Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Geography

First Advisor

Caroline Nagel

Abstract

This thesis critically examines how American high school students experience and make sense of global citizenship within the context of a commercial educational tour. Drawing on a case study of students from a Title I public high school in Florida, the research interrogates the narratives of civic transformation promoted by educational travel companies and explores how these narratives intersect with students’ lived realities. Combining ethnographic methods, interviews, and critical discourse analysis, the study reveals that global citizenship is not meaningfully realized through such travel experiences; rather, it is fragmented, depoliticized, and often disconnected from the civic education students receive in school. Through an analysis of students’ reflections and institutional practices, the study foregrounds the contradictions inherent in global citizenship education: between marketed ideals and structural exclusions, between the promise of civic empowerment and the reality of constrained agency. Students expressed moments of skepticism, refusal, and critique—indicative of a nascent political awareness—but these moments rarely cohered into a stable political subjectivity. Instead, they reflected the broader incoherence of civic formation in an educational landscape shaped by neoliberalism, consumerism, and political restriction. The findings call into question dominant assumptions about how young people become citizens and highlight the futility of attempting to cultivate global competencies without attending to local political conditions—particularly in the context of Florida’s increasingly restrictive educational environment. Ultimately, the thesis argues for a reimagining of civic and global education: one that embraces contradiction, centers youth voice, and critically engages with the structural conditions shaping belonging, identity, and participation in public life.

Rights

© 2025, Jessica Flach

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