Sailing around the World or Sinking with the Ship? Disjunctive Globalization and Transnational Educational Platforms

Abstract

This article provides an empirical illustration of current disjunctive globalization dynamics, especially with regard to the transition from embodied to disembodied globalization. After an overview of a new typology of globalization designed to capture these dynamics, we introduce ABCKID (a pseudonym) and other home-based, virtual, and transnational educational platforms as cases. We illustrate how offshore English teaching conducted on these platforms took over migrated English teachers as the dominant form of foreigner-taught English learning in China before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews, surveys, and online data, we argue in this article that this transition from embodied to disembodied globalization has been disorganized, uneven, and multidirectional. In particular, we document how the rise of digital platforms brought the global educational job market to formerly marginalized US social groups such as stay-at-home moms, military wives, and freelance artists who had been left out of the domestic labor market and migration-based global job market. Disjunctive globalization creates new forms of global inequality among contractors and produces in individual contractors a divided, “unhappy consciousness.” Such complex and contradictory work experience of these formerly marginalized social groups is the micro-level manifestation of the macro-level shift from embodied to disembodied globalization.