BECOMING GLOBAL CITIZENS: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY INTO SOUTH ASIAN INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ FORMS OF ACTIVISM FROM A SOKA PERSPECTIVE

Global citizenship is conceptualized within a neoliberal agenda and oppressive geopolitics of knowledge that furthers social inequities and unsustainability. Despite critiques and attempts to reframe global citizenship to achieve social justice and human rights aims, it is still masked in neoliberal and mono-epistemological terms as global competence. It is vital to explore possibilities of global citizenship becoming that can challenge neoliberal hegemony and the growing ethnocentric and ultra-nationalist thinking. This inquiry was conceptualized, within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, to explore the being and becoming of six South Asian female international students engaged in activism and the bearing it has on global citizenship. My co-researchers negotiated their dynamic identities and were influenced by multiple discourses as they shuttled between various places and spaces. In this inquiry, I examine autobiographical roots that illuminate my research puzzles and phenomena of interest and engage with South Asian female international students as they negotiate their personal, educational, and activist experiences. I analyze their lived experiences based on Ikeda’s perspective on global citizenship, informed by ideas of sōka or “value-creating” education and Buddhist-humanism. The research texts based on the livings and tellings of my participants are represented dialogically in culturally relevant ways, such as chai pe charcha or “conversations over tea.” From a narrative global citizenship perspective, these stories are examples of ‘creative coexistence’ and ‘value creation’ and offer a means to reimagine global citizenship from the standpoint of interconnectedness and interdependence.