| This dissertation studies the various ways in which globalization was informed and framed in the social studies education discourse community between 1990 and 2005 in the U.S. This study refers to social studies educators, curriculum practitioners, and researchers as constituting a community that shares collective practices, language, and modes of communication. The professional publications directed to and used by this community are referred to in this study as a discourse community. Limited to texts in two journals, Social Education and The Social Studies for the data collection, this study seeks a better understanding of the ways in which globalization is described, analyzed, and informed in articles that specifically address global issues. At one level, the study examines the inventory of global issues, dimensions, and debates discussed in this discourse community. At another level, the study explores the frames, conceptualizations, and metaphors through which this discourse articulates and conceives globalization. To organize the terms and sort out the repertoire of ideas and approaches in these data, this study utilized ATLAS.ti, a software package for qualitative analysis of texts. This software makes the data analysis comprehensible and replicable.;This dissertation argues that this particular discourse produces expectations of the global as threatening, inevitable, irresistible, and irreversible. Imagined thus, the global becomes not a set of material forces or outcomes but rather some sort of an autonomous order, operating outside and above the social, political, and cultural terrains in which human agency is influential. The construction of an authoritarian perspective of the global hinders imagining alternative narratives and images of the global. At one level, the deterministic acceptance of the global conceals some negative externalities and consequences of the current form of globalization. Moreover, it constitutes the global as a process that appears to come without actors: a structure with no agency. At another level, accepting the global as such vindicates the centering of global education, as presented in this discourse, on cross-cultural communication and problem-solving skills. All in all, this dissertation argues for accommodating an approach that is less structured, yet more human-agency oriented, through which globalization is approached historically and discursively.;The main finding of this study is that the discourse community of social studies on globalization is strongly influenced by multicultural education. This discourse focuses on two topics: cultural diversity and economics. Further, it marginalizes environment, development, and human rights topics. In this discourse, globalization is viewed as a threatening and novel process that produces difference and weakens the nation state. The data also render three different conceptualizations of the global: as a unit-based process of interaction, as a system-based process of transformation, and as an inclusive order. |
