Cameron McCarthy (Professor Emeritus, Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), "Visual Cultural Practices of Postcolonial Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances"

A dynamic process of revivification is taking place in the visual cultural domains of postcolonial elite schools as they seek to globalize to navigate new, transnational educational markets built around the cultural involution and investment in the educational and cultural capital of youngsters from the Global South. In this talk, Cameron McCarthy discusses the branding and rebranding efforts of these schools as they compete for high achieving students in new, globalizing circumstances in which upstart educational institutions, such as the 100s of IB schools around the world, now proliferate and seek to dominate. In turn, these schools are entrenched in new energies and move towards neoliberal globalization. This has precipitated radically new needs, interests, desires, capacities and competitive logics among the middle class and upwardly-mobile young and their parents in each of these societies that then press powerfully onto these elite schools and they cultivated pasts as they reside paradoxically in the dead objects bequeathed from the colonial past: buildings, monuments, statues, photographs, school anthems, flags, emblems, crests, bunting, banners, rituals of assembly, formal dress and decorum.