“You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities, Study Abroad, and the Construction of Global Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter locates an Australian university study abroad venture in India within the contours of the worldwide transformation of higher education. This framing provides space to discursively analyze how “white” Australian participants contribute to the construction of global citizenship through beliefs and dispositions mobilized to make sense of lived experience. All study abroad ventures are nowadays enmeshed in international circuits of capital and neoliberal discourses that present as “race neutral,” natural and necessary such that those involved are positioned and influenced by dynamics that obscure the inequities on which these ventures are often grounded. Pre- and post travel interviews and in situ photo diaries form the basis for analyzing participants’ experiences. These materials are read against a historically constituted field to shed light on the cultural, institutional, and geopolitical dynamics shaping and framing participant accounts. The chapter demonstrates how a majority of participants in the study at the heart of this chapter remain “innocently” implicated in reproducing hegemony. It links these findings to the way in which global citizenship and study abroad ventures alike are being shaped by the neoliberalization of higher education.