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Global Citizenship Otherwise Education
In this reflection, Vanessa Andreotti explores education in the context of global forces and deep structural challenges, highlighting how persistent social imaginaries shape what is considered real, desirable, and intelligible. These imaginaries often reinforce dominant narratives of progress and development, which, while appearing neutral or benevolent, can obscure complexity, marginalise other ways of knowing, and limit the capacity to imagine alternative futures. Framed by intensifying globalization, migration, cultural hybridity, and economic inequity, education today is tasked with navigating volatility, fragmentation, and rising levels of anxiety and disillusionment, particularly among younger generations.
At the heart of Andreotti’s analysis is the concept of the “yellow corn cob” as a metaphor for the normalized, singular view of development and humanity. While this view may appear harmless, it becomes problematic when treated as universal: it eclipses the validity of other experiences, perspectives, and histories. This dynamic (requiring everything outside the dominant imaginary to be repainted in its image) undermines plurality and reproduces power imbalances. In this way, education risks becoming complicit in the maintenance of a narrow worldview, especially when it promotes simplified solutions to complex problems, emphasizes individualism and mobility, or upholds savior narratives in global citizenship discourses.
Andreotti challenges the field of education to move beyond quick fixes and toward deeper existential shifts: to recognize intelligence and worth in those historically devalued, to sit with complexity without retreating into guilt or idealism, and to disinvest from the illusion of universal knowledge. Instead of projecting change onto others, learners and educators alike are invited to reconsider their own positions (relationally, historically, and ecologically).
From this perspective, education is not merely a system of transmission or adaptation but a space for reimagining how we live, relate, and learn together. It becomes a practice of holding complexity, of cultivating humility, and of generating new habits of being: ones rooted in interconnectedness, mutual responsibility, and the courage to imagine otherwise.