Liberal Arts Educated Citizen: Experimentation

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Liberal Arts Educated Citizen: Experimentation, Subjectification, and Ambiguous Contours of Youth Citizenship Yi’En Cheng Yale-NUS College, [email protected] Abstract This article draws on some initial investigation into the relationship between liberal arts education in Asia and youth citizenship to examine the roles of the ‘institution’ and the ‘student’ in citizenship formation. The article begins with a discussion of how emerging liberal arts education institutes in the Asian cities incorporate notions of citizenship into their visions and curricular programs, using selected cases of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. This is followed by a focus on the liberal arts college in Singapore to preliminarily analyse the ways in which a particular brand of citizenship is being produced and negotiated in/through the campus space. The contention is that recent liberal arts initiatives in East Asia may be read as constitutive of higher education’s ethico-political experiment of youth citizenship, but one that produces ambiguous contours of the ‘liberal arts educated citizen’. The article contributes to wider scholarship on citizenship education and institutional geographies of (youth) citizenship. Keywords youth, citizenship, subjectification, liberal arts education, Asia Introduction Geographical research on citizenship education within formal institutional settings has largely examined the role of schools and school-aged children (Collins and Coleman 2008). The university, however, is also a powerful institution in framing educational lives of young people. More recently studies have emerged to critically explore universities as contested locations in the production of knowledge, student identities, and everyday forms of embodied politics (Zeilig and Ansell 2008; Hopkins 2011; Cheng 2016). These writings point to the university as a productive site for developing fresh understandings on relationships between citizenship education and youth subjectivities. Concomitantly, scholars have examined the ways in which institutes are increasingly taking on the task of producing knowledgeable, skillful and entrepreneurial graduate-citizens (Mitchell 2003). The prevailing argument is that students are now encouraged to cultivate embodied skills, dispositions, and forms of cultural capitals that would allow them to become graduate worker-citizens “that fit [into] contemporary and especially future systems of accumulation” (Olds and Thrift 2005, 274). While such an approach underlines the extension of neoliberal ideologies into higher education (HE) to constitute youth subjectivities, it belies the complex ways in which knowledges, values and discourses intersect in educational projects. Liberal arts education, whether through new establishments or curricular restructuring, is increasingly making a presence in the Asian HE landscape. These initiatives manifest in diverse higher educational reforms, ranging from new programs and revamped curricula to satellite campuses and international partnerships (Godwin 2015; Lewis and Rupp 2015; Jung, Nishimura and Sasao 2016). In terms of educational approach, there is a striking adoption of the north American conception of liberal education defined as “an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change” mostly through “a general education curriculum that provides broad learning in multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, along with a more in-depth study in a major” (AACU, 1


2018). They are also notably shaped by the American-style collegiate model, which places emphasis on learning communities and freedom of expression. Extant writings about Asian liberal arts initiatives underline the global context of increasing recognition that university graduate citizens require critical thinking and more broad-based, flexible competencies in the twenty-first century knowledge economy (Altbach 2015). As such, contemporary liberal arts education in Asia can be understood as a fractional component of the broader restructuring of (higher) education (Godwin 2015). What is less known is the ways in which specific institutions negotiate potentially competing values espoused by a liberal arts education vis-à-vis those promoted by neoliberal agendas. Relatedly, how do different educational institutes themselves articulate particular brands of citizenship (Mills and Waite 2017) that underpin their visions of what young people should become? This article examines citizenship constructs produced by recent liberal arts ventures as a way to articulate their institutional vision and presence in Asia. It does so by situating the analysis within recent scholarship that argues HE has become a key site in the constitution of youth as citizens nested across multiple scales (Cheng 2015; Mitchell 2016). As such, I understand institutionally-produced concepts of citizenship as tied to how youth is being imagined as students, young persons, members of different communities, as well as in relation to adulthood. Reflecting on three cases of American-inspired liberal arts education located in the Asian cities of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, this article offers some insights into what might be recognised as an emerging ethico-political project that simultaneously expands and narrows youth citizenship. It contributes to ongoing research into the heightened and manifold role of HE in the cultivation of citizenship among young people. Data is drawn from textual analysis of institutional philosophies and ideas about liberal arts education across these three national contexts. Sources include annual reports, student brochures and prospectus, and university websites, which have been made publicly accessible online. Data were analysed for themes around citizenship, which led to emergent references to internationalisation, moral virtues, and community engagement, and interpreted through wider contextual understanding of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These institutionallyproduced messages are understood as part of knowledge/power that constitutes the discursive formation of citizen-subjectivities (Rose 1999). The next section provides an overview of the rise of liberal arts education in East Asia. This discussion frames the second part of the article, which shows how notions of a ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ are folded into institutional visions and curricular programs. The case of Singapore’s liberal arts college is then used to illustrate the manner in which a particular brand of citizenship is produced and met with ambiguous outcomes on citizen-subject constitution. Emergence of liberal arts in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore The emergence of liberal arts education in East Asia coincided with broader shifts in the geographies of HE initiatives, flows of student and faculty mobility, and the rise of a global marketplace for tertiary educational qualifications (Brooks, Fuller and Waters 2012). As competencies such as creativity, innovation, and independent thinking are increasingly seen as needed to navigate the twenty-first century global economy, attention shifts to liberal arts education to carve out a new frontier of learning (Altbach 2015). Based on her research on the global emergence of liberal arts education, Godwin (2015, 229) argues the dominant narrative driving interest in this educational form is largely economic:

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With a focus on developing countries, the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education and Society (2000) argues that many of the public benefits higher education provides would not be possible without a society that had some liberally educated citizens. Benefits include a broadly trained population that can contribute to society’s advancement, identify problems and solutions, and create opportunities for studying and developing culture. The framing of “liberally educated citizens” as beneficial to the society in terms of their ability to help advance society and culture as well as to solve global problems is also reflected in the surge of interest for liberal arts education in East Asian contexts (Jung, Nishimura and Sasao 2016). Echoing the economistic narrative circulated by the World Bank and UNESCO, the overarching concerns of national governments in the region is to deemphasise education that is focused on technical-scientific know-how, and instead emphasise fostering creativity, innovation, and global-oriented thinking. This is further clarified by the cases of HE restructuring in China (Shanghai), Hong Kong, and Singapore, where HE plays a crucial role in the generation of urban knowledge capital and by extension national development. In China, introduction of interdisciplinary and broad-based curricula arrived shortly in the 1990s as a response to the nation’s shift towards a knowledge-based economy. Since twentyfirst century, American-style liberal arts initiatives manifest as distinctive colleges began to emerge in tandem with a nation-wide undergraduate education reform, which reflects a deepening belief that general education (or liberal education) serves to advance Chinese culture, national competitiveness, and domestic social harmony (Jiang 2014). Hong Kong developed an independent educational model given that it remains as a Special Administrative Region under the ‘One Country-Two System’ model, after the end of British rule in 1997. In 2004, the city’s government recommended an educational reform to focus on holistic student development and to develop university graduates who are able to navigate the global knowledge economy as workers and world citizens (Jiang 2014). Similarly, Singapore’s approach to liberal arts education is described as adding to “the nation’s existing ‘menu’ of HE offerings… to promote not just more innovation but more inherent capacity on the part of the citizen-subject to innovate” (Liu and Lye 2016, 576). As such, the birth of liberal arts education in the local HE landscape, as well as the subsequent testing of institutional norms and spaces for critique and freedom of speech in a context characterised by what has been termed ‘strong interventionist state’ and ‘illiberal democracy’, is thoroughly engineered towards the goal of economic globalisation. While local manifestations of liberal arts education depended on specific configurations of political cultures, government regimes, and existing HE structures, it is the American-style residential liberal arts college model that appears to have made a distinctive mark in the region in terms of its precipitous uptake only in recent years. 2 Three prominent liberal arts educational institutes in the major cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore that have adopted the collegiate system – NYU-Shanghai, Lingnan University, and Yale-NUS College – are the focus of this article. In all three liberal arts institutes, globalisation has played a crucial role in shaping educational visions, approaches, and curricula; two of which (NYUShanghai and Yale-NUS College) are in the form of transnational partnership ventures borne out of contemporary globalizing HE, while Lingnan University reframed its nationally-

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focused mission into a global one. What all these institutes have in common is they offer an experience infused with elements of international exposure and citizenship education, inspired explicitly or implicitly by an American collegiate model. More importantly for the purpose of this article, all three institutes make dedicated statements about the role of citizenship education in their liberal arts programs. Institutional framing of the ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ Citizenship discourses around cultivation of global outlook, development of a moral habit, and student as being-in-community lie at the heart of liberal arts education across all three institutes. This set of citizenship lexicon gives shape to an emerging construct of what I term the ‘liberal arts educated citizen’, which blends in neoliberal elements, ethical ideals, and dominant ideas about youth as citizens-in-making. As Hammond and Keating (2017) argue, a variety of institutional arrangements such as study and/or internship abroad, international volunteering, and exchange programs – all of which have become a common part of Global Citizenship Education – are now undertaken by policy makers and universities in different parts of the world. The language of internationalisation has also clearly permeated into the institutional structures of Lingnan, NYU-Shanghai and Yale-NUS, as revealed by their emphasis on students to receive international exposure, overseas experiential learning, and formalised student exchange programs. For instance, Yale-NUS conveys this message to prospective students through the slogan “Every YaleNUS student, a global citizen”, where “international experiences are a key tenet of the YaleNUS education” and that “every Yale-NUS student is guaranteed the opportunity to travel overseas” (Yale-NUS 2017a, 17). Indeed, extant literature on restructuring of HE and student identities has demonstrated the increasing emphasis placed on young people to become ‘global citizens’ (Matthews and Sidhu 2005; Baillie-Smith et al. 2013). What sets liberal arts institutes apart from universities that have hitherto come under scholarly examination is the latter two key discourses around student citizenship and moral habits. While these notions are far from being novel inventions, they provide an important lexical resource for NYU-Shanghai, Lingnan and Yale-NUS to ‘imagineer’ the kind of ideal young person that would best represent each institution’s educational aspiration. Moral habits The spirit of moral learning is a crucial component of a liberal arts college experience in Lingnan, NYU-Shanghai, and Yale-NUS. Kimball (1995) has argued the making of moral citizens who are able to free themselves of conventional wisdom remains a fundamental goal throughout the history of liberal education development. Each of the three institutes incorporates this enduring emphasis on moral cultivation in a manner that reflects the goal of the educational model set out by respective governments. The undergraduate program at Lingnan is guided by its mission on whole-person education aimed at “producing graduates that not only have mastered analytic, critical and cognitive skills but also possess a moral and humanistic disposition” (Lingnan 2017a). Out of the four core values espoused by the institution, two of them focus on character and ethical development. The first value of “whole-person cultivation and all-round development” encourages students to cultivate “social responsibility”, “personal virtue”, and “lifelong learning”. The second value of “community engagement and social responsibility” promotes an ethic of “care for others” as well as to “make a positive impact for the betterment of humanity” (Lingnan 2017b). In addition to these ‘hidden curricula’ found in the overall

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educational philosophy adopted by the institute, Lingnan also included a course on “Understanding Morality” alongside others such as “Logic and Critical Thinking” within its compulsory common core curriculum. In NYU-Shanghai, the notion of moral excellence is expressed into the vision of the institute. Similar to the case of Lingnan, social engagement and responsibility is a key trope in the institutional project to develop moral citizenship, as seen in the college values of “responsibility” and “deep engagement with all humanity” (NYU-Shanghai 2017). What is distinct about NYU-Shanghai’s moral imagination of citizenship is the necessity of public service in particular towards to the scale of the urban: “local neighborhoods that surround its campus, the district of Pudong, the city of Shanghai, and the nation of China” (NYUShanghai 2017). The extent to which this is articulated into reality is the focus of the wider project this article is based on. Nevertheless, this imagination recognises the university as entrenched into the urban political economy and social dynamic, as well as being a locus of potentially affirmative change (Addie 2017). At Yale-NUS, the cultivation of an ethos of service is central to the ongoing definition of a ‘liberal arts educated citizen’. In his speech to first year students, then president of the college Pericles Lewis (2015) described the importance of character development and practicing good habits that lead to moral virtue: I hope that the education we provide at Yale-NUS will help you to develop both the intellectual and moral virtues to contribute actively to civic life within your immediate community and beyond. I trust that you will examine your own assumptions about the good life and the best way to live it. I know that you will work together to cultivate a broad ethos of service. The current college president Tan Tai Yong (2017) also stresses that the liberal arts curriculum provides a pathway to build in students a “moral compass” and that an “ethos of service must find permanent place in the Yale-NUS DNA”. The notion that liberal arts education is constituted through a curricular and pedagogical emphasis on moral cultivation ties into broader debates about subjectification and moral conduct (Rose 1999). However, the moral endeavour in liberal arts education needs to be understood as stemming from a longer history that pre-dates neoliberal forms of regulation, one that is instead entangled into an early form of discourse concerned with education’s purpose in creating free citizens. Even though present-day (re)articulation of this discourse is aligned to a global embrace of contemporary youth as socially responsible, active, and civicminded (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015), the ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ cannot be understood as a straightforward product of neoliberalising HE nor a purported purely economically driven liberal arts education sector (c.f. Godwin 2015). Student-in-community The ‘student’ is framed as an active member of the learning community, and in a way that is pivotal to the pedagogical infrastructures of the three liberal arts education contexts. This is striking given that student-centered education is designed into these establishments, more so than their parent institutions such as Yale, NUS, and NYU. As such, the liberal arts educated citizen is imagined as, first and foremost, a student-citizen of a collegiate community where s/he is expected to abide by a code of conduct, responsibilities, and rights. This is most clearly scripted into the institutional mission that guides the work of respective institutes.

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The mission of Lingnan University includes two key statements that express a commitment to “providing quality whole-person education by combining the best of Chinese and Western liberal arts traditions”, and “nurturing students to achieve all-round excellence and imbuing them with its core values”. This is further elaborated by the university’s aim “to build a community of learning and discovery with collegial students and scholar-teachers” (Lingnan 2017b). The ‘student’ here is positioned as part of a broader community involved in a collective project the cultivate the educated young person. This narrative is also found in NYU-Shanghai, where its mission statement reveals explicit ideas about the kinds of subjectivities and community that the institute has crafted for its students: NYU-Shanghai aspires to prepare its students for lives of discovery, satisfaction, and contribution. Students at NYU Shanghai will study with world-class faculty who nurture their capacity for original, rigorous, and critical thinking and with diverse and intellectually gifted classmates. […] They will master cross-cultural skills in a community where half of the student body hail from China and half represent countries from around the world. (NYU-Shanghai 2017) The NYU-Shanghai student is expected to engage with an aspirational community that is not only intellectually remarkable but also internationally diverse in terms of its student demography. This conceptualisation is similarly inscribed in the Yale-NUS mission statements: We are a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, and supporters, dedicated to building a community in which living and learning are intertwined and habits of creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking are encouraged. […] An intimate liberal arts college, dedicated to undergraduate education... (Yale-NUS 2017b) Across these institutes, the space of the college/university is evoked as testing ground for the possibility of social mixing and multiculturalism, and for promoting communities of practice wherein different groups of people come together with a common concern to learn through interaction. The individual liberties that a liberal education seeks to cultivate among students are juxtaposed with an ethical recognition that the individual is always part of a community embodied by student membership to the college. Even as these institutional narratives provide a beacon for identity formation and alignment of loyalty, assumptions about collegiate living are being debated by emerging research into negotiation of ‘difference’ in student hall living (see for example Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine 2012; Holton 2014). Furthermore, these narratives prioritise the ‘college’ over other spatial relationships that young people might (seek to) establish in the formation of citizenship and personhood. By emphasizing the collegiate community as core site of citizenship learning, it assumes that young people need to be socialised into adulthood (or adult citizens) within a defined pedagogical space as opposed to alternative sites of citizenship socialisation. The next section shows how this can pose a challenge to students’ use of campus space for expressing their desire to activate critique and to generate change. The Halcyon brand of citizenship: Yale-NUS College

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The halcyon, a Greek mythical bird and a generic name for kingfishers, is revealed as the college mascot in 2017. The halcyon represents youthfulness, creativity, curiosity, and adventurous spirit – ideals of the Yale-NUS community. To be sure, the kind of youthful subject selected for and by the college is in itself a curated process, which begins from the moment an application is put in to Yale-NUS. The basis of selection, according to the College admission office, comprises of a variety of considerations in and outside academic achievement. This includes ‘academic achievement’, ‘intellectual curiosity’, ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, ‘global mindedness’, ‘leadership’, ‘community engagement’, and ‘sense of adventure’. This criterion reveals the kinds of subjectivities that the college is keen to invest in and promote. The Yale-NUS brand of ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ is one who is intellectually curious and adventurous, embodies entrepreneurialism and cosmopolitanism, and aspires towards community engagement and leadership. The underlying narrative is one of individual risk-taking and self-enterprise blended with an ethical duty towards the community and social good. The Yale-NUS curricular structure features a common curriculum for first two years of study, aimed at a balanced emphasis between knowledges in the sciences and the humanities/social sciences. This is embodied in the inclusion of common curricular modules like Scientific inquiry and Quantitative reasoning (Yale-NUS 2013). Engineering, business or other professional disciplines are excluded to reflect the college’s interest in pursuing academic learning as opposed to educating specialised knowledge and skills that are driven by professionalization and vocationalisation. Hence, the institutional curriculum is not entirely designed with the goal to educate students in the image of an entrepreneurial and creative citizen-worker subject, which is characteristic of the Singaporean government’s view of the purpose of HE (Christensen 2012). Nonetheless, the very embodied qualities that define a ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ guided by a differently-oriented vision can become converted into forms of cultural capital framed through market inclinations. Higher educational institutions are increasingly faced with the pressure to ensure graduates are able to secure employment. This is especially critical for Yale-NUS as the first (and only) liberal arts college in the city-state, which has prioritised scientific-technopreneurial professionals since the 1990s as the foot soldiers of its aspiration towards a cosmopolitan global economy. Indeed, the college has put in a huge amount of effort to ensure students are prepared for global job market. The Centre for International and Professional Experience (CIPE) was set up to do this work, by providing students with a team of experts and resources to develop their professional portfolios. CIPE’s programs range from (summer) internships and leadership development programs to career advice and sessions to hone post-graduate fellowship application skills. All these dedicated programs are highly personalised, student-centered, and executed in a manner that ensures students are in the best position to compete for available opportunities (Yale-NUS 2017c). It is within such institutional work that liberal arts institutes such as the case of Yale-NUS can become a lubricant for - as opposed to being an alternative to - discourses about vocationalisation and professionalisation to take root. But how such discourses will unfold and be managed by the institution vis-à-vis its dedication to intellectual pursuit is an ongoing process of experimentation, especially when these two projects are being managed by the college in a mutually inclusive manner. Citizenship constructs are not only fashioned at the institutional level in potentially competing ways, but their discourses become absorbed and reworked by students in a manner that may further complicate processes by which citizenship is produced. The Yale-NUS

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brand of the adventurous, risk-taking, and socially engaged liberal arts educated citizen can be seen as a figure that embodies the contradictions between youth governance and autonomy in the city-state of Singapore. On the one hand, Yale-NUS students are encouraged to cultivate a deep sense of social awareness about everyday and global injustices as part of their training in critical thinking but on the other hand, the geographies of action (should students decide to act upon these injustices) are constantly curtailed by what is defined as permissible and what is not. This can be gleaned from two episodes illustrative of young people’s everyday expressions of citizenship (Wood 2014) surrounding the use of campus space. The first episode relates to the setting up of an Events Approval Committee that was conveyed to student organization leaders on 1 February 2017. According to an article published in The Octant, Yale-NUS College’s autonomous student-run publication dedicated to free speech and critical discourse, the Committee (originally) invoked the state’s Public Entertainments and Meetings Act and Public Order Act to delineate what is considered a permissible event that can be held on campus. Reacting to this controversial policy that summoned legal regulations to actively govern the use of campus space, students flocked onto Facebook’s college-affiliated groups to condemn and debate this act by the institution. The College was allegedly complicit with the state’s so-called authoritarian regime and failed to live up to its goals to protect individual liberties, freedom of speech, and civic participation. Although the policy has since been revised in tandem with feedback sought from students, which included the removal of the two Acts, it has also brought about a new level of critical examination on the very college that students identity as citizens of. The second episode, which coincided with the announcement of the Events Approval Committee, is the staging of a Skype conversation with Joshua Wong, Hong Kong’s now iconic youth activist of student group Scholarism and brainchild behind 2014’s ‘The Umbrella Movement’. The session took place in a college lounge which saw a full-house, and consisted of Joshua presenting a brief overview of Hong Kong’s political history and dialogue with audience about his involvement in the city’s non-violent protest. The event was understood by students (organisers and audience) as a critical learning moment about youth citizenship across two ‘global cities’, demonstrating students’ curiosity about and desire to engage with ‘politics’ whether at the discursive or material level. While the event proceeded without major obstruction from the institution, the organisers’ initial goal of opening this event to the parent university located right across the Yale-NUS campus, National University of Singapore was not achieved. They were advised against an open invitation, as reported in an Octant article, on the grounds that the event venue did not have the capacity to accommodate students outside Yale-NUS. As one organiser reflected, such an implicit curtailment raises the question of whether the College’s provision of ‘safe spaces’ for critical discourse rests on the exclusion of ‘other’ students and in the process, perpetuates Yale-NUS and its students’ privileged position. The institutional construct of a ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ youth citizenship through the idioms of social and community engagement begins to lose its substance when students begin to test the boundaries of its citizenship contours. Conclusion This article has outlined the emergence of liberal arts education in East Asia using the specific institutional contexts of Lingnan, NYU-Shanghai, and Yale-NUS, pointing to its diverse and fragmented manifestation. These institutes are fueled by economic globalisation, responding to national shifts in educational approach, concerned with production of citizenry, and spatially manifest in important urban economies, specifically in the American-style

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liberal arts college form. The collegiate system is bringing in specific ideas about youth citizenship, contoured around a mixture of older and newer liberal arts emphases about neoliberal elements, ethical ideals, and dominant ideas about youth as citizens-in-making. Textual analysis of these institutionally-produced citizenship statements on global outlook, development of a moral habit, and the student as being-in-community provide a lexicon to describe what I have called a ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ emerging in this part of the world. The case of Yale-NUS College reveals how institutional articulation of citizenship discourses is not a homogeneous and straightforward project. It underscores the importance of examining the role of institutions in producing citizenship constructs, and in ways that demonstrate potentially competing discourses and logics that may be blended by institutional work. This is seen in the diverging aims of curricular design and student professional development. It is through these nuanced interweaving of multiple discourses, values, and ideals around what the contemporary youth ought to be (globally-oriented, socially responsible etc.), and within multiply-scaled institutional geographies, that we might come to critically appreciate how particular ‘brands of citizenship’ are made (Mills and Waite 2017). This also aligns with Fincher's (2011, 909) argument to further examine “practices of institutions as significant parts of the multiply featured social contexts in which young people’s identities are negotiated”. Students also occupy a crucial role in experimenting and testing the boundaries of citizenship imagined by the institution. The Halcyon brand of citizenship produces an aspirational model for collective imagination of what the Yale-NUS student-citizen ought to become or be governed on the one hand, and provides the template for students to stretch the contours of this citizenship on the other hand. The ongoing evaluation, redefinition, and contestation of what it means to be a ‘liberal arts educated citizen’ within the college, in relation to immediate communities, and to the society at large reflects the ambiguities of citizenship subjectification. Furthermore, it is when these young people begin to take seriously the very principles of citizenship afforded by the College, especially those that affirm students’ capacity to debate critically and enact social change, that tensions and complications emerge. Institutional curtailment of students’ boundary-pushing practices vis-à-vis young people’s reflexive interrogation of what counts as ‘citizenship’ throw into light the simultaneous expansion and narrowing of youth citizenship, even as the College reaffirms its commitment to liberal arts values. As such, this article responds to the call for looking into HE students’ everyday lifeworlds (Holton and Riley 2013), but stresses the need to view these young people more squarely as multiply positioned citizens-in-making. The unique institutional context of liberal arts colleges that emphasises freedom of speech, critical discourse, civic-mindedness, and social engagement is bringing about new ideas of what young people can and ought to become as citizens in Asian education landscapes, with potential for shifting wider societal consciousness. Whether liberal arts educated youths can fully realise the promises of such citizenship discourses remains a question that requires attention to localised contestations and reworkings, which very often reveal ambiguities in the contours of citizenship. Such ambiguous outcomes must be read as a constitutive component in the complex geographies of citizenship education. Footnotes 1. This global export and import of the American college model as elite HE into the non-west reveals certain hegemonic circulations that privilege western knowledge-practices (Koch 2014). A fuller discussion is not within the remit of this article.

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Acknowledgements A draft of this article was first presented at AAG 2017 Boston and received feedback from participants. The article has since benefited from conversations with Jane M. Jacobs and Youth Urbanisms class of 2017 at Yale-NUS College. Thanks especially to Krishan Sanjay who assisted with literature survey through the summer of 2017. References AACU, Association of American Colleges & Universities 2018 What is a 21st Century Liberal Education? (https://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-a-liberal-education) Accessed 17 January 2018 Addie J P D 2017 Claiming the university for critical urbanism City 21, 1 65-80 Altbach P 2015 The many traditions of the reviving liberal arts University World News (http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150825170126943) Accessed 10 November 2017 Andersson J, Sadgrove J and Valentine G 2012 Consuming campus: geographies of encounter at a British university Social & Cultural Geography 13, 5 501–515 Baillie-Smith M, Laurie N, Hopkins P and Olson E 2013 International volunteering, faith and subjectivity: Negotiating cosmopolitanism, citizenship and development Geoforum 45 126–135 Brooks R, Fuller A and Waters J 2012 Changing Spaces of Education: New Perspectives on the Nature of Learning Routledge, London Cheng Y 2015 Learning in neoliberal times: Private degree students and the politics of value coding in Singapore Environment and Planning A 48, 2 292-308 Cheng Y 2016 Critical geographies of education beyond “value”: Moral sentiments, caring, and a politics for acting differently Antipode 48, 4 919–936 Christensen S 2012 Higher education and entrepreneurial citizenship in Singapore Learning and Teaching 5, 3 39–55 Collins D and Coleman T 2008 Social geographies of education: Looking within, and beyond, school boundaries Geography Compass 2, 1 281–299 Fincher R 2011 Cosmopolitan or ethnically identified selves? Institutional expectations and the negotiated identities of international students Social & Cultural Geography 12, 8 905–927 Godwin K 2015 The counter narrative: Critical analysis of liberal education in global context New Global Studies 9, 3 223–244 Hammond C D and Keating A 2017 Global citizens or global workers? Comparing university programmes for global citizenship education in Japan and the UK the UK Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Early View Holton M 2016 The geographies of UK university halls of residence: examining students’ embodiment of social capital Children’s Geographies 14, 1, 63-76 Holton M and Riley M 2013 Student geographies: exporing the diverse geographies of students and higher education Geography Compass 7, 1, 61-74 Hopkins P 2011 Towards critical geographies of the university campus: understanding the contested experiences of Muslim students Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, 1 157–169 Jiang Y G 2014 Liberal Arts Education in a Changing Society: a New Perspective on Chinese Higher Education Brill, Boston Jung I, Nishimura M and Sasao T 2016 Liberal Arts Education and Colleges in East Asia: Possibilities and Challenges in the Global Age Springer, Singapore

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