Cosmopolitan agency and meaningful intercultural interactions: an ecological and person-in-context conceptualisation

ABSTRACT

A growing number of studies on students’ intercultural interactions and learning in higher education contexts have placed cosmopolitanism and agency at the centre of conceptual and empirical inquiry. The concept of ‘cosmopolitan agency’ has been proposed as a hallmark of intercultural relationships, such as friendships, between international and domestic university students, which are found difficult to develop in many countries. However, the literature has not established the conditions necessary for the (non-)emergence of this student agency. This paper fills this knowledge gap by presenting an ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework of cosmopolitan agency in intercultural student interactions on campus and beyond. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature (e.g. higher education, psychology, sociology, cosmopolitanism, urban and disability studies), the paper submits a theoretical proposal that cosmopolitan agency (as present practice) emerges at the dynamic experiential interface between cosmopolitan capital (as an individual resource built on past experience) and affordances in convivial proximity (as the environment triggering future projection). This proposal is elaborated through the empirical illustration of four (i.e. amicable, critical, latent and inactive) states of cosmopolitan agency that manifest different forms of intercultural interactions. The paper is expected to advance theoretical inquiry into the issues of power, privilege, morality and reflexivity in students’ engagement in intercultural interactions, and to support a third option for interactions between passive presence and fully-fledged relationships. The directions for future conceptual and empirical research that are ultimately expected to serve for the improvement of student experience are also provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• agency
• intercultural interactions
• ecological and person-in-context perspective
• conceptual framework
• students

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Emeritus Professor Simone Volet and Dr Craig Whitsed for their assistance in the development of this paper, and Professor Simon Marginson for his encouragement. The author is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data were generated in an interview study with 21 international and 21 domestic undergraduate students at two Japanese universities with contrastive degrees of commitment to internationalisation in terms of vision (publicised versus non-existent), curriculum (comprehensive versus partial), international student enrolment (approximately 50 versus 2% of the student population) and languages of instruction (English-Japanese bilingual versus predominantly Japanese). The broad aim of the study was to examine the extent to and the manner in which institutional internationalisation affords and constrains students’ engagement in meaningful intercultural interactions.

2 Transcripts of Japanese interviews were translated by the author. All student names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kazuhiro Kudo

Kazuhiro Kudo is an Associate Professor at Dokkyo University, Japan, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Murdoch University, Australia. He has written on intercultural relationships, intercultural competence, strategies for prejudice reduction through dialogue, and policy and practice of intercultural and international education. His most recent research interests focus on the intersection of intercultural interactions, cosmopolitanism, conviviality and agency in higher education contexts.