Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online

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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

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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 glynda.hull@gmail.com.

Amy Stornaiuolo is a doctoral candidate at the University of California,

Berkeley. She can be reached at amystorn@berkeley.edu.

Urvashi Sahni is the founder of Studyhall Foundation in Lucknow, UP, India,

and can be reached at urvashi.sahni@gmail.com.

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

English Education, Vol. 42, No. 4 (July 2010) pp. 327-452
Front Matter
The Editorial We: At Last [pp. 327-330]
Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online [pp. 331-367]
Preservice Teachers Planning for Critical Literacy Teaching [pp. 368-390]
Dialogic Praxis in Teacher Preparation: A Discourse Analysis of Mentoring Talk [pp. 391-426]
Critical Conversations: Tensions and Opportunities of the Dialogical Classroom [pp. 427-447]
Back Matter

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