Cosmopolitan agency and meaningful intercultural interactions between international and domestic students: An ecological conceptualisation

A growing number of studies on students’ intercultural interactions and learning in higher education contexts have placed cosmopolitanism and agency at the centre of conceptual and empirical inquiry. However, the merits of combining these concepts have received only marginal attention. While some recent studies have used ‘(critical) cosmopolitan agency’ as a promising conceptual tool to unpack the complexity of positive intercultural interactions, they lack clarity on what this concept means. Nor has the literature identified the conditions necessary for the (non-)emergence of this student agency.

This seminar aims to fill these knowledge gaps by presenting an ecological perspective of cosmopolitan agency as a hallmark of meaningful intercultural interactions between international and domestic students. A preliminary conceptual framework that captures the dynamic interactions between the individual (as a bearer of past experience) and the environment (as a trigger of future projection) in the (non-)emergence of cosmopolitan agency (as a present reflexive practice) is proposed. This framework is expected to shed new light on the issues of power, privilege, ethics and temporality in students’ engagement in intercultural interactions, as well as to support a third option for intercultural student interactions beyond passive presence and fully-fledged relationships.

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