Authors:
Ruth Bateson-Ardo, Massey University, New Zealand
Ann Rogerson, Massey University, New Zealand
Stephanie Denne, Massey University, New Zealand
Leigh Coombes, Massey University, New Zealand
Email: [email protected]
Published: July 8, 2025
https://doi.org/10.22492/ijcs.10.1.04
Citation: Bateson-Ardo, R., Rogerson, A., Denne, S., & Coombes, L. (2025). Telling “The World Changes”: Artist Stories of Envisioning Global Citizenship. IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.22492/ijcs.10.1.04
Abstract
Third culture kids (TCK), also called global citizens, are a highly diverse population connected through shared experiences and senses of the world from in-between and across countries and cultures. Tracing visions of self and the world through reflections with creative works, our research in collaboration with third culture/global citizen artists offers cartographic figurations of transcultural memories and desires that articulate experiences of cultural marginality through affirmative imaginations. Artful storylines challenge cultural “realism” as a paradigm that enables monocultural dominance, deconstructing and reconstructing experiences of self through explorative articulations, emerging with creative becomings that empower and enable speaking back to the world. Bringing postcolonial theory of hybridity as rhizomatic processes of exchange to bear through posthuman ethics of transformation and politics of location, we resist the division of stories of difference and exclusion from stories of hope, joy, and community, as we follow affirmative flows of embedded and embodied resistance that disrupts the silencing of cultural others. Our gathered stories include accounts of contemporary colonialism in international spaces, navigation of stereotyped bodies, amalgamating spaces and skylines, writing to care, becoming-jellyfish, and more. With an emphasis on strengths and empowerment as processes, the stories that draw together this project of encountering difference differently attend to the not-so-missing voices of those who flow over and beyond cultural categories into emergent bodies of contemporary citizenship in a globalising world.
Keywords
arts, cartography, global-citizen, migration, posthuman, third-culture-kid