Abstract
This thesis examines the Junior Year Abroad programmes of four American institutions of higher education during a key phase of the Cold War, from 1950 to approximately 1970. During an era when federal funding flooded universities, higher education became increasingly accountable for producing responsible citizens who would serve national interests. The question of how these programmes and their participants envisioned and reshaped American identity beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States is central to this thesis. Of specific interest are the ways in which Junior Year Abroad administrators understood themselves as constructing Americanness; how undergraduate studyabroad participants responded in ways which simultaneously supported and contested institutional designs; and how particular constructions of American citizenship were reformulated between institution and participant in ways that integrated aspects of the dominant modes of American Cold War patriotism with elements of radical political contestation. This thesis argues that while American universities sought to initiate students into a new mode of American citizenship, individual participants were able to contest institutional prescriptions through political dissent, by confronting normative gendered expectations, or by aligning with anti-imperialist internationalisms. In doing so, this study builds on the work of scholars such as Wendy Wall, Penny Von Eschen, and Andrea Friedman, who argue against the notion of a civic consensus regarding the meanings, values, and responsibilities of Americanism and instead illuminate the contested authorship of American identity and citizenship as a process generated in the interactions between institutions and individuals, and within the contexts of national and global pressures.
A central concept within the thesis is a specific institutional ideal of citizenship that was envisioned by administrators of Junior Year Abroad programmes during the Cold War era, which I term American world citizenship. American world citizenship had among its key purposes the moulding of American citizens as liberal individuals and cosmopolitans who would support the state and their home academic institutions by engaging in diplomacy and extending the presence and power of US academia overseas. Upon their return to the United States, students were expected to assume roles as professionals and active citizens administering state, private, and civic institutions, and to fortify
civil society through leading and improving local communities. Intrinsic to American world citizenship was a form of constructive patriotism, whereby devotion to country required contesting national practices that were considered adverse to America’s central creeds and long-term interests. The critique prescribed by this form of citizenship was not a radical, fundamental questioning of American norms or virtues. Rather, it was to be elaborated and deployed to serve the existing objectives of the nation state.
This thesis makes a particular contribution to scholarship on gender in relation to citizenship. Women comprised a substantial majority of American study abroad participants throughout the Cold War era, when higher education for women was anchored in a notion of citizenship defined by gendered social obligations of marriage, maternalism, and suburban domesticity. However, the liberal individualism and professional trajectories espoused by architects of American world citizenship corresponded to roles more available to men. By focusing on female study abroad participants, and through the creation of a unique archive of women’s oral histories of study abroad and its use alongside the written archives of higher education institutions, this thesis introduces new historical actors to explore the gendered dimensions of the institutional-personal dynamic of American world citizenship and its contestation.
Crucially, by exceeding the focus on academic institutions that characterises much existing scholarship on study abroad, and by devoting sustained attention to the actions and ideas of study abroad participants themselves, I argue that in creating the conditions for American world citizenship, its architects also unwittingly created the circumstances for American students to interrogate American identity and global responsibilities in transformative ways which sometimes clashed with institutional designs. I utilise the concept of American world citizenship, then, to illuminate the complexities of American citizenship as a construct that can emerge at the intersections of national and institutional forces with personal subjectivity and experience and can encompass widely varying and even contradictory political ideals.
Existing scholarship on US Cold War-era international education prioritises a concentration on government objectives and anti-communism. This thesis intervenes in the literature in distinct ways. First, I break with scholarship which exclusively situates student mobility as advancing US empire, and instead argue that the institutional objectives of Junior Year Abroad served to fulfil domestic hegemonic aims as well. Secondly, this thesis challenges scholarship that identifies anti-communism as the principal motivation for US Cold War-era transnationalism, and instead locates Junior Year Abroad within a longer lineage of US liberal internationalism. Thirdly, in contrast to most scholarship
on women’s diplomacy, I argue that women’s motivations for participating in study abroad were fuelled far more by individual pursuit of cultural and intellectual enrichment than by an overtly political agenda. Moreover, their mobility was neither motivated by pursuit of global sisterhood nor was it suffused with the rhetoric of maternalism to justify women’s participation as global actors. On the contrary, women students exhibited a striking confidence in the intrinsic legitimacy of their role as international actors which further illuminates the divergences between the roles ascribed to women by the state and institutions of higher education and the roles they assigned themselves—and
reveals much about the complexity and dissonance involved in conceptualisations of citizenship.
| Date of Award | 1 Aug 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Daniel Matlin (Supervisor) & Uta Balbier (Supervisor) |