ABSTRACT
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the past efforts of education for international understanding seem to have failed badly in reducing cultural conflicts and bias. This chapter seeks to zoom in on the dangerous flashpoints of love and fear, care and control that were historically embedded in the making of “international understanding” and “global competence” in the United States. It explores the particular historical condition and practices where representational technologies (e.g., simulation games, statistic models, images) of the world were constructed as epistemic infrastructures to cultivate American citizens with “global competence.” The chapter first traces the rise of the Spaceship Earth movement in the United States during the 1960s and then examines how the imaginary of “Spaceship Earth” was translated into the curriculum and teaching of international education and what kinds of epistemological, emotional, and ethical effects were induced. This chapter finds that simulating and modeling the world in the classroom produced a heterotopia that made it possible for the subject to care about the world as “home” through disengaged representations of the world and the “other.” Departing from love and care of the common world all life shared, the perspective of “Spaceship Earth” nonetheless actualized the desire for a totalized control of the earth and reenacted ethnocentrism that international education aimed to criticize. At the end of the chapter, it proposes historical epistemology as a critical approach to education for students to be more responsibly engaged with the world.
