The influence of education for global citizenship on Bangladeshi international students’ future imagination in Australia

Recent scholarship on ‘young people’ and ‘future’ has recognised the need to investigate young people’s future mobility as a transitory node. Following a qualitative methodology, this paper analyses the global citizenship experiences of young Southern (Bangladeshi) students attending university in a culturally Northern (Australian) society to understand their thoughts and hopes for the future. It also examines how these young students see education for global citizenship shaping their future. The paper characterises young Bangladeshi students’ imagined future and identity as ‘internationally mobile’ based on their degrees of mobility, which appear to develop within the interplay of economic and moral aspects of lived experience in neoliberal Australian universities and society. It shows how young Southern students create ‘a mobile future’ through their lived experience in the North. This visualised future confirms the newly built mobile identity of individuals, which is based on economic desires and a flexible morality necessary for survival in the globalised market economy. Thus, it provides empirical evidence that encourages higher education providers and policymakers to reconsider their global citizenship education policies to develop young international students into competent, conscious, and critical participants in the labour market and as moral actors.