Epistemologies of Inclusion Across Continents and Cultures

"It is hard to think in two languages when your feet are freezing." Words swim through her head, but she is unable to catch any of them (twelve-year-old Syrian migrant, Warga 2019). In these ‘liquid’ times of hyper-diversity, students’ lives marked by their identity practices and social relations can tell us how future inclusive global citizenship will be crafted and negotiated. During 2023, students and professors from universities in Ecuador, Argentina, Dominican Republic, United Kingdom, Czech Republic and Ukraine participated in a series of virtual meetings to explore and present the multiple threads that connect the local expression and negotiation of student identity to broader social contexts and ontologies. Our values of intentional inclusion, reciprocity and relational accountability were demonstrated in the collaborative engagement among students and teachers from global south to global north and global east to global west. Our narrative does not follow the linear order of a partnership and engagement framework that consists of values, understanding, self-determination, shared interests, coordination, collaboration and collective action that acts as a guide to bridging relationships among its partners. Rather, in our participatory-emancipatory approach, we document our process as it organically unfolded to reflect the dynamic nature of student sharing their narratives concerning their voluntary or forced migration to study. Virtual breakouts became a transnational diasporic space for student discussion about the common and different challenges each of them had to overcome. Qualitative data from interviews as well as student documented discussions were content analyzed and a six-step thematic analysis provided ‘a story’ concerning the impact of mobility on identity. Some patterns, connections and trends within the thematic construct of higher education’s role to contribute to the enhancement of sustainable inclusion by means of internationalization were identified. Quantitative survey data enabled us to evaluate changes in the students’ intercultural competencies and their views on the collaborative partnership they had experienced.