The Parks & People Experience: Questioning the “Global” in Global Citizenship

We start from the assertion that the concept of “global citizenship” is neither simple nor stable. Rather, it is a contentious idea that is often uncritically based upon assumptions of the “global” and “citizenship” as positives. In geography, however, the “global” and how it relates to the idea of the “local” is a complex and debated concept. Drawing upon critical geographic theories of scale, we suggest that the concept of global citizenship should be thoroughly interrogated to understand its problems and paradoxes as well as its possibilities. In this chapter, we offer one such interrogation grounded in the experiences of designing and implementing the Parks and People experience. We identify tensions within the program such as how to sell the program, how to navigate between individual and group experiences, and how to simultaneously support one-time encounters and ongoing relationships. In exploring these tensions, we demonstrate how the everyday practices of “global citizenship” are enmeshed in uneven geographies of privilege. We suggest that our goal should not be to separate ourselves from such inequality, but, rather, to face the complexities of the relationships we are trying to foster in the name of promoting social justice.