ABSTRACT
This paper is motivated by the question: ‘How can we invite undergraduates to
contextualise new global citizenship knowledge and identity in assessment?’ I argue
for the use of ethnographic-style research as a strategy for going beyond tick-box
approaches to graduate attributes, which also promotes the generation of student-
authored new knowledge emerging from undergraduate research. For the purposes
of this paper, I provide examples of such knowledge in two excerpts from a Dutch
student’s essay that reveal ways in which she articulates a personal reading and
writing of global citizenship knowledge identity, which conforms to the conventions
of academic rhetoric and yet offers resistance to individualised and reified readings
of ‘the global citizen’. This article does not offer a comprehensive textual analysis of
undergraduate global citizenship knowledge in the genre of the research essay, rather
it uses a discourse-historical interpretation of traces of interculturality in a student
text to highlight how critical global citizenship is contextualised at the local level of
text, course and institution. It is intended that a more in-depth discourse-historical
analysis of student articulations of an English-language discourse of interculturality
will be presented in a future paper. Although the locus of analysis for this paper is a
course in intercultural communication in the discipline of applied linguistics, it is
intended that there are resonances with other practices in other disciplinary
traditions.
