ABSTRACT
Contemporary youth are growing up in a rapidly changing and unpredictable world characterized by, among other factors, the unprecedented expansion of “transcontinental fl ows and patterns of social interaction,” which have created complex and uneven forms of “interconnectedness” (Held and McGrew, 2002, p. 1). Th is has important implications for the young and their education. Our focus is on those forms of interconnectedness created by the global cultural economy, and more particularly global consumer-media culture. Th ese are increasingly predicated on consumption (Best and Kellner, 2003). We begin with a discussion of these terms. We then explain how the global corporate curriculum for the young is part of the global cultural economy, showing how young people are located within it and pointing to its worrying silences. We explore what the corporate curriculum means for pedagogical projects associated with global citizenship, explaining the importance of developing a sense of critical agency in the young that goes beyond that made available by consumer-media culture (Kenway and Bullen, 2001). But we also identify the dangers of critically deconstructing children’s pleasures in class and point to the importance of pedagogies for global citizenship that blend the playful and the earnest. Th e third section develops the case for an understanding of the young cyberfl âneur as global citizen. Here we clarify the contours of the debates about the fl âneur, justify our use of the term cyberfl âneur, and off er examples of the young cyberfl âneur as critical observer and as cultural producer.
