Date of Award
Summer 6-30-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Publication Status
Version of Record
Submission Date
July 2026
Department
Comparative Studies Program
College Granting Degree
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
Department Granting Degree
Comparative Studies Program
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]
Patricia Widener
Abstract
While Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and Virtual Exchange (VE) are celebrated as democratizing tools fostering intercultural understanding, this techno-utopian narrative obscures a complex reality: the virtual classroom is a contested social field where global inequalities are reproduced and amplified. This dissertation interrogates this paradox, exploring how structural inequalities, digital divides, and epistemic hierarchies are negotiated within the Virtual Thirdspace of global education. Integrating Structural Inequalities (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2004; Tilly, 1998; and Young, 2008), Critical Environmental Justice (Pellow, 2018), Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), World-Systems Analysis (Wallerstein, 1974), and Thirdspace theory (Soja, 1996), the study examines this terrain as both a microcosm of macro-level inequalities and a site of potential epistemic restitution. Employing a six-year (2019–2025) critical digital ethnography and leveraging an embedded positionality as a COIL coordinator in Venezuela, within a context of profound infrastructural collapse. To empirically ground this monograph, I analyze four primary Case Studies derived from in-depth interviews with faculty and students who collectively participated across 33 distinct COIL iterations. To ensure empirical rigor, data collection triangulates participatory observation, critical discourse analysis, and in-depth collaborative follow-up interviews with 48 stakeholders. This cohort comprises 13 faculty members spanning 8 countries across the global core, periphery, and semi-periphery (the United States, Spain, Germany, Ukraine, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and South Africa), alongside 35 students. Findings reveal that core-periphery, or Global North and Global South, dynamics shape virtual micro-interactions, thereby perpetuating structural inequality, digital coloniality, and infrastructural disparities.
Furthermore, participants’ intersectional identities deeply mediate these experiences, compounding vulnerabilities and privileges for faculty and students. Yet, this Virtual Thirdspace also yields radical pedagogical possibilities through pedagogical inversion, where marginalized students leverage their lived precarity to become the educators, and epistemic restitution, where marginalized participants and Indigenous leaders disrupt dominant epistemologies (Kumalo, 2020; Vázquez, 2023). Challenging extractivist educational models, this research advocates for a pluriversal pedagogy (Escobar, 2020). It introduces Geopolitical Pedagogical Fluency, a structurally grounded literacy of partner realities, as a prerequisite for ethical COIL design, offering actionable recommendations to construct genuinely equitable virtual learning environments.
Recommended Citation
Jimenez, José Luis Figarotti, "SOCIAL COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN VIRTUAL THIRDSPACES OF GLOBAL EDUCATION: SITES OF STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES AND RADICAL PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 410.
https://digitalcommons.fau.edu/etd_general/410