birds and self, Shushma

suggested the parallels that she drew between feeling caged at home and free

at school, contrasting worlds that she also described in the spoken narrative

that accompanied the images. As Shushma noted, images might help others

to see the girls' stories, literally gaining a new perspective on the girls and,

by implication, themselves in relation to others. And indeed, awareness of

distant others who would view their images and thereby better understand

their stories became an important participatory context for the Indian youth

as they created digital artifacts and participated in critical dialogues—a fruit

ful context, we submit, for possible global cultural citizenship.

However, such cross-cultural, cross-geographic, and cross-semiotic

understandings are neither automatic nor universal. Determining where

potential communicative challenges and difficulties most commonly lie,

and what online and offline participant structures and activities can best

position youth to engage with them, is one of the goals of our project. As

participants began to correspond more frequently with each other online, we

were interested in their miscommunications, misunderstandings, and missed

But I feci like a caged because I cannot go out (n school I feel like free bird because I am free to big} at home or do what I want to. exSTqP* myself

Figure 4. Image Sequence and Narrative from Shushma's Digital Story Figure 4. Image Sequence and Narrative from Shushma's Digital Story

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

opportunities. Lam, another active participant on the site who liked making

connections with other people,[T]" regularly commented on other youth's

postings. Lani worked as an intern in the school uniform store until class time

each day and loved singing, dancing, acting, and photography. She, as well

as other participants, struggled with differences in communicative norms,

cultural ideologies, and linguistic and aesthetic preferences. In one instance,

Lani offered a critique of a photo by a South African boy, Anthony. For his

profile picture, Anthony had chosen an image of Lil' Wayne, an American

rapper who in this particular picture revealed his bare chest and held his

hands in the pockets of his low-hanging jeans belted below his underwear.

Several of the Indian girls discussed how "ridiculous" underwear showing

above jeans seemed to them, but it remained for Lani to write to Anthony

later, posting the following message on his profile wall: "Hello [Anthony), I

am |Lani], You don't have a picture of yourself? Why do you use this photo.

I don't like your profile picture. Please use your photo." Lani preferred for

profile pictures to depict offline, real-world selves, and thus seemed to admon

ish Anthony to use a personal photo instead of representing himself through

what, in her view, was an unappealing image drawn from popular culture.

She forthrightly communicated this sentiment in her still-developing English

to Anthony, who declined to respond but who did change his profile picture

in the next iteration of the site to a close-up of himself. Incidents such as

this one are of course full of possibility for teachers, who can use them as

springboards for myriad possible conversations, including discussions about

norms for politeness, semiotic preferences and personal taste, and rights and

responsibilities of community memberships—all important aspects of those who would be global cultural citizens.

We are, then, interested in small moments of intercnltural exchange,

which we term "everyday cosmopolitanism" (Corpus Ong, 2009). We believe

that over time these communicative missives and missteps and concomitant

retracings and repairs, if properly scaffolded, can accumulate to form cosmo

politan habits of mind and heart. Such habits, we believe, are often based on

an imaginative capacity to be hospitable readers, to use Silverstone's (2007)

phrasing, of others' multimodal representations of ourselves and our worlds.

As an illustration of this capacity, we turn again to Shushma and her conver

sation with her classmates about an especially provocative image that had

been chosen as a profile picture by a 13-year-old South African girl named

Layla. This image displayed the American singer Christina Aguilera dressed

both as a scantily clad nurse and as a patient, posing in an advertisement for

Sketchers athletic shoes (see Figure 5).

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English Education ,V 42 N4, July 2010

Figure 5. Profile Picture Chosen by Layla in South Africa Figure 5. Profile Picture Chosen by Layla in South Africa

The adult teachers and researchers from the Kidnet

project considered this image to border on inappropriate

for a profile picture of a teenage girl, seeming too sexually

explicit. In particular, they worried that it would alarm parents and teachers, who expected the private network

to protect participants from inappropriate Internet con

tent. When asked what they thought of the picture, some

of the Indian girls similarly objected to the nurse's and

patient's clothing, which they considered to be "too little."

However, others said they liked the picture because it

showed a nurse "being very friendly" toward and caring

for a patient. When asked what the South African girl might have meant to

suggest about herself by selecting this image as a profile picture, one Indian

girl proposed, "The world has really changed"—a comment that drew much

laughter. Shushma then followed that interpretation by proposing, "Models

are turning into nurses."

le Picture Chosen uth Africa

Remarkably, Shushma came close to the authorial intent of the South

African girl, who explained in an interview that she wanted when she grew

up to be both a nurse and a model, and that the image she had selected combined both dreams:

When I put the picture of Christina Aguilera, it's the meaning of two but it's one picture. She's famous and she's like a nurse. And I want to be famous and a nurse, that's why [ put the pictures together. The clothes that she is wearing is like a nurse but she is like modeling the clothes and advertising the things that she has on. It's two, but it's one person and that's why the modeling and the nurse can be one.

Shushma was a young woman distant from South Africa and most of the

world culturally and geographically. Neither she nor the other Indian girls

had any detailed knowledge of American popular culture, although it is often

recognized as a transnational bridge that joins the tastes and sensibilities of

youth across the world (Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009). However, Shushma

did know something about the struggle to become independent ideologically,

and she had had practice as well in repositioning herself in critical dialogues.

Unlike some of the adults in the Kidnet project, who arguably had missed the

most important aspect of the girl's authorial intent, Shushma seemed able

to exercise a hospitable semiotic sensibility, making an imaginative leap of

understanding. The disposition and ability to make such a leap, we submit,

constitutes one kind of cosmopolitan habit of mind.10

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

Circulations on and off Space2Cre8

We traced these hospitable interpretive moves, in which youth attempted

to take account of others' points of view as they simultaneously sought to represent themselves, through the circulation of artifacts both on and off

the network. While many of these artifacts were digital, including images,

music videos, blogs, and digital stories, others were material artifacts car

ried back and forth to the sites by visiting teachers and researchers. In this

manner, Indian youth and youth in South Africa and the United States were

able to exchange handmade greeting cards, and in so doing we observed

that they experienced striking moments of interconnection. Through offer

ing elaborately designed, carefully personalized artifacts, the Indian girls

made powerful communicative overtures, addressing their interlocutors in

ways that positioned them to respond generously in kind, to demonstrate, in

Bakhtin's( 1986) terms, "an active responsive understanding" (p. 94). Indeed,

for Bakhtin, addressivity, or "the quality of turning to someone" (p. 99), is a

quintessential feature of speech communication. "The role of these others,

for whom my thought becomes actual thought for the first time (and thus

for my own self as well)," he wrote, "is not that of passive listeners, but of

active participants in speech communication" (p. 94). Indeed, the Indian

girls and their addressees engaged with each other by anticipating each

other as audience. They thereby influenced each other's texts and their own

representations and understandings of self and other in the process, in just

the dialogical manner that Bakhtin theorized.

The 15 girls in Kidnet India made personal greeting cards for the nearly

40 students in the eighth-grade Kidnet class in South Africa. Constructed

from large sheets of differently colored paper, embossed with elaborate

designs on front and back covers, each card contained a message designed

to generate a response, including background details on interests and goals,

interview-type questions, and sometimes the author's picture (see Figure

6). Bakhti, for example, wrote two pages' worth of text in English to Nathan,

telling him multiple things about herself, including her desire to "to help

all of the children in the world to go to school" and her aspiration "to be a

software engineer." She also asked Nathan a long series of questions, includ

ing "what do you like to do in your free time" and whether he tended "to

share everything to your friends and teachers."

The care and artfulness that had gone into the cards was not lost on

the South African youth. Momentarily awed into uncharacteristic silence by

the personally addressed, strikingly designed, and copiously penned cards,

the South African youth spent hours designing and writing elaborate cards

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English Ed ucation, V 42 N4, July 2010

Figure 6. Examples of Cards Made by Indian Youth for South African Youth Figure 6. Examples of Cards Made by Indian Youth for South African Youth

in response, their covers sometimes echoing the original card s aesthetic

(Regev, 2007)—for example, lotus and rose-flowered borders. Daniel, a f 3-year

old gregarious boy who loved sports and music, took time to carefully trace

two perfect circles, one on the front cover and the other on the back cover

of his card. Inside the front circle, he drew a bird with a heart in its beak,

and inside the back circle, a heart in a carefully sketched nest. He explained

that the image of the heart, carried by the bird, symbolized friendship, while

the bird represented how that friendship would travel. In another example,

Nathan, a quiet and confident 13-year-old boy, responded to Bakhti's card to

him by writing extensively about his love of music, including his ability to

play a number of instruments. When a classmate pointed out that Bakhti

might not be familiar with the names of the instruments in English, the boy

painstakingly drew each one.

The card activity thus offered an interesting window onto the cir

culations of artifacts, one that revealed the particularities of how youth

envisioned each other as audience and respondent, the semiotic choices and

authorial designs they made on the basis of those imaginaries, and the observ

able impacts of these conversational turns on their desire to communicate

and to develop personal connections with each other. By the time the greet

ing card exchange occurred, the Indian girls had become especially adept

at conversational overtures, perhaps because their first attempts to connect

to youth in South Africa via Space2Cre8 had seldom generated answers in

kind, due partly to problems with Internet connectivity and discontinuities

in school schedules. This experience may have primed the girls to consider

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

ever more carefully, in Bakhtinian fashion, what constitutes an utterance that will be heard.

The exchange also seems to index what Hansen (2010) called "cos

mopolitan artfulness" (p. 15), or the on-the-ground semiotic practices that

people engage in as they respond creatively to distant others, reconciling

existing practices and belief systems particular to local cultures with those

of larger arenas of concern. In designing cards for one another, the youth

imagined their global peers as they looked for connections with one another,

trying to anticipate whether their addressees would be familiar with flutes

and trumpets or soccer and rugby. Some of the South African youth artfully

sought interconnection by echoing the design aesthetics or the friendly

questioning tone of the Indian cards, hybridizing their own style with that

of the girls, while others searched for com monality through shared interests

and activities. All youth went to elaborate lengths to craft cards that were re

sponsive to one another and in so doing communicated a sense of caring. We

think that such communicative overtures, both digital and material, helped

youth develop reflexive and hospitable stances toward others as they engaged

in representational and communicative activities on and off the network.

While a surge in communicative overtures and interactions did oc

cur around the exchange of material artifacts like the greeting cards, these

opportunities were infrequent. Most often such activities and positionings

were spurred by messages and artifacts shared through the network. Digital

stories were popular sites for youthful connection, as they combined im

ages, text, voiceovers, and music in multimodal narratives that almost all

youth found compelling to create as well as view. The Prayas girls took great

satisfaction in writing, directing, and starring in their own short movies, in

no small part, as Rani explained, because "earlier we used to see films, but

never thought we could make films. [T]" She went on to say that she and her

friends became "actresses in their own productions.[T]" Her teacher Samika

reminded Rani that the girls were also the directors and story writers, an

ideological shift in perspective that the teachers continually tried to foster

as the girls came to see themselves not just as actresses dramatizing lines from stories that others had written but as the directors and writers of their

own life narratives. Their mu Itimodal creations, interweaving photos, story,

voice, and text, became important for youth's self-expression, and as they

had to make decisions about how to represent themselves to others using

new symbolic tools and genres with particular affordances and constraints,

they came to new understandings about themselves. These understandings

evolved in the context of imagined others—potential audience members

of their local communities certainly—but also addressees and potentially

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English Education ,V 42 N4, July 2010

responsive members of their online community in Space2Cre8. As Aditi ex

plained, the main reason for creating digital stories was because "we want

others to know about ourselves.[T]" Aditi's orientation toothers, particularly

the youth on the network with whom she might share her digital narrative, revealed how the network functioned as a context for the creation of their

stories. It also served as a site for communicative forays, as youth viewed,

posted, commented on, and engaged in discussions about digital stories.

Like the greeting card exchange previously described, digital stories

often served as "intercultural communicative triggers"—an activity, semiotic

resource, or participant structure that jumpstarts, at times in dramatic fash

ion, cross-cultural communication. As such, these types of exchanges stand

out from "everyday cosmopolitan practices" whereby youth more routinely

connect and communicate with one another. One particular instance of such

a trigger helped us illuminate and trace the cultural flows of artifacts that

circulated through the Space2Cre8 network. But most importantly, it illus

trated a surprising reversal of what Silverstone (2007) termed "polarities of

interpretation," the customary pattern and directionality of representations

of others through media. That is, for a long time, people in the West have been

able to assume their dominance as interpreters of others, but in Silverstone's

imagined "mediapolis," where the use of media achieves a moral dimension,

such assumptions are likely to be questioned and reversed. So it was in the

case of a digital story by an Indian girl that had a major impact on network

participants, in the United States and South Africa, on both audience and

author, both online and offline, through its unexpected and unpredictable

circulatory power and influence. This story by 16-year-old Bakhti depicted the formidable challenges of her young life, and it provoked mirror stories

and transnational, transcultural, trans-semiotic exchanges. Here are Bakhti's

words as she narrated them in English:"

Hello 1 am [Bakhti] from India. I live in a small house with my family. I have 3 sisters and a brother. I am eldest of them all. My younger sister [Chanda] like to play with her clay toys. Elder sister [Trisha) is a brilliant cook. Although we don't have a proper kitchen and a stove [Trisha) still manages to provide us a fair meal. [Gita] and me work as domestic help in several houses. One of the house I work for is a Sherma family. They are very nice people. Their daughter [Radha] is my good friend. My dad is an alcoholic and spends all his money on alcohol and never support the family neither financially nor emotionally. All this time Prayas school has been a haven. Our teachers never let us miss our late mother. All my friends at Prayas are like my sisters. We laugh together and cry together. My journey in search of a home ends here.

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

Thus, Bakhti described the actors in her social worlds of home, work, and

school: her resilient siblings, kind employer, deceased mother, alcoholic

father, and beloved teachers. What made her digital story all the more

poignant and semantically full was the layering and expansion of meaning made possible through the juxtaposition and orchestration of multiple modes

(Hull & Nelson, 2005)—that is, the propositional content of her simple yet

powerful story, the accompanying vivid images that located her story in a

particular locale and moment, and Bakhti's optimistic tone of voice and nar

rative evaluation, which suggests a strength of character and a serenity of

self that contradicted her youthfulness and her constrained circumstances.

It may well be, this story suggests to us, that multimodal compositions can

obtain considerable power via an expansion of meaning that occurs when

the semantic content of one channel simultaneously contrasts and comple

ments that of another, resulting in a more powerful understanding and

aesthetic experience than any one of these modes might convey alone or

merely indexically (Hull, Kenney, Marple, & Forsman-Schneider, 2006; Hull

& Nelson, 2005; Lemke, 1998).

Perhaps the most striking image from Bakhti s story, paired with her

narrating voice, is that of a small child squatting on an uneven brick floor,

utensils spread on a tarp nearby, and tending a black cooking pot set on a

makeshift brick Are pit in front of her (see Figure 7). The image is suspended

Figure 7. Cooking Pot Image from Bakhti's Digital Story Figure 7. Cooking Pot Image from Bakhti's Digital Story

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English Education , V 42 N4, july 2010

onscreen for 10 seconds, the longest of any picture in the story, as Bakhti

narrates: "Elder sister [Trisha] is a brilliant cook. Although we don't have a

proper kitchen and a stove [Trisha] still manages to provide us a fair meal."

This combination of image and narration proved to be quite memorable

for the Kidnet participants who viewed it, adults and children alike. Many

youth in South Africa and the United States were struck by the communi

cative power of the image, which depicted an admitted lack of a "proper

kitchen," paired with Bakhti's praise for her young sister as a "brilliant

cook." Rather than lamenting or hiding their modest circumstances, Bakhti

straightforwardly revealed them, and in so doing, she took the opportunity

to emphasize her sister's skill, which was made all the more impressive in

light of the siblings' poverty. Her message, represented multimodally and

drawing its power from the multiplicative relation of word, image, and voice,

spoke volumes to viewers of the story, embodying hopefulness and strength

in the face of adversity on the part of children for whom such resilience and

maturity would not customarily be expected or required.

Children in South Africa viewed Bakhti's movie as part of a montage

of nine short films created by children in different sites. When asked later

in interviews what they remembered and enjoyed from the presentation,

more than two-thirds of the children referenced Bakhti's movie, the majority

of them mentioning "the girl with no kitchen," even though there were a

number of other striking and memorable digital stories shown to the youth

that day. Charles, an adolescent boy from the South African village, described

Bakhti's story as "moving" as he touched his heart and tears filled his eyes.

In particular, her story inspired youth in South Africa and the United States

to think differently about poverty in relation to themselves and their own

social and economic worlds. Charlotte, who lived with her grandmother

in the South African farming community, sharing a dilapidated one-room

house with no heat, explained that she had not considered that others could

be worse off than she, as she compared Bakhti's living situation to her own.

What struck many of the children most vividly about Bakhti's story

was her sense of hope and joy, despite her life circumstances, and many took

great comfort from her attitude. Marquis at the U.S. site summed up many of

the youth's responses: "What was interesting to me about [ Bakhti's] video,"

he explained, "was how she's her age, and she has to take care of so many

obstacles, and things, and I feel that she is a, a very, very strong person to

have that type of mind set…. And I think she's a person who will be blessed

along the road." Over and over again, children responded to Bakhti's resil

ient spirit and hopeful tone, admiring her fortitude despite her challenges.

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

The story not only provoked emotional responses and prompted

changes in the attitudes of those who watched it, but it also inspired creative

action on the part of some youth, who shifted their understandings of their

own digital movies and decided to create mirror stories. One youth in the U.S., Shanae, immediately upon watching the movie exclaimed, "I want to

change my [digital] story." That is, she wanted, she went on to say, to make

the story about her own life instead of the story she had been working on

about her dream life. She reflected, "We got more opportunities than they

do. We don't have to go to work." This sparked a conversation about hard

ship and how youth like Bakhti "had to take such responsibility from such

a young age." Thus, discussions about hardship and poverty grew from the

viewing of the movie, and like the India site's critical dialogues, opened new

dialogic spaces for discussing difficult issues. In South Africa, many youth

also developed stories that echoed Bakhti's, exploring deeply felt experiences,

such as car accidents and the death of a parent. Months after viewing it, many remembered and spoke about Bakhti's story.

Beyond Bakhti s intended and imagined audiences and her anticipation

about their possible responses, the story also had ramifications in the local

Indian community. When her teachers included her movie in a schoolwide

showing of digital films created by youth, her fellow students and teachers

were moved by her plight. Some went so far as to confront her father for not

supporting his children, a response that Bakhti did not foresee. Reacting quite

negatively, some of Bakhti's neighbors castigated her for revealing publicly

matters that, in their community's view, were best kept private; they claimed

that she had brought shame to her family. Bakhti thereupon removed her movie from YouTube, where she had posted it, and she asked her teachers

not to make it available to the Space2Cre8 community any longer. Over time,

however, through the passionate responses of other children in her school

who drew hope from her resilience, with the feedback from and admiration

of her international peers on the network, and supported by her teachers'

guidance, Bakhti eventually changed her mind. Recognizing that her story

often prompted others to reconsider and speak forthrightly about their own

lives, she understood the importance of those self-reflexive and hospitable

acts. She explained that the message of her movie for other youth was inspi

ration: "if you can change yourself anything is possible. [T]" Making movies,

she further articulated, allowed "others … to know about our lives. You get

happiness, when you share your life experience with others.[T]" Bakhti's

awareness of how others might perceive and learn from her story seemed

to have guided her authorial decisions, such as the narrative of hope that

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English Education, V42 N4, July 2010

runs throughout the movie, and ultimately enabled her to continue shar

ing her story with the network. Her outward focus, on potential audiences

and addressees and the impact of her story on them, demonstrates what

we consider Bakhti's cosmopolitan orientation to communicative practice.

While digital products like Bakhtrs story can acquire an unruly agency

of their own, circulating in local and global communities with unanticipated

and sometimes unintended consequences (Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith,

2008), her story worked to helpfully challenge dominant gender and gen

erational mores and to inspire youth to create their own narratives of self,

reaching out to Bakhti and other potential companions on the social network.

As one of the most prolific users on Space2Cre8, with 82 friends and numer

ous blogs, comments, and photos, Bakhti sought connections with others as

avidly as they desired interactions with her. Such moments of connection

with others who are both quite different from and similar to oneself can ac

cumulate to help youth develop hospitable reading practices as they imagine

points of commonality, seeking not just "ways to tolerate differences between

them but also ways to learn from one another" (Hansen, 2010, p. 4).

Cosmopolitanism and English Education

In this article we joined theorizing about cultural citizenship, identity formation, and communication with empirical data from an online inter national social network and accompanying offline local programs. We were

interested in exploring the communicative practices and twenty-first-century

literacies that emerged when youth were positioned to develop and enact cosmopolitan stances toward their local contexts and diverse and distant

others. That positioning included a global online social network that privi

leged multimodal, arts-based expression, collaboration, and communication,

in tandem with a local offline curriculum and set of participant structures

that privileged critical dialogues and the "self-project" of ideological becom

ing. Together, these forms of interaction, association, and meaning-making

helped young participants to imagine and enact morally and ethically alert

selves, that is, "to be responsive to the demands of justice toward others

and of the desire for self-improvement" (Hansen, 2010, p. 8). The forms of

engagement that characterized youth's interactions, their representations

of self, and the circulation of their artifacts in such a "figured world" (Hol

land et al., 1998) can usefully be viewed, we have suggested, as a form of cultural citizenship, and the online and offline contexts for these activities,

as sites for cosmopolitan practice. Further, tracing the intersecting paths of

communication, expression, and representation among diverse and distant

interlocutors—that is, examining the progress, derailments, and repairs of

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

communicative turns—and following the circulation of digital artifacts over

time is suggestive in terms of the kinds of educational interventions that can

help to foster cosmopolitan habits of mind.

Our research points to the importance of developing a global conscious

ness in English education. Indeed, interest in exploring the implications of

globalization for literacy and language learning, especially in relation to

trans-nationalism and the Internet, is on the rise (Lam & Rosario-Ramos,

2009; Myers & Eberfors, 2010; Warriner, 2009). Our approach has been not

only to document the literacies, languages, and new media practices of

particular populations of youth but also to create and study theoretically

motivated interventions in the tradition of design research (Brown, 1992;

Nicolopoulou & Cole, 2010). Our project was centrally informed by the as

sumption, shared by current philosophers and other theorists of globalization

and communication, that although we live at a time of radical connectivity

and intense interdependence, our world is nonetheless riven by seemingly

irreconcilable differences. A response to this most serious dilemma is the

inculcation and practice of cosmopolitan habits of mind: a respect for legiti

mate difference, along with communicative dispositions and a repertoire of

literate arts that make dialogue across difference possible and productive

in its consequences. Thus, philosophically, semiotically, and dispositionally

primed and prepared, our young people can affiliate, interact, engage, and

learn within local and global contexts.

To our knowledge cosmopolitanism has not previously been used to

frame language arts or literacy education, although twenty-first-century

skills lists often include "global awareness" or "intercultural competence" as desirable capacities. Nor does a multicultural orientation, under whose

banner a concern for difference and diversity has traditionally flown, qualify

as cosmopolitanism. Multicultural approaches typically take as their focus

the intra-national, emphasizing learning about cultures within the nation

state (Banks, 2004), which led Beck (2004) to complain: "The diversity

that multiculturalism celebrates is a diversity among identities lacking in

ambivalence, complexity, or contingency" (p. 446). With Rizvi (2009), we

would "emphasize the dynamic nature of our identities and cultures, now

changing more rapidly and intensely than ever before, mostly as a result of their interactions with identities and cultures that potentially span the

world" (p. 264). English classrooms, in considering the learning that students

require who would become citizens of the cosmos as well as localities, must

consider the kinds of practices, texts, modes, symbol systems, and interlocu

tors that position young people to reflect, to know, and to communicate in

the context of global flows and connectivities.

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English Education, V 42 N4, July 2010

Our research has explored the communicative strategies, literate

practices, and cosmopolitan habits of mind that come to the fore with Internet-enabled social networking, a twenty-first-century communicative

tool whose significance and ubiquity researchers and educators are just

beginning to fathom. Over the last decade, English education and literacy

studies more broadly have recognized the importance of multimodal textual

forms. Digital storytelling genres have become common in community

organizations and schools (e.g., Hull et al., 2006)12; youth's participation in

digital media production is recognized and celebrated (e.g., Hill & Vasudevan,

2007; Soep & Chavez, 2005); and theorists and researchers have explored se

miotically informed approaches to conceptualizing literacy practice (Kress,

2003; Lemke, 1998). Now, given dizzyingly rapid advances and innovations in information technologies and a concomitant explosive spread of mobile media communicative practices and platforms (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, &

Zickuhr, 2010; Walton, 2009), we must also theorize and explore the implica

tions of digital connectivity for conceptions of knowledge and instructional

time and space. While studies of Internet-enabled social networking in

general have mushroomed, considerations of such networking capacities for educative purposes are nascent (Greenhow, Robelia, & Hughes, 2009; Hull & Stornaiuolo, in press).

We designed Space2Cre8 as a vehicle for international linkages of di

verse and distant others, and in particular, adolescent girls in India and youth

in the United States, South Africa, and Norway. Observing their attempts to

participate via this network taught us, first, the significance of the challenge

we had presented them. Conversing and connecting in a digital environment with unknown others requires skill, courage, and imagination. Participants

must envision how to represent themselves as worthy interlocutors, desirable

potential friends, and young people with things of interest to say to a global

community, making myriad choices about mode, language, aesthetics, and

design. For their part, teachers (who are often absent in accounts of youth

media production) must scaffold this choice-making as well as moderate

multiplex offline conversations about culture, identity, and communication

in local and global contexts. This is no small task for anyone and brings home

the complexity of Bakhti n's (1986) construct of addressivity, t he visioning of

the expectations of an audience at the point of utterance.

As the India girls made their forays onto Space2Cre8, we observed

two broad types of cosmopolitan practice (see Stornaiuolo, Hull, & Sahni, in

press). One we termed "everyday" cosmopolitanism, or the micro-moments

of online intercultural exchange, in which young people extended simple

greetings, made brief commentaries, joined groups, and posted occasional

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

pictures, blogs, and video. Most of the activity 011 the social networks was

of this variety, and such overtures and routine participation over time al

lowed participants to form associations, establish a sense of participatory

agency, and identify themselves as a member of a particular online culture. "Everyday" cosmopolitanism was not always innocuous or smooth, as youth

from different cultures, with different aesthetic preferences, different norms

for politeness, and different levels of proficiency with English bumped up

against each other. However, learning to negotiate such rough or awkward

moments is, we believe, core to developing a cosmopolitan disposition and

communicative repertoire.

A second type of cosmopolitan practice we termed "intercultural

triggers," which we defined as an activity, semiotic resource, or participant

structure that jumpstarts, at times in dramatic fashion, cross-cultural com

munication and understanding, generating a flurry of activity on and off

the network, sometimes sustained over periods of time. Bakhti's digital story

was a quintessential instance, and another was the handmade greeting card

exchange between the Indian girls and youth in South Africa. Intercultural

triggers typically caught us by surprise, as youthful responses emerged

from the conjunction of their interests, the activity at hand, and the com

municative power of a multimodal artifact. While everyday cosmopolitan

practice typically involved pairs of participants responding one to another

online, intercultural triggers affected groups of students and provided mo

ments of cohesion with i 11 and across sites and lengthy intra-site discussions

and activities. Most importantly, these triggers led to noticeable and often

immediate shifts in attitudes and actions, as young people took giant steps forward in cosmopolitan understandings, becoming for a time hospitable

communicators able to recognize, to return to Silverstone's (2007) phrasing, the other in themselves.

Social networks such as Space2Cre8 and accompanying offline pro

grams such as Kidnet can indeed function as sites of cosmopolitan practice,

where young people can productively engage with communicative and

literate arts that will prime them to become ideologically knowledgeable

(Bakhtin, 1981). As youth encounter in such pedagogical contexts media

created by others that challenge their familiar ways of interpreting and

understanding the world, this juxtaposition can foster, we are hopeful,

youth's imaginative capacities as hospitable interlocutors. More hopefully

still, the process of developing cosmopolitan habits of mind can be nurtured

by educators who are willing to assist youth to participate actively and to

"dwell educationally in the world" (Hansen, 2010, p. 24).

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English Education , V 4 2 N4, July 2010

Notes

1. We gratefully acknowledge the support given the larger project from which this paper grew: the Spencer Foundation; the UC Links project of the University of Califor nia; the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. Special thanks are due Lauren Jones Young, P. David Pearson, and Mike Wood, whose considerable early assistance and belief in the work made all that followed possible. We also acknowledge the members of the research, development, and teach ing team of the Kidnet project: Sangeeta Anand, Patricia Baker, Anand Chitravanshi, Ola Erstad, Anna Floch, Adrienne Herd, Suenel Holloway, Garth Jones, Gary Jones, Nora Kenney, Knut Lundby, Dave Malinowski, Stacy Marple, Mark Nelson, John Scott, Kenneth Silseth, Xolani Tembu, Kristin Beate Vasbo, Rian Whittle, and Duncan Winter. Finally, we thank Daniele E. C. Fogel for sharing her resources on cosmopolitanism and David Hansen for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.

2. Please see www.space2cre8.info for more information about the project and a demonstration site for the social network itself.

3. The literature on cosmopolitanism is vast, although it has only recently made its way to education, primarily through the work of educational philosophers (e.g., Hansen, 2008,2010; Papastephanou, 2002,2005; Rizvi, 2009; Todd, 2010) and theorists of media (e.g., Corpus Ong, 2009; Couldry, 2006; Silverstone, 2007). For introductions to this literature we recommend Appiah (2006), Beck and Snyder (2006), Kleingeld and Brown (2009), and Hansen (2010). For critical views, see Cheah (2006) or Hun tington (2004).

4. The decision of whether to locate the sites during the school day or after school depended on the institutional capacities and constraints at each site in each country. In some cases, as in the United States, there was no space during the school-day cur riculum for activities deemed to be "extracurricular." In other sites, such as India, there were no after-school programs, and in South Africa, the Kidnet curriculum filled a school-day need for a technology curriculum. In Norway, where the program was offered during the school day as a part of the English class, teachers worried that it supplanted important parts of the curriculum. Although an account of the complexi ties involved in determining where such activities belong, in or out of school and in what part of the curriculum, is beyond the scope of this article, we note its impor tance in our project and more generally, especially as English classes increasingly incorporate media-related and Internet-enabled activities and tools. Such concerns also parallel current debates and tensions over the nature of afterschool in relation to school (Hull, 2007).

5. There is a substantial literature on digital storytelling theory and practice. See, for example, Hartley & McWilliam, 2009; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Lambert, 2008; Lundby, 2008.

6. I he names of the school, teachers, and student participants are pseudonyms. 7. The tension-laden role within the school day of social networking and other

digital media practices such as digital storytelling won't be addressed in this article. However, we note that determining where in the curriculum and when in educational time to locate the Kidnet project and Space2Cre8 activities was a nontrivial matter, not only in the United States but in international sites as well. For a discussion of current debates around the appropriate role of afterschool programs in relation to school time, see Hull (2007).

8. All transcriptions that were translated from Hindi to English have been marked by the symbol [T] at the end of the quotation; if not so indicated, the transcribed quotations were originally in English. Ail translations from Hindi to English were

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Hull, Stornaiuolo, and Sahni > Cultural Citizenship

carried out by Indian researchers at the Ridnet India site. Transcription conventions included [bracketed] information for material not included in the original transcript, such as pseudonyms.

9. Aunty is a form of respectful address for women older than oneself. 10. See Hull and Nelson (2009) for a discussion of the "sexy nurse" photo in the

context of a call for an aesthetic turn in literacy studies. 11. Bakhti had the choice of writing and narrating her story in Hindi or in Eng

lish; for her first digital story for the Kidnet project, she chose English to more easily communicate with youth elsewhere. We haven't in this article discussed the role of English on Space2Cre8, which is a multilingual network that currently supports the use of Hindi, Afrikaans, and Norwegian in addition to English. Youth from India, South Africa, and Norway chose to write in English most of the time, viewing the network as a language-learning opportunity, as did their teachers, while some youth in the United States lamented the dominance of English on the network but yet did not engage actively in learning the other languages themselves.

12. The practice of digital storytelling, fostered by organizations such as the Center for Digital Storytelling (http://www.storycenter.org/), ranges from the efforts of indi vidual educators to introduce the genre to their students to a large, multiyear effort sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corporation to "Capture Wales" (http://www. bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/galleries/pages/capturewales.shtml).

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Glynda A. Hull is professor of English Education at New York University; she

can be reached at [email protected].

Amy Stornaiuolo is a doctoral candidate at the University of California,

Berkeley. She can be reached at [email protected].

Urvashi Sahni is the founder of Studyhall Foundation in Lucknow, UP, India,

and can be reached at [email protected].

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