ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how short-term study abroad experiences unknot subjectivities that are persuasively described as molar, molecular, and lines of flight by Gilles Deleuze. These concepts have been very useful in understanding how encounters between the self and the other allow us to explore the multiplicity of selves that each of us carries. The chapter provides insights into what the students felt was “transformational” of their identity as Americans and what was challenging to them to accept in the other. It examines the idea of multiple selves, engages the idea of an imagined home, which fuels so much of our discourse on identity, and argues that, like the ideas of nation and community, the home is also imagined. The encounter between self and other is not only “significant during students’ study-abroad experience, but also well before it as students produce and consume various identities through performances, representations, and discourses”.
