Abstract

In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being “international” that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships and romance on campus. By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called “Third Culture Kids”, to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities.

“This ethnographic study offers a valuable correction to our understandings of the ‘third culture kid’ phenomenon.” · Huon Wardle, Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, University of St Andrews

“This book offers profound insights on how class and race can play out among globally mobile children. I highly recommend it.” · Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds

Danau Tanu is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia in Anthropology, Sociology and Asian Studies. She has won an Australia Awards–Endeavour Research Fellowship for her research on young refugees, and has published on “Third Culture Kids”, international schools, and fieldwork methodology for multilingual settings.