The Global Imperative for Higher Education: Cultivating Students’ Ontological Relationships to Multiscalar Spaces through Glonacal Agency

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the cause and treatment of global emergencies are bounded within a space (e.g., local communities, a country, or a region). This establishes a new purpose for higher education, namely to move from the notion that institutions must physically house students to that of cultivating students’ glonacal agency through the online learning environment. Such a model intrinsically motivates students to navigate the multiscalar spaces (i.e., global, national, and local spheres) as part of their higher education learning and to lead actions that do not subjugate the interests and rights of communities in diverse spaces. In serving the new purpose of higher education, online graduate education, particularly asynchronous comparative and international education courses, can play an imperative role. This essay, thus, establishes an ontological and pedagogical conceptualization of how comparative and international education can prepare students to develop glonacal agency by interrogating the concept of space and attending to students’ ontological sense of being in the context of education and agency development.

1. Introduction

“Life is a series of moments. The quality of attention and action that we bring to each moment determines the quality of our lives.”

(Dan Millman)

Despite the worldwide challenges, hardship, and death associated with COVID-19, the pandemic has ushered in a new era for higher education in an age demarcated by emergencies impacting life and well-being. While “emergency” is captured as a global moment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, emergencies in the modern and globalized world should be understood as continuous and simultaneous moments (e.g., crime and violence, local and national disasters, and pandemics that start in some locale and expand to the global level). Ikeda [1] also averred that, as the COVID-19 pandemic was different from traditional forms of disasters “in which the negative impacts are geographically concentrated and contained,” individuals witnessed the interconnected impact of disasters across the globe (p. 2). While grappling with personal survival and collective fate, it became necessary for individuals and organizations to perceive the interconnectedness of the causes across different scales of space and to use their agency in solidarity that encompassed both support for local communities and the world for the rapid and equal recovery from COVID-19, rather than creating divides among peoples and nations [1]. Not being able to see the interconnectedness of local, national, and global implications of emergencies can divide humanity and cause unjust discrimination against certain groups (e.g., increased incidents of Asian hatred during COVID-19).

At this critical juncture, current online learning in higher education is faced with important questions. Can online education foster a sense of interconnectedness across various scales of space among students when education more often promotes dominant perspectives based on national or local interests? What is a framework of online education that can develop students’ sense of multiscalar being and identity that addresses the interconnected implications of emergencies across global, national, and local spheres? Contemplating these questions is timely because the sudden and wide adaptation of online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up renewed discussions on the roles of higher education in shaping one’s sense of being and conception of space (i.e., where one belongs or does not belong), particularly for graduate-level students.

This article therefore seeks to conceptualize the kind of space and agency in which students and faculty are learning and teaching in an era of global emergency. As such, this work is a conceptual essay, defined as academic writing that presents an innovative idea or concept related to education for purposes of stimulating discussion, offering a new way forward, and advancing thinking in the field of education. The argument is for a graduate online education in the area of comparative and international education that fosters students’ glonacal agency. Toward that end, we define glonacal agency, conceptualize space, consider students’ ontological sense of collective being, and advocate for asynchronous online learning that is both critical and inclusive.

The opportunity and autonomy to learn from home for those digitally connected during COVID-19, combined with declining economic conditions and financial insecurity for growing numbers of people worldwide, has led many graduate students to choose online degree programs going forward. Increasingly, students are unwilling to uproot their lives and/or those of their families, to change their locales, to interrupt their learning, or to forego work and income for in-person education. Rather, more and more students are opting for graduate academic programs that provide mobility, flexibility, and the opportunity to expand their learning and understanding while potentially opening new career paths. Marinoni and colleagues [2], in reference to the International Association of Universities (IAU) Global Survey Report, suggest that “it is therefore possible that a shift in mindset is happening,” as the impact of COVID-19 on higher education has enhanced prospects for working from a distance and accessing lifelong learning opportunities online around the world (p. 26). Thus, graduate students seeking online degrees are likely to be immersed in learning that is not specifically space-bound (such as city or nation) while their daily lives are locally rooted, which makes their learning to embody comparative, international, and multiscalar elements. However, while this increased virtual mobility enables more diverse adult learners to access an alternative type of learning that shifts students’ sense of place to a multiscalar one, they are not automatically guaranteed an equitable learning environment in which every student can experience the same degree of the multiscalar shift regardless of their locations.

The main purpose of the field of comparative and international education is to foster cross-cultural understanding, academic achievement, scholarship, and societal development through the international study of educational issues, ideas, systems, and practices. As such, comparative and international education is uniquely positioned to equip students with outward-looking perspectives. Simultaneously, the field is also concerned with globalization and seeks to engage students in reflection on dominant paradigms and methodological approaches. The intent of our essay is to argue that graduate online education—when infused with comparative, international, and multiscalar elements—can be an effective site for fostering students’ glonacal agency, especially when done asynchronously. To explicate, the term ‘multiscalar’ refers to “sociospatial spheres of practice that are constituted in relationship to each other and within various hierarchies of networks of power” [3] (p. 8) while understanding the complexity among a host of sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and environmental issues, including contemporary migration [4]. The term ‘glonacal’ encompasses the interplay of three scales of agency and activity and is formed from the morphosis of three words: global(glo) + national(na) + local(cal) [5]. Marginson and Rhoades [5] originally coined ‘glonacal agency’ as recognizing that types of problems and roles of higher education under globalization are inevitably implicated at various scales or spheres. Hence, glonacal agency can be defined as a disposition toward glonacal spheres of practice, an understanding of relational hierarchies and networks of power, and the ability to navigate complex emergencies without canceling human rights efforts in various spaces. In addition, the glonacal agency concept was coined in efforts from comparative and international education to unpack patterns of inequalities among agents in spatial terms [6]. Developing glonacal agency involves students from diverse positions and places, and each of them wrestles with how their actions influence one another comparatively in new global emergencies without privileging certain locations. Asynchronous online environments provide non-place and virtually non-time-bound learning [7,8], which is more conducive for students from diverse technological, linguistic, and geographical conditions to engage in intentional discussions in the online classroom.

The manifestation of glonacal agency can only be realized through the development of an ontological sense of being that espouses and relates to the practices of sociospatial spheres across local, national, and global spaces. Thus, we see in this important moment not only the potential for pedagogical renewal but also for ontological ascension through graduate online learning. This renewal should accompany the exploration and establishment of a conceptual framework that explains how graduate online education with comparative, international, and multiscalar elements can contribute to one’s ontological sense of being and agency beyond spaces with which one already identifies. In establishing such a framework, it is particularly beneficial to unpack concepts and categories germane to comparative and international education that also attend to the affective aspects of learning with regard to graduate students’ ontological views of reality and their sense of being in the world. This kind of framework must offer critical understandings of and navigations in hierarchical networks of power and relations interwoven in social, economic, and political contexts and histories of places. Toward that end, it is worthwhile to conceptually examine how academic courses in comparative and international education develop students’ critical local, national, and global perspectives, particularly through the online format.

As an attempt to establish the grounds for graduate online education in fostering students’ glonacal agency, we conducted conceptual research that examines the current body of scholarship to: (1) conceptualize ‘space’; (2) consider students’ ontological sense of collective being; (3) contemplate how asynchronous online learning, especially in comparative and international education courses, develops glonacal agency in making space; and (4) explore how critical and inclusive glonacal agency can be fostered through online graduate education. The attendant sections of this article address these very areas. In sum, our pedagogical concern here is an ontological concern—to help college and university students see themselves as glonacal beings. Because little attention has been given by the field to how asynchronous online delivery of graduate-level comparative and international education courses can foster students’ glonacal agency, we make the case for the comparative and international education field to conceptualize space not only in their research and scholarship but also in their teaching. Through online asynchronous teaching, comparative educators can ascertain and foster students’ ontologies of collective being considered central to critical and inclusive glonacal agentic development. Such global competence is necessary for individual knowledge, voices, and values to be included in education and to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

2. Conceptualizing ‘Space’

Fostering glonacal agency begins with a thorough conceptualization of space to explain how individuals and collectives can develop multiscalar positionalities encompassing and transcending their physical location. First, as human beings, we occupy a position in both geographic (physical) and social space. Bourdieu’s concept of social space [9,10,11] is particularly relevant to the study of critical issues in the humanities and social sciences [12]. Bourdieu conceptualized the construction of social space through habitus, which refers to people’s embodied orientation to the world and includes points of view, tastes, and dispositions. In reference to Bourdieu’s theory of social space, Reed-Danahay [12] argues that, while people compose social space, it is not a given that they enter that social space. Rather, social space is produced by a host of social actors engaged in social practices informed by their viewpoints, positions, and strategies [12]. In a similar vein, Giddens [13] views all social actors as being knowledgeable about the social systems they produce and reproduce through their action and conduct. To illustrate this, in her work with both domestic Jordanian and Syrian refugee students in Amman, Kubow [14] advanced the notion that Arab youth identities are shaped by socialization processes, or what Bourdieu [9,11] has called “habitus”—the internalized structures and schemes of perception, conception, and action that guide the norms of daily life. However, the Arab youth also produce their own knowledge about the social systems to which they are exposed. As such, social spaces are created through everyday social, political, and economic activities and through the application of students’ knowledge, perspectives and modes of interest.

Ute Wardenga [15], a German geographer, differentiated the idea of ‘space’ into four dimensions: space as container; topological space; individually perceived space; and socially constructed space [16]. Space as a container refers to the physical geography of a place and the human activity that occurs within physical entities. Topological space is associated with location and its relationship to surrounding influences or proximities (e.g., locations, distances, and scales). It focuses on the features of one space compared to another. Individually perceived space refers to the perception of a place through the lens of individuals or different groups. Spaces, therefore, are categories of sensory perception that enable humans or institutions to give structure, organization, and classification to “their views of the world and to create a spatially differentiated world by means of action” [16] (p. 16). Socially constructed space is concerned with how spaces are produced and reproduced through the communication and representation of various social actors [16]. Social space also expresses articulations between physical space and sociality. Importantly, the first two conceptions of space (space as container and topological space) are rooted in realist and structuralist traditions that focus on the observable world, whereas the latter two conceptions of space (individually perceived space and socially constructed space) are grounded in constructivist and post-structuralist perspectives that view reality as subjective and shaped by public discourse [16]. Other scholars, such as Lillehammer [17], Romero and colleagues [18], and Soja [19], have depicted space as having three dimensions: “physical space (location), mental space (social conceptions and significance), and practical space (how they occupy those spaces)” [14] (p. 121). Thus, there are at least three levels pertinent to social space: the actual space (physical), the discursive space (representation), and the lived space (human experience).

Teachers of comparative and international education courses, including online, need to consider actual/physical, discursive, and lived spaces in the context of their work. In the field of comparative and international education, these three levels of social spaces are to be equally treated, as they are essential to multiscalar understanding. Bourdieu raised an important question as to “the degree to which the physical environment, or geographic space, should (or can) be analytically separated from the more abstract idea of one’s position in an imagined social space that has to do with moral values, status, prestige, affinity, identity, and so on” [12] (p. 17). ‘Space’ is often associated with abstract conception, whereas ‘place’ signifies the cultural meanings people attach to a specific site or locale. Massey [20], however, critiques the dichotomous view of space as global and abstract and place as local and concrete. The challenge is that both the global and the local are social constructions that are equally dynamic [6,20]. In this regard, a hallmark of comparative and international education is that it considers “the relevance of the context to facilitating understanding of a particular phenomenon” [21] (pp. 168–169). Kauko and Wermke [21], for instance, remind us that comparative education has benefited from spatial re-narration in its theoretical perspectives [22,23] and research approaches, where space is conceived as fluid scales [24] such as glocal and glonacal [5] and transnational [25], and that education is situated within complex networks, scapes, and flows [26,27]. Comparative and international education as a field of scholarship, therefore, fundamentally concerns the conceptualization of space in multiscalar contexts. This makes it a particularly appropriate place to start in developing graduate students’ glonacal agency.

Furthermore, comparative and international education purposes foster students’ multiscalar agency, such as glonacal agency, by creating spaces where students can re-conceptualize space through a framework for comparative analysis. This is especially important because self-identity shapes, and is shaped by, institutions of modernity [28]. Gaventa [29] identified three types of spaces: invited, claimed, and created. While invitation is often a form of exclusion or even elitism, claimed and created spaces are extremely valued for social change, for which higher education has an important role to play. For this social change to occur, teaching and learning in comparative and international education courses, including online, presents the occasion to approach ‘comparison’ as an ontological category that extends beyond similarities and differences to engage with non-Western traditions, assumptions, and worldviews and to stimulate conceptual change [30]. Coined in the mid-1980s, use of the term ‘glocalism,’ for instance, spread from its original application in Japanese business contexts to other geographical areas and knowledge fields, such as sociology, education, economics, and political science [31]. The term ‘glocalism’ integrates the words ‘globalism’ and ‘localism’ and provides a conceptual synthesis of the “modernity” thesis and the “postmodernity” antithesis [31] (p. 191). Comparing and combining these words into one neologism reflects hybridity in its form, integration, and content [31]. Thus, for Brodeur [31], glocalism is “a constant reflexive process by which a human being’s philosophy/ideology/belief/perception and corresponding praxes understand and integrate reality perceptually, materially, and symbolically in ways that, though not always conscious, try to constantly overcome the gaps between various dichotomies, conceptual and pragmatic, as presented in linguistic representations of reality that live with interdependent community circles” (p. 197). This example delineates comparative and international education as a space where “new languages and ways of talking are recognized and respected” [30] (p. 481). Thus, in the teaching of comparative and international education courses, students can engage with the concepts of space and place. To do so, space must be understood “not only as an object in its concreted form but also as sets of relations between individuals and groups” [27] (p. 192). Space, therefore, must be applied as a framework for comparative analysis and not treated only as an object of study [27].

3. Ontological Sense of Collective Being

The conceptualization of space through comparison extends to a discussion of the ontological sense of being. First of all, ontology is concerned with the nature of existence or reality, of being and becoming, and the basic categories of things that exist and their relations [32]. Derived from the Greek words “onto” (being) and “logia” (written and spoken discourse), ontology refers to the nature and relations of being [33,34]. It is a branch of philosophy that focuses on the assumptions one makes in order to believe that something is real or makes sense; ontology, therefore, speaks to the essence of the social phenomenon being investigated [32,35]. Ontological security develops when one senses continuity and is able to integrate external events in the world with one’s own self-story [28]. Unfortunately, ontology is often neglected in identity discourses, despite it being central to the meanings people give to their life experiences [33]. Moreover, ontology provides a common vocabulary and an explication of what is often left implicit or unsaid [36,37]. For instance, ontology is essential to a paradigm and helps one understand the things that constitute the world and how it is known [38]. In literature, a particular set of concepts and their relationships are generally referred to as ontology [39]. In philosophy, ontology is associated with theories of existence and seeks to explain what is being and how the world is configured, offering critical categories that account for things and their intrinsic relations [37]. The ontological concern, therefore, involves the theorization of being and how one exists in relation to others.

Thus, for our conceptual framework, we particularly pay attention to the development of collective being and the specification of what we are (or what we are not) through the concept of space. This is because ontological concerns for the collective can shape the idea of who we are and with whom we share a common fate and, thus, should be supported in times of emergency. The ontology of collective being, premised upon social ontology, is formed through interactive systems of the current world in which individuals develop the ability “to co-constitutively participate in social realities, in situations and institutionalized conventions. These influences are deepest in their framing of the issues and possibilities of what constitutes meaningful and successful ways of being in one’s life and one’s relationship” [40] (p. 19). According to Bickhard [40], individual ontology is largely associated with the personal level of norms and values and offers an ontological framework “that permits defeasible explorations of trans-cultural ethical issues and reflections” (p. 15). Interactions with structures and social patterns, while not entirely, greatly influence the development of shared ontology. Thus, the classification of what is to be studied is an institutionalized form of the collective ontology of humans. This implies that the ontology of collective being, which is developed through the shared urgency of cultivating the multiscalar agency of individuals, suggests an alternative comparative and international education with purposes and pedagogical concerns to espouse the ontology of the field accordingly.

The ontological sense of collective being is indispensable to the formation of an imagined community, discerning the boundary of collective space. Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal [23] first ask us to consider both material and immaterial space. Drawing upon the work of Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal, Kubow [41] explains that “material space denotes people’s lived experiences within particular physical locales, whereas immaterial space refers to the imaginations and memories formed through associated living with people similar or dissimilar to their selves” (p. 350). As space is formed, territorialized, and re-territorialized through the struggles of power relations via access, imagination, and discourse surrounding it, space is a constant but also changing and emergent. This is because space shapes the structure of our lives and is also re-imagined by human agents whose being and belongingness are bound in that space. This implies that individuals with dispositions for certain spaces make and re-make spaces. Anderson [42] conceptualizes that the collective sense of being and belonging, such as national identities, is a reflection of the imagined space of community. He argues that the formation of national identities is the product of the imagination of space, which is shaped by the institution of language and written scripts, a sense of comradeship, and shared ideas and interests among people. Smith [43] suggests that identity cultivated in relation to space (in Anderson’s case, the nation) facilitates a salient community identity and collective faith through common mythological values that foster individual belonging and the sense of the nation as family.

Ontology—one’s understanding of the nature of being, existence, and reality—can be contracted by communal spatial identity. Subsequently, the territorialization of the sense of being and belonging may precipitate exclusionary practices among individuals or communities, such as racism and hatred and fear of others outside one’s community, since being-ness is conceived as bounded within a particular space [42]. While the imagination of space into a community is a fundamental function of human agency production, it also shapes individual identities, territorializing the sense of being and belongingness and binding their ontologies in relation to the spaces to which they belong, which results in unjust discrimination toward others and for which others’ ontological concerns do not reach. In fact, we have witnessed the divisive implications of ontological security and concerns governed by the collective sense of being during the COVID-19 pandemic in the form of unequal vaccine distributions around the world as well as Asian hatred.

While the ontological sense of collective being is bound to the imagined space of community, Marginson [6], who has written extensively about globalization in the field of comparative and international education, suggests its fluidity. Marginson and Rhoades [5] originally developed glonacal agency as a geo-cognitive multiscalar heuristic to interrogate human agency—both individual and collective—within higher education in an era of globalization. To validate the glonacal agency heuristic, Marginson [6] explains that the actors or agents in higher education institutions are engaged in multi-scales across local, national, and global spaces (multiscalar nature) because their ontological relationship to these scales is not fixed but varies due to the social imagination of space encouraged by the higher education institutional context or profession (geo-cognitive nature). For instance, Marginson [6] states:

First, agents vary in their practices of leading scale. For some local agents, national valuations and relations are primary, as with Friedman’s university administrators. For other local agents, global relations may come first, such as those scientists who are focused primarily on global disciplinary networks. Second, social practices and relations are subject to a complex mix of changing scalar drivers. Third, scalar primacy is always contextually articulated by time and place. If the global scale is the locus of causation today, it may not be tomorrow. Likewise, the national scale.

(p. 1388)

These examples corroborate the existence of diverse imaginations of community, the ontological sense of collective being, in higher education institutions. They all have different ontologies shaping their priorities, decision-making, and views of their course curriculum and other learners. These examples also allow us to theorize the ontological ascendancy of individuals, including students, to perceive their existence and agency as “globally, nationally, and locally implicated” [5] (p. 288). The ontologies of organizations mediate and influence individual ontologies—what can be imagined in terms of their communities to serve and their purposes of being. Furthermore, individual ontology is not fixed at one scale according to the entity to which one belongs. Rather, the fluidity of student ontology is mediated by the operating ontology of the higher education organization of which they are a part.

One concrete example of the social and organizational influence on individual spatial ontology and mediation between ontological spaces can be found in the story of co-author Seonmi Jin, who comes from a disadvantaged family. Her parents moved to Seoul, South Korea’s capital and urban center, before she was born. They had only an elementary education and grew up in rural areas where education for non-first-born children was unimportant. Both of Jin’s grandparents were also uneducated farmers and fishermen. Her paternal grandmother learned to read in her sixties. With little formal education and a lack of knowledge in financial and legal areas, her parents struggled to establish their lives in Seoul for a very long time. Their extended families were no different. The kinship’s primary concern was to establish sustainability in the capital city of Seoul, where they had migrated. Jin grew up not seeing much of Korea, as her father worked seven days a week. Her family’s ontology was ingrained in survival and socioeconomic mobility, and her own sense of belonging was often associated with her schools and local neighborhood. However, with the influence of practicing Buddhism with an international Buddhist organization, the primary concerns of Jin′s parents shifted to overcoming hardships by encouraging others in their communities and around the world. They experienced that their purpose of life was extended across spaces beyond Seoul or Korea, as they were able to imagine their purpose of being in the context of the international Buddhist community. With this shift, regardless of disadvantaged circumstances, Jin completed seven months of volunteer work in the Philippines working for children’s rights with the local NGO and then pursued an education in the U.S. to improve her capability in serving wider communities, such as refugees across the globe. Moreover, her own parents supported her decisions and actions. Jin had a primary sense of being bound to family (local) due to her disadvantaged background in Korea, yet she expanded her sense of being and belonging and pursued inquiry of knowledge and practices addressing the interconnectedness of actions in various spheres as she associated the imagination of the global community of the international Buddhist organization that her family belonged to, though she did not interact with other overseas Buddhists in person when growing up. To summarize, in the case of Jin, her spatial ontology was mediated and expanded to understand her sense of being across multiple scales of spaces, as she was educated to see her purpose and cause in relation to the lives of others outside Korea as well.

While this example conveys the mediating impacts of social and organizational influence on individual ontological senses of being towards a more inclusive and collective one, we argue that it is necessary to pay attention to ontologies in the context of higher education and to study the concepts and vocabularies used in international and comparative education courses, including online delivery, that may enable students’ ontological ascendency to be multiscalar in nature so as to develop glonacal agency. Because ontology specifies concepts and relations among them, Patricia Kubow and colleagues [44] identify some key conceptual categories that provide a grammar or common vocabulary in comparative and international education courses for purposes of glonacal agency development and are therefore central to our conceptual framework in this essay, which include: fluidity and hybridity; interconnectedness and belonging; identities and identifications; diverse theoretical and philosophical traditions; value convergences and divergences; empowerment (agency) and engagement (activism). Fluidity and hybridity, for instance, speak to the new ways that students are defining citizenship (their sense of being and belonging) and negotiating differences in relation to their being and belonging in diverse contexts where agency and activism occur (e.g., the home, workplace, and educational institutions) [44]. It becomes necessary and important, therefore, to incorporate non-Western knowledge traditions in comparative and international education courses to challenge students “to engage decolonial perspectives, which unsettle the category of the ‘citizen’ itself and the desirability of ‘global citizenship’ if it is formed within the global power regimes that continue to solely center Western epistemologies and knowledge and imperil indigenous and marginalized knowledge systems” [44] (p. 251). Encounters with diverse actors, locales, and theoretical traditions allow students to suspend judgment for the sake of learning about value convergences and divergences and the meanings such values hold for people in the core and periphery in multiscalar spaces (local, national, and global).

4. Asynchronous Online Learning to Foster Glonacal Agency in Making Space

Our earlier conceptualization of space and the ontology of collective being premises our capacity for multiscalar human agency, creating spaces and manifesting actions with a consciousness that one’s existence and sense of belonging are locally, nationally, and globally implicated. Eteläpelto and colleagues [45] also argue that agency is a manifestation of ontogenetic development, epitomizing the world (space). Furthermore, they contend that “professional agency can manifest itself as individual-level action or else as practiced within” [45] (p. 47), implying that agency is situated and malleable depending on the ontology and agency of the learning communities and network. The kind of human agency to be fostered aligns with the objectives of comparative and international education: to cultivate a multiscalar ontological sense of being by making space for inclusion through critical comparison. In effect, the critical notion of human agency is its enactment through space and the role of agents in constructing spaces.

For Bandura [46], human agency is defined as the complex interplay of personal characteristics, social behaviors, and societal events. This is the capacity of individuals, groups, and nations to exert power and influence through ideological, social, and sometimes physical means [47]. An aspect of human agency formation that is often ignored is its spatial nature [48], as explained earlier. Human agency, therefore, is enacted through space and through agents involved in the making of spaces. As previously noted, a host of scholars have defined space based on its physical, imaginative, discursive, and social aspects. Applying Lefebvre’s [49] notion that space is produced through material, imaginative, and social practices and Massey’s [50] idea that human geography conveys the interrelation of structure and social interaction central to the concept of space, Marginson [6] reconceptualized agency in space (see Figure 1). Space as material represents the pre-given structures that exist through forms of institutions, resources, policies, and language, which subsequently confine or provoke agentic imaginations and discourses around space. Through agentic imagination, space is interpreted and idealized. The agentic imagination of space eventually makes space as agentic social practice possible, bringing forth changes and emergent systems.

According to Marginson [6], when these agentic social practices are manifested, space as material shifts as well, and “agency becomes embedded in a new structure” (p. 1375). For instance, place-based postsecondary education has been a long tradition (space as material). However, with innovations and rising critiques of the traditional system, discourse and ideas on establishing online learning shift (space as agentic imagining). The imaginary space lends itself toward space as agentic social practices in which higher education institutions establish emergent online programs. The trials of agentic social practices in improving access for non-traditional college students facilitated the emergence of larger-scale online universities granting not only bachelor’s degrees but also graduate degrees and free online courses through MOOCs [51,52]. These online universities are officially acknowledged and have become a part of higher education policy and structures in the U.S. and elsewhere as they are accredited universities [53].

Online learning, as currently administered at the postsecondary level, is not without defects. It is largely criticized for structural barriers because synchronous classes, which facilitate live interactions during the online classes, are greatly influenced by the quality of WiFi, private space availability, and finance [8,54]. These barriers can worsen students’ sense of isolation [55] if a pedagogy that directly grapples with the concept of connecting spaces and collective senses of being is not applied explicitly. Similarly, Fabriz and colleagues [56] found that students in asynchronous online classes at one German university during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced fewer gains in social skills but reported greater gains in autonomous learning. However, it is argued that asynchronous course management is likely to create student-centered learning [57] by reducing time and space barriers and enabling students to maximize creativity and ingenious engagement in their own learning [8]. Considering that glonacally implicated interrogation is a process of unpacking one’s experiences in relation to other peers with differing spatial ontologies with equal attention, asynchronous courses facilitate more equitable participation in comparative analysis among students. Henrikson and Baliram [58] also found that graduate-level online learning conducted asynchronously enabled students to learn content and highly engage with class peers when they deemed the course activities to be useful. Because the digital response to the pandemic appears to have gone well with many students in higher education, Chaudhury [59] views asynchronous online learning as the natural next step, asserting that storytelling, or commentary by the instructor in relation to more difficult concepts, helps students understand course content.

Similarly, co-author Kubow has found that by integrating peer-to-peer asynchronous online activities and discussions, alongside frequent instructor interaction via discussion posts and assignment and participation feedback, it is possible to foster students’ social skills and critical engagement in addition to content learning in asynchronous online comparative and international education courses that she teaches at Indiana University. Zhang and colleagues [60] also found that it is teacher presence that has a significant effect on students’ cognitive engagement in learning in both asynchronous and synchronous course formats, while the course format is not associated with cognitive engagement. They also found that students’ cognitive involvement was a significant factor in students’ learning performance in asynchronous courses. This implies that an asynchronous course format with high instructional interaction is conducive to facilitating comparative learning, in which students can collectively and equally grapple with new emergencies applying a glonacal lens.

Because the formation of agency as a space maker greatly depends on fluidity and hybridity in imagining where one belongs, online comparative and international education courses provide a space of pedagogical innovation for developing students’ multiscalar agency [6] and manifesting their actions, respectively. Therefore, online comparative and international education courses and programs can be implemented to foster students’ ontological ascendancy in their categorization of spaces and to expand comprehension of the power dynamics involved in creating action-oriented responses to the new type of emergencies requiring glonacal agency consciousness (Figure 2). In Figure 2, the circle represents the horizontal expansion of individual ontologies to a multiscalar ontology through asynchronous online international comparative education in higher education. Global, national, and local scales on the same line indicate that each scale is significant without hierarchy. The multiscalar ontology enables individuals to accompany the multiscalar agency of making spaces. However, it is the curriculum ontology of comparative and international education courses that enables agents to develop and apply the critical understanding of onto-epistemology in their glonacal actions of space-making.

In Anderson’s [42] thesis of imagined political communities, the nation is conceived of as “a deep horizontal comradeship” (p. 7). For purposes of our argument here, we extend these horizontal relations to those of the online class community of students with various socioeconomic backgrounds, educational training, historical conditions, country contexts, and value systems. Asynchronous online class communities, like nations, are systems of cultural representation. Moreover, the involvement of youth worldwide in digital environments (formal and non-formal) provides a constant opportunity for students to transcend their own ontological boundaries and parameters to learn from the ontologies of others, especially in the Global South [44].

Borrowing the terms put forth by Appadurai [61], ‘technoscape’ refers to the space enabled through technological invention under globalization, which allows the ‘ethnoscape’ composed of people located in various parts of the world, who share their identities and everyday lives through the technoscape, to engage in teaching and learning no longer performed in one specific geographical location. Thus, it is possible for localized practices to become nonlocalized [62]. The new online learning structure is opening up the “nonlocalized quality” and ability to rebuild histories and languages collectively without having to migrate or regroup in new places, subsequently reconfiguring individuals’ ethnic identities [62]. In other words, globalization elicits the possibility that the online community is capable of expanding the spatial ontology of individuals whose identities are often bound to localities and physical places. These points also suggest more open ontological relationships with various spaces across different scales, such as local, national, and global.

Other scholars have envisaged the effects of online education as post-multicultural and super-diversity [63,64,65,66]. This is because the online learning community involving students from diverse locations and ethnic identities facilitates reconsiderations of primary-group orientations based on shared histories and singular, placed-bound categories [64]. Gradinaru [63] interrogated online communities as imagined communities with diverse perspectives through media studies and the philosophy of communication. By analyzing a Romanian virtual community, it was observed that the users fill the gaps in shared history, languages, and spaces by investing in the development of their own language in the space. In addition, in a study that analyzed the online environment by applying ethnography, case study, and content analysis methods, Kim [64] found the online community to have fostered greater learning about one’s own culture and the cultures of others, which generated cross-cultural connections among young adults and their self-representation in cross-border contexts. Kim [64] concluded that transcultural online learning spaces afford new tools and spaces that help to alleviate “some of the boundaries and burdens of identities defined by institutions and offline social expectations. Identification with a specific heritage or culture is not circumscribed by geography, appearance, or social conventions” (pp. 214–215). Fox [67], moreover, elucidates cross-border connections by asserting that virtual communities offer flexibility in one’s imagination and, thus, warrant opportunities for identity shifting and reduce an imposed imagination due to the contexts and structure in the physical space. The nonlocalized online learning communities, therefore, permit transcendence in individuals’ being and belongingness that are often localized in affiliation with the physical space in which they reside.

5. Fostering Critical and Inclusive Glonacal Agency

In light of global emergencies, it is imperative for online education to cultivate graduate students’ ontological relationships to different scales of the world. University online instruction in comparative and international education holds the potential to introduce students to various ideological systems and actors to expose how knowledge and agency have shaped societies and fostered hegemonic patterns, relations, and norms that often go unchallenged. The intent of this essay has been to consider how we might develop spaces where students can learn about the discourses, policies, and decisions that affect their lives and those of others in various locales and contexts. How might teachers then empower learners in the online environment? Luttrell and colleagues [68] suggest that “empowerment can be broadly defined as a progression that helps people gain control over their own lives and increases the capacity of people to act on issues that they themselves define as important” (p. 16). The goal of comparative and international education courses is to support students to guard against those who would read other people’s world (i.e., their situation and context) without being aware of that person’s or group’s interests. Gaventa [29] challenges educators to see spaces as opportunities and moments where students can consider the policies, discourses, relationships, and decisions that affect their lives and interests, as well as those of diverse others. Andrea Cornwall [69] reminds us that participatory spaces are never neutral but rather shaped by internal and external power relations. Power relations can influence the boundaries of a space through access, imagination, discourses, and interests. As Gaventa [29] asserts, “though everyone possesses and is affected by power, the meanings of power—and how to understand it—are diverse and often contentious” (p. 23).

Cultivation of the agentic perspective, as advocated by Bandura [46], in support of democratic online teaching-learning environments entails that graduate students engage with course content, concepts, and peers in critical and in-depth ways. According to Kubow and Fossum [70], courses in comparative and international education offer the opportunity for students to engage anew with the seemingly familiar in terms of the less familiar. This is accomplished as students consider educational issues in Western and non-Western contexts as well as indigenous knowledge and other ontological and epistemological views, including people’s lived experiences from below as opposed to only official or state understandings from above [41]. For instance, most of Patricia Kubow’s professional research and scholarship has been dedicated to ascertaining the views and knowledge of historically marginalized groups in non-Western contexts, especially the Middle East [14,33,70] and Sub-Saharan Africa [41,47,70]. This, in turn, has influenced her teaching of comparative and international education with the inclusion of ontologies and knowledge systems generated by non-Western cultural groups in their respective settings and contexts.

Understanding curriculum ontology construction in an online learning environment is also an important consideration. Zhu and colleagues [71] contend that curriculum ontological constructions are powerful in establishing knowledge structures and identifying key points of knowledge learning. Curriculum ontology construction is a powerful tool to establish curriculum knowledge structures and sort out key points of knowledge. Shahjahan [72] asserts the need to make the “invisible” visible in comparative and international education research. We argue that this assertion must extend to the teaching of comparative and international education courses as well, including online formats. For Shahjahan [72], “‘How we know’ cannot be separated from questions of ontology” (p. 1). While much of the effort of the field of comparative and international education is to ameliorate education and improve educational outcomes for more and more people, the area less tended to is what Shahjahan [72] terms “an onto-epistemic grammar—a grammar that defines what is real, ideal, desirable and knowable” (p. 1) (see also [73,74]). Aydarova and Marquardt [75] have also argued for the re-fashioning of comparative and international education courses so that they challenge students’ ethnocentric assumptions about education and foster planetary relational perspectives to aid students’ conceptual understandings of global scale and import.

6. Conclusions

We believe our conceptual work in this essay has offered a new type of dialogue on global-oriented education that is needed in higher education to respond to a host of “emergencies” facing humanity. Harnessing the global moment that we are in, this essay has addressed how higher education, especially through comparative and international education online learning, has the potential to influence students’ ontological relations that interconnect global, national, and local spaces, as captured by the term ‘glonacal.’ Glonacal agency was offered as a potentially useful heuristic to foster students’ ontological sense of collective being in space to be harnessed in graduate online teaching-learning environments. Naqvi and Sahu [76], for instance, have referred to “digitalization as an emerging educational reform” (p. 1976). While digital learning can open new opportunities for learning, the availability of online learning materials and electronic texts shapes the types of knowledge and viewpoints to which students are exposed. Thus, we must consider how technology catalyzes educational reformation and the possibilities it holds for educational and ontological transformation.

While graduate degrees are often discussed in the context of skills improvement and human capital contexts, the new age of expansion of non-locally bounded online graduate programs makes us re-consider the contributions of online learning to equity and justice. In this article, we explored the ascendency of students’ agency to take professional and collective actions with multiscalar conscious minds through an online learning, particularly asynchronous, environment. This shift in student mindsets, however, can only be meaningful if the agency is enacted toward justice that is not exclusive to others. Thus, asynchronous online comparative and international education graduate programs and courses can play crucial roles in enabling students to interrogate their being and sense of belonging through analytical comparison that attends to the manifestation of power structures in spaces in local, national, and global spheres.