Cosmopolitan Sidestep: University Life, Intimate Geopolitics and the Hidden Costs of “Global” Citizenship (Area; Vol. 51, No. 4)

In higher education in the US today, particular practices of global engagement are positioned as essential to student learning. Institutional stakeholders foreground the potential of outward‐facing orientation to the globe while sidestepping local connections to racial inequality and injustice foregrounded by student and waged‐worker activism. Faculty and student composition, course content and hierarchies of waged work have been targeted by activists from within and without. In this example, relations between labour, students and administrators at a large southern research university in the USA reveal the mechanisms by which especially neoliberal cosmopolitanisms require an intentional and narrow rendering of what and who counts in the production of campus life. A discussion of student activism and changes to housekeeping work practices reveal how power is produced and divided by controlling and corralling particular kinds of social reproductive labour. In light of the redistribution and erasure of this labour, we argue that US universities are geopolitical in nature, shaping young people's orientations to an imagined global citizenship to create a specific form of cosmopolitanism that centres whiteness and makes claim to a globally oriented generosity rather than a justice‐oriented framework with explicit connections to the breadth of waged work undergirding university life and practice. To create this possibility, the university frequently side‐steps complex interconnections between student life and systems of racialised, ethnicised and gendered exploitation in local spaces in favour of a focus of similar inequalities in the world “out there.”