Written by Trang Nguyen (University of Liverpool)
During my PhD fieldwork, I had the opportunity to observe several international educational fairs in Vietnam, where different universities from the UK, Canada, Australia and the US marketed themselves through different slogans related to “global citizenship”, such as “Preparing students for global citizenship” and “Becoming a global citizen”. Global citizenship is often touted as an ideal outcome of international education and a marker of institutional prestige. The promise of global citizenship centres on cultivating a “global outlook” in students by fostering global awareness, knowledge, language, and skills that enable engagement with the global world and their ability to travel across borders. However, critics argue that although “global citizenship” is often presented as a universal or egalitarian idea, it actually reproduces the dominance of Western knowledge and neoliberal market values, reinforcing a homogeneous figure of the “privileged student”. In many Western educational programs, global citizenship is marketed through promises of global mobility and diverse cultural exposure, carrying an implicit assumption that international education is associated with upper-class and elite social groups. This framing can obscure social dynamics embedded in the “local” or “national” context and complicitly perpetuate a view that positions the West as the central locus of rationality, modernity, and progress.
A critical question that arises is: Who gets to be seen as a global citizen, and who is excluded from this category? Existing research has recognised the diversity and profound stratification within international student mobility. As a result, the dynamics underpinning international students’ mobility are messier than ever. For many students, international education is deeply linked to their intersectional social positioning, such as class, gender, or race, and is employed as a strategy for navigating uncertain futures. As such, global citizenship should not be viewed as a dominant ideology through which to understand the aspirations of international students. Instead, we should question how imaginaries of “global citizenship” are constituted by, and constitutive of, different socially and culturally embedded subjectivities. Moreover, we should critically examine how students engage with the “global” in agentive ways and how this reveals their agency within intersecting local and global power structures. Analyses that treat “global” and “national” identities and politics as discrete risks oversimplifying students’ hopes and experiences. Instead, we should recognise that “global citizenship” is always mediated through their intersecting hierarchies of gender, class, and race at local and national levels.
Moreover, the opening up of international education spaces to a broader range of students from different social classes and geographical areas raises questions about how international students negotiate precarity, rather than simply being privileged in their experiences. Global citizenship should not be romanticised in analyses of precarious student migration. While host countries’s governments rely on international students to boost national economies, they paradoxically undervalue students’ cultural and intellectual diversity and reinforce racist and discriminatory practices. For example, the Trump administration has recently halted student visa applications, while the UK government has banned international students from bringing family members and placed certain countries on visa “blacklists”. While international students undeniably hold a degree of privilege within the global migration landscape, many experience precarity in relation to immigration regimes, financial stress and indebtedness, labour market experiences, and housing. The everyday realities and multifaceted precarity experienced by international students are frequently overlooked, resulting in inadequate support from both higher education institutions and host countries. Moreover, international students often express a strong connection to their cultural identities rather than a “global outlook”. For example, they usually maintain preferences for ethnic food, music, and social practices. Their immersion in new environments does not erase these attachments; instead, it reinforces a sense of transnational belonging and hybrid identities.
Instead of treating “global citizenship” as a fixed, normative ideal, we should critically engage with the concept of the “global” to explore how mobility and the imagination of mobility influence students’ everyday lives without elevating “global citizenship “as inherently unique or superior. This work advocates for a more nuanced understanding that acknowledges transnational identities, the multifaceted precarity experienced by international students, and their agency in navigating these complexities. It also critiques the reification of international education as a conduit for “neo-colonial” and “neoliberal” imaginaries of global citizenship. In research and practices with international students, we should move beyond normative ideals of global citizenship toward a concept that embraces diversity, fosters a sense of belonging and collective solidarity, and supports a pedagogical approach grounded in cultural biography and storytelling. It is also crucial to foster the co-construction of knowledge during research, recognising that students have their own agency, as they do not fully absorb dominant narratives; instead, they challenge, reframe, and expand them. Furthermore, greater emphasis should be placed on the everyday emotional and embodied practices, as well as the messy complexities of the different roles global mobility plays in students’ lives.
Further reading:
Brunner, L. R., Streitwieser, B., & Bhandari, R. (2023). Classifications and clarifications: Rethinking international student mobility and the voluntariness of migration. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–15.
Brooks, R., & Waters, J. (2022). Partial, hierarchical and stratified space? Understanding ‘the international’ in studies of international student mobility. Oxford Review of Education, 48(4), 518–535.
Caruana, V. (2014). Rethinking global citizenship in higher education: From cosmopolitanism and international mobility to cosmopolitanisation, resilience and resilient thinking. Higher Education Quarterly, 68(1), 85–104.
Gu, Q., & Schweisfurth, M. (2015). Transnational connections, competences and identities: Experiences of Chinese international students after their return ‘home’. British Educational Research Journal, 41.
Lipura, S. J., & Collins, F. L. (2020). Towards an integrative understanding of contemporary educational mobilities: A critical agenda for international student mobilities research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(3), 343–359.
Squire, V. (2023). Global citizenship in the making? Generating an inventory of migratory claims. Citizenship Studies, 27(8), 967–982.
Author Bio
Trang Nguyen is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research focuses on the aspirations, hopes, and multifaceted experiences of precarity among Vietnamese students in the UK. Her research interests include social stratification, international education, and migration studies. Trang is a co-leader of the Global PhD Network in Education. She also serves as a coordinator for the RIS Writing Retreat.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trang-thu-nguyen-236abb1b5/