Global citizenship discourses often comport with a moral liberal response to new place-based formations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class inequalities globally in complex arrangement with increasing politically invested ideologico-religious polarizations; persistent and pernicious levels of poverty, global violence and human degradation; the rise of new forms of nationalism and differentiated capitalist formations geopolitically; and a concomitant rise in cosmopolitanism and new integrations. It is also associated with a resurgence of humanism and humanitarianism, and it can be said to be caught up, at least partially, in the globalization project of neo-liberal spread and capitalist imperialism. In the Higher Education arena, global citizenship has investments in the intensification of internationalization of universities in competition with each other on a global scale. Reservations around the hosting of an HE online international transdisciplinary course on global citizenship would therefore be understandable in terms of the expected interests it may serve in the promotion of the international university. This paper draws on experiences in the development and facilitation of such a course at a leading Canadian university, and argues that the critical dialogue between participants (both students and facilitators) in such a course offers spaces of reflexive ontological possibility to address global/local injustices and foster local ethical activism connected to global projects, while recognising the limits and dilemmas that such an undertaking exacts. In this sense, the paper speaks to the imperative and (im)possibility of doing critical global citizenship work within the international university, and presents opportunities for thinking through epistemic and political border crossing through a glocalizing pedagogy and ethical praxis (Swanson, 2010; 2011).

Swanson, D.M. (2010). Value in Shadows: A contribution to Values Education in our times. In T. Lovat (Ed.), Springer Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing, (pp. 137-152). New York: Springer Press. Swanson, D.M. (2011). Parallaxes and paradoxes of Global Citizenship: Critical reflections and possibilities of praxis in/through an international online course. In Lynnette Schulz, Ali A. Abdi and George H. Richardson (Eds.), Global Citizenship Education in Post Secondary Institutions: Theories, Practices, Policies, (pp. 120-139). New York: Peter Lang Publishers.