ChapterPDF Available

Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity of "Third Culture Kids"

Authors:

Abstract

The term “Third Culture Kids” is currently used to describe children who experience a high level of international mobility while they are growing up. It is usually applied to those who are relatively economically privileged and move due to their parents’ career choices, typically in the corporate, diplomatic, military, religious (missionary), or NGO sectors. There is an emphasis on “those raised with an inner expectation of ‘going back’ or repatriating one day” (Van Reken, 2014). Over the last decade or so, the term has garnered attention among the expatriate population and educators in international schools that cater to these children. “Third Culture Kids” and its related term “global nomads” (McCaig, 2002) have been featured in various major international media outlets such as Al Jazeera and the International New York Times (formerly International Herald Tribune) (e.g. Bolon, 2002; Al Jazeera, 2013; Rodriguez, 2013). However, the concept is difficult to apply across disciplines for two reasons. First, it is premised on essentialist categories that reify the boundaries, which define “Third Culture Kids”. Second, the (Anglophone) literature has hitherto overlooked the significance of the specific socio-historical context within which the term “Third Culture Kids” was coined and subsequently popularized. The literature is broadly unreflexive of its own American-centric approach.
13
1
Toward an Interdisciplinary
Analysis of the Diversity
of “Third Culture Kids”
Danau Tanu
The term “Third Culture Kids” is currently used to describe children
who experience a high level of international mobility while they are
growing up. It is usually applied to those who are relatively economi-
cally privileged and move due to their parents’ career choices, typically
in the corporate, diplomatic, military, religious (missionary), or NGO
sectors. There is an emphasis on “those raised with an inner expectation
of ‘going back’ or repatriating one day” (Van Reken, 2014). Over the
last decade or so, the term has garnered attention among the expatriate
population and educators in international schools that cater to these
children. “Third Culture Kids” and its related term “global nomads”
(McCaig, 2002) have been featured in various major international
media outlets such as Al Jazeera and the International New York Times
(formerly International Herald Tribune) (e.g. Bolon, 2002; Al Jazeera,
2013; Rodriguez, 2013). However, the concept is difficult to apply
across disciplines for two reasons. First, it is premised on essentialist
categories that reify the boundaries, which define “Third Culture Kids”.
Second, the (Anglophone) literature has hitherto overlooked the sig-
nificance of the specific socio-historical context within which the term
“Third Culture Kids” was coined and subsequently popularized. The
literature is broadly unreflexive of its own American-centric approach.
Consequently, the concept has facilitated the production of a wealth
of niche research that resonate with those who self-identify as “Third
Culture Kids” or “TCKs” but are largely neglected in academia. The
broader literature on migration and identity barely acknowledge the
existence of the term “Third Culture Kids”; even when it does, it does
so fleetingly and shy away from using it as an analytical concept (e.g.
Ahmed, 1999; Sparrow, 2000; Peterson, 2011). This chapter proposes an
interdisciplinary approach to explore the conceptual issues of “Third
14 Danau Tanu
Culture Kids” and its implications on research with the purpose of
moving the scholarly debate on international mobility among young
people beyond the concept’s current methodological limitations.1
The chapter begins with an anthropological critique of the concep-
tual origins of “Third Culture Kids” by considering the socio-historical
context of the term. I argue that the American focus of the foundational
literature lends itself to a close study of the socio-psychological impact
of international mobility on the individual at the cost of essentializing
the concept of “Third Culture Kids”. In contrast, this chapter reflects
on the socio-historical context of the foundational literature in order
to embed young people’s experiences of contemporary international
mobility within a world characterized by “super-diversity”, whereby
a complex array of social factors (including, but not only mobility)
intersect to influence individual experiences (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1025).
Subsequently, I analyze empirical data using a psychological approach
to show that the concept “Third Culture Kids” is more useful for study-
ing the impact of mobility on individual identity development than
the diversity among those impacted by mobility in childhood. “Third
Culture Kids” is better understood as an emotionally powerful insider
(emic) construct that narrates identity and belonging for people with a
transnational upbringing in the same way that “Italy” or “Indonesia”
represent geographical and emotional homelands, but are insufficient
as analytical concepts. The final section moves beyond the existing
concept of “Third Culture Kids” toward a more nuanced analysis of the
diversity among those whom I refer to as “transnational youth” and the
socio-cultural inequalities within the “third culture”.
This chapter is based on a critical review of the existing literature as
well as data that I collected as part of a yearlong ethnographic study of
an international school in Indonesia, where many of the students had
moved multiple times.2 The data is drawn from participant observation
and over 140 in-depth interviews with students, staff, parents and alumni.
The foundational literature: shifting definitions
of “Third Culture Kids”
Ruth Hill Useem coined the term “Third Culture Kids” as a sociological
concept for her study of white, American expatriate children growing
up in the then recently decolonized India of the 1950s (see R. H. Useem,
1993). However, the conceptual development of “Third Culture Kids”
has been problematic because the literature treats culture as bounded
and static, and is unreflexive of the changing socio-historical context.
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 15
“Third Culture Kids” is derived from the notion of the “third culture”
whose definition in the literature shifted over the years. Useem et al.
(1963) originally conceived of the “third culture” through their study of
mostly American expatriate workers and local workers in India to describe
the way they interacted with each other within a shared social space (see
also J. Useem & Useem, 1967). Useem et al. (1963, p. 169) define the
“third culture” broadly as “the behavior patterns created, shared, and
learned by men [sic] of different societies who are in the process of relat-
ing their societies or sections thereof, to each other”. Useem et al. refer
to the culture practiced by locals in the host society as the “first culture”
and the culture practiced by expatriate Americans as the “second culture”.
The “third culture” is understood to be a set of practices that facilitate
interaction within a social space shared by those who come from differ-
ent cultural backgrounds. This initial study gives almost equal attention
to the American expatriates and Indian host nationals who participated
in the third culture. However, the research emphasis subsequently shifts
toward the American expatriate community with conceptual implications.
Ruth H. Useem (1973) turned her attention to the children who were
growing up within the so-called third culture. Useem’s study focuses on
the children of the dominant group: white American children growing
up as dependents of American expatriate workers stationed in India and
elsewhere in the non-West. Useem emphasizes that the various subcul-
tures formed by overseas Americans are similar despite the variations
that exist between them depending on the sending organization (e.g.
military, church, corporation) or host society. In this study, the meaning
of “third culture” shifts from being “behavior patterns” shared by all who
engage with each other in the interstices of societies to being a subcul-
ture shared by expatriate workers (and their children), namely American
nationals, who experience a relatively privileged form of international
mobility. It is telling that Useem’s work focuses on the viewpoint of the
dominant group when she writes that “the broad outlines of all of these
third cultures were more alike than the various ‘native’ cultures in which
they were situated. The non-Western cultures gave local color, embellish-
ments, artifacts, additional languages and uniqueness to those coming
from the West—but altogether these various third cultures formed an
ecumenical bridge between East and West” (R. H. Useem, 1973, p. 122).
According to Calhoun (2008, p. 113), those who are in a position of
privilege are able to engage with ease in cosmopolitan interactions in a
manner that relegates the host society into mere “backdrop”. Useem’s
description of the third culture appears to pay scant attention to the way
relations of power mediate intercultural processes.
16 Danau Tanu
The singular focus on white American children in the foundational
literature (mainly by American researchers whose research agendas are
partly driven by the available funding) has influenced the develop-
ment of the field. Useem’s (1973, pp. 132–133) original study acknowl-
edges that those who attend American-sponsored overseas schools
include “hyphenated-Americans”, “host nationals” (usually children
of the local elite) and “third country nationals” (those who, like the
Americans, were in India as foreigners). Later, Useem and Downie’s
(1976) seminal article entitled simply, “Third Culture Kids”, brought
much needed attention to the topic, especially among American
expatriate communities. However, because it only discusses American
children growing up overseas, subsequent research came to assume
that the findings on American TCKs apply to all children who grow up
under similar circumstances.3 Even research that include data on non-
Americans overlook other factors that influence the third culture, such
as nationality, “race”, ethnicity and class. It remains true, as Schaetti
(2000, p. 74) notes, that “issues of power and cultural dominance in
international microcultures” have not been adequately addressed in the
literature. The novelty of discovering that the shared experience of
international mobility in childhood leads to a sense of belonging that
defies national boundaries appears to have overshadowed the need to
research the diversity of the target population.
In its current form, “Third Culture Kids” contributes to an under-
standing of the way international mobility impacts upon the individual.
Studies often use approaches akin to developmental psychology because
they are driven by practitioners in the field who want to help those who
are personally struggling with issues relating to their internationally
mobile upbringing. The most influential work by practitioners is Pollock
and Van Reken’s (2009[2001]) book, Third Culture Kids: Growing up among
worlds. Their findings are based on surveys and interviews, as well as
David Pollock’s extensive experience of working with internationally
mobile children (Van Reken, 2014). It is important to note that because
the findings resonate with people beyond those whose cross-cultural
upbringing was a result of the “third culture”, Pollock and Van Reken
(2009[2001], p. 13) altered the definition of “Third Culture Kids”. In
order to be more inclusive, Pollock and Van Reken (2009[2001], p. 13)
used the word “culture” instead of “country” as follows:
A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant
part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture
(emphasis mine). The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures,
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 17
while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from
each culture are assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense
of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.
The broad definition gives the impression that the study is representa-
tive of all cross-cultural experiences. Meanwhile, the “TCK profile” in the
book specifically describes the commonalities found among those who
have had an internationally mobile upbringing as a result of their parents’
career choice.
Consequently, the move to be more inclusive has had practical
success, but the contradiction between the broadness of the defini-
tion and the specificity of the description is analytically problematic.
Practically speaking, it proved successful in reaching out to a wide
array of people articulating hybrid identifications, especially after Brice
Royer founded an online community for Third Culture Kids called
TCKid.com in 2007. Royer worked together with Van Reken and other
practitioners and researchers in the field to reach out to those who are
struggling with issues resulting from an internationally mobile life-
style, thus popularizing the term “Third Culture Kids” and, to a lesser
degree, “global nomads”. The use of the term has since proliferated on
the internet. Analytically speaking, however, the study reinforces the
conflation between the expatriate community with the broader third
culture. Pollock and Van Reken (2009[2001], pp. 14, 49) identify “the
shared lifestyle of the expatriate community” or the “expat subculture”
as the third culture that represents “an interstitial or ‘culture between
cultures’”. According to Ruth Van Reken (2014), the third culture is “a
subculture where they share the experienceof a cross-cultural lifestyle,
high mobility (theirs or others’) and expected repatriation[,] which
is what made this experience different from traditional [migrants]
and began the need for international schools in the first place.” In
an attempt to be even more specific about the shared lifestyle of the
expatriate community, Norma McCaig (2002, p. 11) coined the term
“global nomads”4 to emphasize the unique experiences of those “who
are raised and educated internationally due to a parent’s career choice.”
The specificity of these emphases essentializes the third culture and
Third Culture Kids by further shifting the focus from the processes of
negotiating boundaries, which involve all who participate in the third
culture, toward a set of characteristics that specifically describe expatri-
ate children.
Subsequent studies contribute empirical data toward the literature but
tend to retrace the thematic findings of the few initial authors, such as
18 Danau Tanu
that “Third Culture Kids” have a broader worldview and multicultural
identity, without making significant conceptual developments (e.g.
Cockburn, 2002; Fail, 2002; McLachlan, 2005, 2007; Walters, 2006;
Wurgaft, 2006). Instead of the processes involved in negotiating
boundaries, they emphasize the content, which Barth (1994, p. 15) calls
the “cultural stuff”, that define the third culture and is shared across
expatriate communities. Paradoxically, this emphasis reifies the third
culture such that the parameters of research is determined by who is or
is not a “Third Culture Kid”—the new Cartesian box constructed based
on the characteristics shared by a select group of internationally mobile
children (Pieterse, 2001). The TCK concept challenges national and
cultural boundaries with its notion of hybridity while it simultaneously
essentializes the hybridity of TCKs as though it is a fixed characteristic.
The concept “Third Culture Kids” poses problems for researchers
wanting to situate the study of the children of economically privileged
expatriate workers within a globalizing world. The concept does not
lend itself to the changing demographics of transnational social spaces
in which expatriate and local populations interact with each other.
The number of “hyphenated-Americans”, “host nationals” and “third
country nationals” who grow up attending international schools has
increased. The number of children from international marriages, espe-
cially where one parent (usually father) is considered an “expatriate”
and the other parent (usually mother) is a “local”, has also increased.
Their existence challenge the socially constructed boundaries between
expatriates and locals, echoing the way “mixed-race” children of
European and indigenous descent challenged racial boundaries during
colonial times (Stoler, 2002). Likewise, there are many children whose
parents or ancestors are migrants to the host society and who maintain
transnational connections with their parents’ countries of “origin”.
These children also complicate the dualistic definitions of “expatriate”
and “local”. For example, one of the girls I interviewed who identified
as an ethnic Indian born in Spain but raised in Indonesia explained
that her father is an Indonesian citizen while her mother is a Spanish
citizen. In all of these cases, the notion of expected repatriation is
ambiguous given the complex transnational connections. Moreover,
the social spaces in which the children of various expatriate and
local populations interact are expanding due to the internationaliza-
tion of education, particularly among the middle and upper-middle
classes (Rizvi, 2009; Hayden, 2011). There are now more international
schools than ever catering to diverse student bodies. The boundar-
ies between those who grow up within an expatriate community,
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 19
experience a transnational lifestyle through high mobility, and expect
to repatriate and those who do not are clearly blurring. How then do we
study “Third Culture Kids” when it is difficult to determine who they are?
In order to avoid the trappings of static, bounded categorizations,
new research need to take into account the fluidity of boundaries
and their socio-historical contexts. However, to move beyond “Third
Culture Kids” we need to first understand its role as an insider construct
that provides a potent narrative for transnational belonging.
“Third Culture Kids” as a narrative for transnational
belonging
This section outlines the importance of the concept “Third Culture
Kids” as an insider construct by applying perspectives from the disci-
plines of psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to
the thematic findings from existing research, which are supplemented
by interview data from my own research. The concept “Third Culture
Kids” narrates transnational belonging in three distinct ways. Firstly,
it provides a sense of continuity over time amid repeated international
moves, weaving together fragmented experiences that occur in distant
places with different people. Secondly, it provides a sense of coherence for
the fragmented identities of internationally mobile children by articu-
lating a sense of hybridity (Bhabha, 1994; Hall, 1996). Thirdly, it alludes
to a sense of mutual intelligibility shared by those who are affected by the
experience of repeated geographical and cultural displacement in child-
hood. “Third Culture Kid” narrates a shared memory of repeated loss of
place and relationships with each move and a sense of familiarity with
cultural in-betweenness. El-Zein (2002, p. 230) writes, “The migrant
loses the concise language of familiarity and shared memory, the ability
to evoke worlds of associations with a few hints and words.” It is this
lack of language that the Third Culture Kid narrative fills by naming the
mutual intelligibility shared among those who have an internationally
mobile childhood, albeit a privileged one.
Mobility and continuity over time
The psychologist Erik Erikson (1959, 1968, 2008) claims that ado-
lescence marks a crucial phase in a person’s development as they go
through a process of establishing who they are within and who they
are in relation to others. They begin to internally address the question,
“Who am I?” to find a sense of self that remains more or less coherent
in the face of change (Schwartz, 2001, p. 7; Schachter, 2005, p. 141).
20 Danau Tanu
Berzonsky (2005, p. 129) explains that, “[p]ersonal identity implies that
a specific person continues to be the same person across varying condi-
tions and over time.” One way a young person explores this sense of self
is through intimacy with another person. Erikson (1968, p. 42) writes
that, “to a considerable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at
a definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s diffused self-image on
another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually clarified. This is
why so much of young love is conversation.” It is through interaction
with others that a person learns how they are similar and, yet, different
to others. While “intimacy” may be defined differently across contexts,
the “feeling of knowing ourselves and being known by others” is a basic
human need (Pollock & Van Reken, 2009[2001], p. 146). Erikson (1959,
p. 102) states that in adolescence “the young individual must learn to
be most himself [sic – universal male] where he means most to others –
those others, to be sure, who have come to mean most to him.”
According to Pollock and Van Reken (2009[2001]), those with a trans-
national upbringing may find this process challenging because their
transient lifestyle means that their socio-cultural context – and with that
the people who know them – change frequently. Some move interna-
tionally multiple times before they finish high school. As children, most
cannot choose to move or stay. Without agency, even economically privi-
leged international mobility is experienced as a form of displacement
(Coleman, 2011; Schwartz, Côté, & Arnett, 2005). Pollock and Van Reken
(2009[2001]) explain that, “With one plane ride a TCK’s whole world can
die.” They have to trade in their social network of relationships, crucial
to adolescent development, for new ones each time they move. Others
may only sojourn to one country before repatriating, but they experi-
ence mobility indirectly if, for example, they attend an international
school that caters for expatriate families and therefore has a high student
turnover rate. Even though they stay in one place, those who know them
change with each new academic year as their old friends move away and
new ones come. Thus the people who mean the most to them are geo-
graphically scattered. A therapist is noted to have said of her clients who
have a transnational upbringing that “few of them had any idea what it
meant to be a person” (Pollock & Van Reken, 2001, p. 146). Each time
their social network changes, they need to start their relationships over.
While reinventing oneself can be constructive, it can also interfere with
the process of coming to know and being known by others. High mobil-
ity interrupts the development of a shared history with others.
A highly mobile childhood is punctuated by life experiences that are
fragmented by each move, which affects identity development. Pollock
and Van Reken’s (2009[2001]) conceptualization of “Third Culture
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 21
Kids” recognizes the significant impact that mobility has on relation-
ships and identity development. They use the concept to identify a set
of characteristics that are often, though not always, shared by those
who experience a high level of mobility during childhood such as root-
lessness, restlessness and unresolved grief due to loss of relationships. By
identifying a set of common characteristics, the concept “Third Culture
Kid” weaves together the fragmented experiences that occur with dif-
ferent sets of people in disparate places into one continuous life story.
It narrates a sense of continuity for individuals in spite of their multiple
moves, and thus narrates an imagined history among people who may
not personally know each other (Anderson, 1983).
Hybridity and coherence
In addition to continuity over time, the concept “Third Culture Kids”
enables a sense of coherence for the fragmented identities of those who
grow up in multiple cultural milieus by narrating and thus normalizing
cultural mixing. Internationally mobile children frequently negotiate
socially constructed boundaries that vary with context as they are grow-
ing up, making it challenging for them to develop a singular, static,
bounded sense of belonging that can produce a one word answer to the
question, “Where are you from?” (Fail, Thompson, & Walker, 2004).
One of the most researched issues on Third Culture Kids is their expe-
rience of cultural marginalization upon repatriation to their passport
country. Richard Downie (1976) found that American citizens raised
overseas who repatriated for college had to set aside their transnational
experience in order to fit in because mainstream America would only
validate one aspect of their identity – the American part. It is challeng-
ing to establish who one is in relation to others when only a fragment
of one’s self is being validated, while the rest of the self that does not
align with the dominant culture is dismissed.
Nathan’s experience of repatriation provides a striking picture of the
power of the dominant culture to define another.5 I interviewed Nathan
as part of my research while he was working as a principal of an inter-
national school. Both of Nathan’s parents are American, but he grew up
mostly in France until the family returned for a year to the United States
in the early 1980s when he was 14. He was fluent in French, but not in
English. Nathan said of that particular move:
So we went back to the States. I went to the public school in
Philadelphia and … the school didn’t know what to do with me.
I could not read, write, speak English. So they were very con-
fused. Here’s this little American kid who has very low levels of
22 Danau Tanu
comprehension. So they gave me an IQ test. I did extremely poorly
on it, as you can imagine, because it was in English. And so I was
labelled as educably mentally retarded [sic] and placed in a Special
Education classroom for my eighth grade year … So as a TCK … as
a kid who really … I mean as an educator, I look back and I go, “Oh
my goodness, was I ever mislabelled?” I mean I was ESOL [English
for Speakers of Other Languages], yes, but I certainly wasn’t educably
mentally retarded. (Interview, March 2009)
Nathan’s inability to speak English was interpreted as an intellectual
disability that marked him as deviating from the norm. His transna-
tional experiences did not fit in with the mainstream narrative of an
imagined, singular “American” community, rendering him mute in the
American context.
The need to negotiate various cultural contexts cause some with a
transnational upbringing to act like a “cultural chameleon” (Pollock &
Van Reken, 2009[2001], p. 99). They learn to pick up the cultural cues,
languages, accents, and mannerisms of their surroundings so as to blend
in with the dominant culture. By the time I met Nathan, he was fluent
in English and sounded completely American. He also admitted that
his accent changes depending on with whom he is speaking to because
he will naturally pick up the other person’s accent. In Bourdieu’s (1986,
p. 243) words, those with a transnational upbringing acquire a diversity
of “cultural capital”. Yet, knowing how to play the game of acting out
certain parts of their identity at different times in order to fit in does
not necessarily mean that they like playing the game. Some struggle to
accept that their identity is multiple, fragmented and negotiable (Ang,
2001; Hall, 1996). They feel as though they are putting on different per-
sonas. It may also appear to those around them as inauthentic (Pollock
& Van Reken, 2009[2001]). Some who feel unable to weave a coherent
narrative of their culturally fragmented lives express a sense of loss by
taking on what Erikson (2008, p. 236) calls a “negative identity”, where
being different is their identity.
Pollock and Van Reken’s work embeds the notion of hybridity in their
description of “Third Culture Kids”: “The TCK builds relationships to all
of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any.” Nathan was
able to make sense of his experiences of cultural displacement only after
he encountered the term “Third Culture Kids” through David Pollock.6
Nathan recounted,
… so my parents, after one year, moved to Germany. We moved to
an international school, where, for the first time in my life, I was
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 23
actually with other international kids, TCKs. Everything else, I had
been with French kids … and … not really understanding who I was
as an American. Pretty negative experience when I went back to 8th
grade in America … Then for the first time in an international school
at 9th grade, I realize “Oh, this is who I am.”
And Dave Pollock actually came to speak at our school, and it was
the first time that I had … heard this term, TCK. And that identity
switched something in me. Understanding that … actually helped
me. This help settle some things in me. Was I retarded, was I less than
intelligent? Was I going to wrestle with this whole—was I French, was
I American, was I German? But all of a sudden be[ing] given an iden-
tity, and surrounded with kids who had a similar identity, even though
all of them had a different story, which is a part of the beauty of being
a TCK is that our differences are actually the thing that unites us.
According to Nathan, he was “given an identity” through spending time
with others who had shared his transnational experiences and discover-
ing a language through the concept of “Third Culture Kid” with which
to narrate those experiences that did not fit into the French, American
or German narratives of singular, bounded national identities.
According to Walters (2006, p. 52), the TCK narrative normalizes a
person’s transnational upbringing, which they may have hitherto con-
sidered pathological because their experiences seemed different from
and incomprehensible to others. A man described the profound impact
that the literature on TCKs had on him:
[T]here was an instant release and lots of things started to make sense …
to hear that I wasn’t the only person to be moved on a much deeper
level by this understanding helps tremendously … Boy, it’s fantastic
not to have to fit into some other culture-box—it’s hard not being
Black, Trinidian, English, Scottish, American, Chinese or Ghanaian
but instead a strange mixture of the above. That’s a little hard to
deal with. The weirdest thing is when I find the roles within my
above mentioned mix clashing, which means that depending on my
surroundings I am more or less masculine/black etc., but never the
norm (emphasis originally in Bold). [I] don’t know how much sense
that makes, but understanding that I don’t fit anywhere is a big
relief. (Email correspondence, 19 December 2008)
Due to his mixed background, he felt that in some contexts he was too
masculine and too black for those around him, while in other contexts
24 Danau Tanu
he was not masculine or black enough. He felt a “big” sense of “relief”
in knowing that it is okay, so to speak, to not “fit anywhere” and there-
fore it is normal to be mixed.
As previous research has shown, coming across the term “Third
Culture Kid” is, for many, a life changing experience (Schaetti, 2000;
Fail, 2002; Walters, 2006; Pollock & Van Reken, 2009[2001]). Ortner
(2006, p. 125), borrowing from Sennett (1998), writes that narratives
fulfill the “need for conceptual, cognitive, symbolic tools for reorient-
ing and reconstituting the self” within a postmodern world. Narratives
hold together seemingly disjointed events and fragmented pieces of
a person’s life to give to it meaning through a sense of continuity
and coherence. “Third Culture Kids” provides a sense of coherence amid
fragmentation by normalizing experiences of repeated geographic and
cultural displacement and ambivalent feelings about belonging. It
dissolves the seeming contradiction between coherence and fragmen-
tation by reconstructing fragmented identities as hybridity. Pieterse
(2001, p. 229) writes that, “Hybridity is an argument against homoge-
neity, not against coherence.” As an insider construct, “Third Culture
Kids” narrates a form of hybridity that at once challenges the notion
of singular, bounded identities as it enables a sense of coherence for
otherwise fragmented experiences by situating them within the larger
socio-historical context of a globalizing world.
Mutual intelligibility within the “third culture”
The concept “Third Culture Kids” further challenges singular and
bounded constructions of identity by alluding to a sense of mutual
intelligibility that stems from a shared transnational upbringing. It
does so, however, at the expense of essentializing a form of hybridity.
A recurring theme on the online TCKid forum mentioned earlier in
this chapter is the difficulty faced by “TCKs” in expressing their feel-
ings and sharing their transnational experiences with those who have
not had a transnational upbringing. In contrast, they feel they do not
have to explain themselves in detail to be understood when speaking
to fellow “TCKs”.
A Korean alumnus of an international school said it was “healing” to
return for a visit almost two decades after she had graduated and to also
meet up with a former teacher. Eun Joo explained,
[E]verything about [the international school] made sense … I fit in
like that piece of puzzle that’s been missing for years … I didn’t have
to explain anything to anybody … Mr [Salamon] just “got it”.
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 25
The international school environment helped normalize Eun Joo’s
experiences through meeting someone who could understand her. The
interaction, as David Morley (2000, p. 48) writes, “is not dependent on
long explanations but can proceed on the taken-for-granted premises of a
set of shared assumptions.” While Mr Salamon did not self-identify as
a “TCK”, he was the child of European migrants to the United States
and had taught at the international school as an expatriate teacher for
over two decades. He was familiar with the transnational experiences
of his students.
Although “Third Culture Kids” come from diverse backgrounds,
their shared experience of mobility and cultural displacement offers a
platform for mutual intelligibility to the extent that their differences
become momentarily suspended. Nathan mentioned above that “part
of the beauty of being a TCK is that our differences are actually the
thing that unites us.” The sense of mutual intelligibility among “Third
Culture Kids” based on the experience of mobility and cultural hybrid-
ity is a constant theme in the literature (Fail, 2002; Pollock & Van
Reken, 2009[2001]; Schaetti, 2000). From the purview of anthropol-
ogy, Bashkow (2004, p. 452) explains that individuals of diverse back-
grounds can negotiate differences to create “an exaggerated impression
of mutual understanding” that enables them to feel as though they are
part of the same tribe. Jenkins (1997, p. 10) similarly contends that,
“mutual intelligibility of the behaviour of others’ is a fundamental pre-
requisite for any group.” It gives the impression that they are members
of the same group who are “fundamentally ‘playing the same game’”
(Barth, 1994, p. 15; see also Bourdieu, 1990).
The literature on “Third Culture Kids”, however, often mistakenly
assumes that mutual intelligibility signifies the inconsequentiality of
differences. In her dissertation of students at a primary international
school, Frederick (1996, p. 282) goes so far as to write that she “was
convinced TCKs were special” in reference to their ability to transcend
differences. Fail’s (2002) study of TCKs who are non-native speakers of
English corroborates this argument but none of her interview questions
allowed for the participants to discuss the impact that language, ethnic-
ity or culture had on their transnational experiences. These examples
and others assume that transnational social spaces are neutral and that
transnational experiences by default produce internationally minded
cosmopolitans (see also Ferstad, 2002; Fail et al., 2004; Wurgaft, 2006).
In fact, mutual intelligibility is situational. Those growing up in the
“third culture” are diverse and their sense of mutual intelligibility
shifts according to various factors. Factors such as cultural background,
26 Danau Tanu
nationality, “race” and class do not become irrelevant, instead they
continue to shape the subjectivities of those with a transnational
upbringing. While some research suggest that young people may not
automatically transcend difference by virtue of their transnational
upbringing, these works are still few and far between (Sparrow, 2000;
Allan, 2004; Konno, 2005).
Essentializing “Third Culture Kids”
The concept “Third Culture Kids” challenges bounded, singular defini-
tions of identity based on the nation-state, yet it paradoxically essential-
izes the “third culture”. It narrates continuity over time and coherence
by normalizing the experiences of fragmented identity resulting from
geographic and cultural displacement. It narrates transnational belong-
ing by acknowledging the sense of mutual intelligibilty that arises out
of a shared experience of the “third culture”, which is characterized
by mobility and a sense of hybridity. At the same time, it essentializes
the “third culture” by assuming that mobility and hybridity are expe-
rienced in the same way by all who participate in the third culture as
though socio-cultural inequality is absent. The experiences of American
transnational youth are often projected onto all children growing up
in the third culture, thus creating a concept that is prescriptive in its
application. Those who do not fit the “stereotype” of American chil-
dren raised overseas are either overlooked by researchers or seen as
“not really” Third Culture Kids by practitioners, such as some of the
inter national school educators in my research. However, the assump-
tion that transnational social spaces are neutral is untenable given the
diversity of those who participate in the third culture as children.
The diversity of “Third Culture Kids”
A yearlong ethnographic study of high school students at an English-
medium international high school in Indonesia, which I dub “The
International School (TIS)”, reveals that many students deviated from
the “Third Culture Kid” stereotype. At the time of fieldwork, TIS had
about 800 high school students who represented over 50 nationalities,
with the majority being from South Korea (approximately 25 percent),
Indonesia (approximately 20 percent), the United States (approxi-
mately 15 percent), Australia and Canada.7 Most students, including
Indonesians, grow up in two or more countries before completing high
school. The majority were of Asian descent. The high school adminis-
trators and teaching staff represented about 20 nationalities, though
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 27
they were predominantly from white-dominant Anglophone countries
such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia,
and New Zealand. This section offers brief examples of the diversity of
experiences found among transnational youth that become apparent
when research takes into account the socio-cultural inequalities of the
“third culture”.8
Despite the transnational upbringing of most students, cultural and
linguistic differences did not dissolve, which was evident from the for-
mation of student cliques. On my first day at TIS, one of the teachers
showed me an article entitled, “The great divide” that was published
in TIS’s student magazine. The article contended that while the school
“provides the ideal setting for internationalism,” students still practice
“self-segregation based on characteristics ranging from nationality and
religion, to even sexuality and extra-curricular activities.” These student
cliques were most evident among the older students. In fact, students
who had been at TIS since primary school noted a distinct pattern of
change in student interaction where cultural background mattered
more as they progressed from primary to middle to high school. Their
experience of primary school confirms Frederick’s (1996) observation
that primary school-aged TCKs socialize with their peers irrespective of
cultural backgrounds. In middle school there was a vague sense, at least
retrospectively, that “Asian” students hung out more with other Asian
students and “western” students with other western students. By high
school, student groups became more distinctly based on nationality
or language. The friendship patterns reflect the increasing importance
of mutual intelligibility with age as young people develop their sense of
identity in relation to others (Erikson, 1959).
Mobility intersects with developmental processes and cultural issues to
affect the social lives of both those who stayed at TIS for a long time (since
primary school) and those who moved around a lot. Among those who
stayed at TIS, sometimes their friends all leave at the same time, leading
them to lose their whole social network with the turn of a single academic
year. Sam, for example, is a Korean national who used to have a lot of
non-Korean friends.9 When his non-Korean friends left, he was unable to
replace them with other non-Koreans. Sam eventually “hung out” more
and more with other Koreans: “People come and go, come and go, most
people are like that. All my Korean friends are quite stable here, so I have
them as very stable friends.” Maintaining friendships with Korean friends
provided Sam with a sense of continuity over time.
Similarly, those who moved found that cultural issues affect their
friendships as they grow older. Ben, who is Korean by nationality and
28 Danau Tanu
grew up in Korea, Canada, the UK and Indonesia, found that cultural
issues limited his ability to make diverse sets of friends in high school.
After listening to Ben explain that his Korean friends do not hang out
with “westerners” due to cultural differences, I asked whether or not he
gets along with “westerners” since he can, unlike many of his Korean
friends, speak English fluently to which he responded:
Yeah. But, like, I don’t have really many western friends because
I wasn’t here in middle school, elementary school. It’s [Korean]
people from middle school and elementary school have much more
western friends …’Cause in elementary school, like, there’s no cul-
tural difference because they’re so young and stuff. Even middle
school, it’s less … division. But as you go to high school, there’s such
a strict and vivid division … between cultures. It’s so hard to make
foreign friends.
As Ben grew older, like Sam, it became easier for him to maintain or
build new friendships with other Koreans than to maintain or make
new friends among non-Korean students because cultural capital weighs
in more on relationships as a teenager than as a young child.
In addition to mobility and cultural differences, cultural hierarchies
influenced friendship circles. Only some of the student cliques were
considered “international” or “Third Culture Kids” by the school admin-
istrators and teachers, while others were seen as “self-segregating”.
The students who gained the school’s approval tended to socialize
in groups that were diverse in terms of nationality and “race”. In
the school staff’s view, these students fulfilled the TCK definition
in that their “sense of belonging is in relationship to others of simi-
lar background” (Pollock & Van Reken, 2009[2001], p. 13). Others
were seen as unable to overcome cultural differences. These students
“hung out” in groups that were often associated with one national
marker, such as “Indonesian”, “Japanese”, or “Korean”, despite the
diversity of some of these groups in terms of nationality, languages
spoken, ethnicity and culture. A teacher remarked, for example, that
the Koreans tended to be “monocultural” even though almost all the
Korean students were bilingual (Korean and English) and some trilin-
gual (e.g. Indonesian).10 According to the teacher, some stayed very
much within the Korean community and did not “assimilate”, while
others branched out. The use of the word “assimilate” presupposes
a normative culture that all students are expected to become like
or mimic (Bhabha, 1984), as opposed to a mutual, interactive process
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 29
wherein members of different cultural backgrounds make equal effort
to move towards one another.
In fact, the groups of students who were perceived as ideal by the
staff used English as their main mode of communication and were,
according to students, culturally “white” despite the diversity of their
cultural backgrounds. They often labeled themselves and were labeled
by other students as “white kids” irrespective of their physical appear-
ance. A Japanese female student, Kairi, said, “They may seem mixed, but
they’ve basically built a wall around themselves based on being white.”
The cultural sameness of those in the dominant groups was most visible
to those who often felt alienated by the dominant Anglophone school
culture and struggled to join these groups. Kairi said that when she
enrolled at TIS as an 11th grader, she tried to join the English-speaking
groups by sitting in their hangout area. But she gave up after one week.
Kairi found that their values and the way they interacted with each
other were vastly different from what she was used to. “I tried to do
the over-the-top-reaction thing like an American,” she explained in
Japanese. Kairi demonstrated what she meant by switching into English
and expressively saying, “That’s great! It’s beautiful!” as she flung her
arms out for effect. “But I wasn’t being myself,” she reverted back to
Japanese. “I thought to myself, ‘Why do I have to be the one acting
like an American? It’s so tiring, I don’t like it.’ So I quit.” The onus was
on Kairi to assimilate. Similarly, Indonesian students used the phrase
nggak nyambung”, or “can’t feel connected”, to describe how they felt
about the English-speaking groups and cited this as their reason for not
hanging out in these groups. Mutual intelligibility among TIS’ students
is mediated not only by their experience of a transnational upbringing
and the “third culture”, but also by their cultural background and lin-
guistic abilities.
Relations of power within the “third culture” add further nuance to
the way mutual intelligibility occurs among transnational youth. When
Ben mentioned above that he found it difficult making “foreign friends”,
he was referring mainly to peers who, in his words, are “western”.
Among the Korean seniors, Ben was one of the most exposed to the
West through his extended experiences of living in Canada and the UK
as well as attending international schools, and most fluent in English.
But still he found it difficult to befriend the students in the English-
speaking groups. As for the other groups, he says:
I think it’s easier to go into Indo group. [Be]cause, like, it’s still Asian …
And their culture is a little bit more similar to ours than the
30 Danau Tanu
western[ers] … I have friends who are Indo, and friends who are
Cantonese and … Italian. But people who are western, like English-
speaking countries, it’s harder to make friends with since they have
their own group and stuff. I don’t know. Even Italians … have dif-
ferent cultures from like States, and like English, and so it’s easier
to hang out with Italians. That’s how I find it. I don’t know why …
still …
Despite hanging out mainly with Koreans, Ben described an affinity
with Asians and other minorities in the English-medium international
school. At one level, the affinity alludes to a sense of mutual intelligi-
bility that stemmed from their shared experience of feeling culturally
marginalized at an international school. At another level, it alludes to
a sense of mutual intelligibility that stemmed from their shared expe-
rience of hybridity that blurred the cultural boundaries among Ben’s
transnational Asian and Italian friends.
Even so, Ben echoed the literature regarding the impact of mobility on
his relationships. With regard to the experience of having moved mul-
tiple times between several countries as a child and teenager, Ben says:
The bad thing is, since I have to move around so much, like, when
I was about to get so close to the friends there as friends … When
I made that kind of friends, I had to leave. It kinda ... it’s hard for me
to leave those kinds of people and then settle in a new environment.
But … yeah … that’s kind of [the] bad part of it. But I can just contact
them with MSN or … it’s okay, yeah.
Ben finds it difficult that he has to constantly leave his friends due
to his internationally mobile upbringing just as he feels he is getting to
know them more intimately. It affects his sense of continuity over time.
Thus, some of Ben’s experiences overlap with those of other transna-
tional youth described in the literature, while others do not.
The experiences of TIS’ Asian students illustrate that those with a
transnational upbringing share some experiences irrespective of their
cultural backgrounds, but they differ in other ways. They share the
experience of having their relationships affected each time they or their
friends move, which in turn affects their sense of continuity. They also
share the experience of cultural hybridity that transgresses socially con-
structed boundaries of nation and culture. Having these two types of
experiences can form the basis for mutual intelligibility for those who
have an internationally mobile childhood. But mutual intelligibility
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 31
is situational because young people experience the social space of the
international school differently based on their background. As a result,
they also develop different forms of third culture, or behavior patterns
that help them relate across cultural boundaries, which I elsewhere refer
to as “cosmopolitan practices” (Tanu, 2013). At TIS, some develop cos-
mopolitan practices that are referred to as being “international”, being a
“Third Culture Kid” or being “white”, while others develop cosmopoli-
tan practices that are referred to as being “Asian”.
Conclusion
“Third Culture Kids” is difficult to use as an analytical concept across
disciplines for two main reasons. Firstly, it valorizes and essentializes the
hybridity of “Third Culture Kids”, resulting in the conceptual inseparabil-
ity of the “third culture” from “Third Culture Kids”. “Third Culture Kids”
is conflated with children of expatriates – a conflation that overlooks the
diversity of children growing up in transnational social spaces. Secondly,
the predominance of white American researchers has resulted in an
analytical blind spot regarding the diversity of internationally mobile
children and the factors that influence their experiences. Limiting the
research parameter to who is or is not a “Third Culture Kid” is an unten-
able approach in the field. Instead, it is more useful to treat “Third Culture
Kids” as an insider construct and as such use it for understanding the
developmental processes of transnational youth at an individual level.
At the same time, analyses of transnational youth and transnational
social spaces need to take diversity into account. While this chapter
has only discussed issues of cultural difference, its interdisciplinary
approach enables a move toward more robust discussions of the
diversity among people with a transnational upbringing and the com-
plex array of factors that influence their experiences. Other factors
include: nationality (e.g. the varying value of passports held between
those from developed and developing countries and their impact on
mobility), linguistic ability (e.g. the impact of English as a dominant
language in the international arena), socio-economic status (e.g. the
differences between the children of international domestic workers
and the children of corporate expatriate workers), reasons for mobil-
ity (e.g. differences between the children of refugees and the children
of diplomats), gender, sexual orientation, etc. It is important to treat
the “third culture” as dynamic and changing in relation to specific
socio-historical contexts, and be reflexively aware of the impact that
researchers’ background have on the analytical lens. Only then can
32 Danau Tanu
we begin to situate the existing study of Third Culture Kids within the
broader study of migration and identity.
Notes
1. I am thankful to Ann Baker Cottrell, Richard Downie, and Ruth Van Reken,
all of whom are familiar with the history of the term “Third Culture Kids”,
for their feedback on this chapter. I also thank the anonymous reviewer.
However, I take sole responsibility for the views presented here.
2. Indonesia was chosen as the field site because of my native fluency in
Indonesian which would facilitate data collection.
3. In Japan, for example, the term kikokushijo (literally: “repatriated boys and
girls”) or kaigaishijo (literally: “overseas boys and girls”) is used to refer to
returnee children of Japanese expatriate workers who have been posted
overseas by their company or organization (Goodman, 1990). However, the
term has not been applied more universally in the same manner as “Third
Culture Kids”. See also Ann Baker Cottrell’s (2011) work for a comparison of
American and Japanese TCKs.
4. Norma McCaig coined the term in 1984 (Schaetti, 2000, p. 68).
5. Pseudonyms are used for all research participants to protect anonymity.
6. David Pollock is a co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing up among worlds.
7. Only approximate figures have been used to ensure the anonymity of the
school.
8. This forms part of a larger study of the diversity of transnational youth (see
Tanu, 2013).
9. Sam and Ben, who I mention later, both have Korean names. But I have
given them English pseudonyms because they generally use their English
names to introduce themselves to non-Koreans.
10. Unless otherwise indicated, the conversations have been reconstructed from
field notes.
References
Ahmed, Sara. (1999). Home and away: narratives of migration and estrange-
ment. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3), 329–347. doi: 10.1177/
136787799900200303
Al Jazeera. (2013, June 5). Cultural chameleons. Retrieved 2 December 2014, from
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201306052316-0022804
Allan, Michael. (2004). Cultural borderlands: cultural dissonance in the inter national
school. In E. Murphy (Ed.), Culture and the international school: living, learning and
communicating across cultures (Vol. 2, pp. 89–97). Saxmundham: Peridot Press.
Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. (1983). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin
and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Ang, Ien. (2001). On not speaking Chinese: living between Asia and the West. New York &
London: Routledge.
Barth, Fredrik. (1994). Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of
culture difference. Oslo: Pensumtjeneste.
Toward an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Diversity 33
Bashkow, Ira. (2004). A neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries. American
Anthropologist, 106(3), 443–458. doi: 10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443
Berzonsky, Michael D. (2005). Ego identity: a personal standpoint in a postmodern
world. Identity, 5(2), 125–136.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1984). Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial dis-
course. October, 28, 125–133.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The location of culture. London & New York: Routledge.
Bolon, Anne-Sophie. (2002, October 26). At home abroad / Third Culture Kids:
nowhere to call home but I like being a global nomad. International New York Times.
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/26/news/26iht-rkid_ed3_.html
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook
of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Westport,
Conneticut: Greenwood Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press.
Calhoun, Craig. (2008). Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary.
Daedalus, 137(3), 105–114.
Cockburn, Laura. (2002). Children and young people living in changing worlds:
the process of assessing and understanding the “third culture kid”. School
Psychology International, 23(4), 475–485. doi: 10.1177/0143034302234008
Coleman, John C. (2011). The nature of adolescence (4th ed.). London & New York:
Routledge.
Cottrell, Ann B. (2011). Explaining differences: TCKs and other CCKs, American
and Japanese TCKs. In G. H. Bell-Villada & N. Sichel (Eds), Writing out of limbo:
international childhoods, global nomads and Third Culture Kids. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Downie, Richard D. (1976). Re-entry experiences and identity formation of third
culture experienced dependent American youth: an exploratory study. (Ph.D. disserta-
tion), Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.
El-Zein, Abbas. (2002). Being elsewhere: on longing and belonging. In G. Hage
(Ed.), Arab-Australians today: citizenship and belonging (pp. 225–240). Carlton
South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press.
Erikson, Erik H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle: selected papers. New York:
International Universities Press.
Erikson, Erik H. (1968). Identity: youth, and crisis. New York: W.W. Norton.
Erikson, Erik H. (2008). The problem of ego identity. In D. L. Browning (Ed.), Adole-
scent identities: a collection of readings (pp. 223–240). New York: The Analytic Press.
Fail, Helen. (2002). An examination of the life histories of a group of former interna-
tional school students. (PhD dissertation), University of Bath, Bath, UK.
Fail, Helen, Thompson, Jeff, & Walker, George. (2004). Belonging, identity
and Third Culture Kids: life histories of former international school stu-
dents. Journal of Research in International Education, 3(3), 319–338. doi:
10.1177/1475240904047358
Ferstad, Corrine Freitas (2002). A sense of home: what constitutes a sense of home
and community for pre-adolescent and adolescent youth living in international tran-
sition? (Ph.D. dissertation), Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Frederick, Leah Ruth. (1996). Balancing the four major influences on transcultural
students through an educational environment. (Ph.D. dissertation), The University
of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.
34 Danau Tanu
Goodman, Roger. (1990). Japan’s “international youth”: the emergence of a new class
of schoolchildren. Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press & Oxford University
Press.
Hall, Stuart. (1996). Who needs an identity? In S. Hall & P. du Gay (Eds),
Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1–17). London: SAGE Publications.
Hayden, Mary. (2011). Transnational spaces of education: the growth of the
international school sector. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(2), 211–224.
doi: 10.1080/14767724.2011.577203
Jenkins, Richard. (1997). Rethinking ethnicity: arguments and explorations. London:
Sage.
Konno, Ayako. (2005). Examining the relationship between ethnic identity and
adjustment in Asian international students: understanding the experience of Third
Culture Kids. (Psy. D. dissertation), Chicago School of Professional Psychology,
Chicago.
McCaig, Norma M. (2002). Raised in the margin of the mosaic: global nomads
balance worlds within. International Educator, 2002(Spring), 10–17.
McLachlan, Debra A. (2005). The impact of globalization on internationally
mobile families: a grounded theory analysis. Journal of Theory Construction &
Testing, 9(1), 14–20.
McLachlan, Debra A. (2007). Global nomads in an international school: families
in transition. Journal of Research in International Education, 6(2), 233–249. doi:
10.1177/1475240907078615
Morley, David. (2000). Home territories: media, mobility and identity. London: Routledge.
Ortner, Sherry B. (2006). Anthropology and social theory: culture, power, and the act-
ing subject. Durham: Duke University Press.
Peterson, Mark Allen. (2011). Connected in Cairo: growing up cosmopolitan in the
modern Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. (2001). Hybridity, so what?: the anti-hybridity backlash
and the riddles of recognition. Theory Culture Society, 18(2-3), 219–245. doi:
10.1177/026327640101800211
Pollock, David C., & Van Reken, Ruth. (2009[2001]). Third Culture Kids: growing
up among worlds. Boston: Intercultural Press.
Pollock, David C., & Van Reken, Ruth E. (2001). Third Culture Kids: the experience
of growing up among worlds. Boston & London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Rizvi, Fazal. (2009). Global mobility and the challenges of educational research
and policy. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 108(2),
268–289. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-7984.2009.01172.x
Rodriguez, Rachel. (2013, December 24). “Home” for the holidays? Not that
easy. CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/24/living/going-home-holidays-
irpt/.
Schachter, Elli P. (2005). Erikson meets the postmodern: Can classic identity
theory rise to the challenge? Identity, 5(2), 137–160.
Schaetti, Barbara F. (2000). Global nomad identity: hypothesizing a developmental
model. (Ph.D. dissertation), The Union Institute, Ohio.
Schwartz, Seth J. (2001). The evolution of Eriksonian and, neo-Eriksonian iden-
tity theory and research: a review and integration. Identity, 1(1), 7–58.
Schwartz, Seth J., Côté, James E., & Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. (2005). Identity
and agency in emerging adulthood. Youth & Society, 37(2), 201–229. doi:
10.1177/0044118x05275965
... Further, over the years the concept has greatly evolved and received more attention from expatriate populations, educators from international schools, psycho-social counseling services, and human resource development professionals. All these fields share the aim to better understand, both the positive and negative, impacts a multi-cultural and mobile lifestyle has on these children (Tanu, 2015;Mosanya & Kwiatkowska, 2021). ...
... This limits the breadth of TCKs cosmopolitan identity, as their multi-cultural competencies are primarily developed through interactions and engagement with highly privileged individuals and is arguably limited beyond such social spheres (Collette, 2019;Meyer, 2015). In addition, research conducted in several international schools in the Middle East and Asia found that TCKs struggled to form social relationships with individuals from non-TCK backgrounds (Tanu, 2015;Cheruiyot Bii, 2011;Dillon & Ali, 2019;Bailey, 2015). This again demonstrates how TCKs cosmopolitan outlook is restricted, because of their focus to primarily interact with individuals from similar backgrounds, hence according to Hannerz (1990, p. 240) is not a "search for contrasts" rather uniformity. ...
... Moreover, there are various methodological concerns that many researchers studying TCKs stress is limiting the scope and applicability of current literature. The foundation of TCK literature is based upon research conducted on white, American expatriate families living in postcolonial India (Tanu, 2015). Therefore, the roots of TCK research primarily reflects the experiences of white, western children growing up abroad. ...
Research
Full-text available
To what extent do third-culture kids develop a cosmopolitan identity and how does this then impact their life trajectories?
... Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background." (13). TCKs are heralding an era in which cultural identification is niche, personal, and fluid, and multiculturalism is an advantage. ...
... In this article, I refer to the third edition of 2017, which is co-authored by Michael Pollock. For further information on the origins of the Third Culture Kid concept see Useem (1993); and Tanu (2015). See also Rauwerda (2013), who applies the TCK perspective to examine fiction written by 'Third Culture' individuals. ...
Article
Over the last half-century, an industry of sense-making and psy-management has emerged to narrate an increasingly “special” population of third culture kids (TCKs): children with highly mobile formative contexts, living between countries and cultures. Producing categories of identification and models of development through dominant monocultural assumptions, TCK literature performs colonising epistemological disciplines of coding difference as risk and capital. In this article, we trouble the prevailing assumptions and frameworks that narrate TCK identity through a paradox of unrecognisability, integrating autobiographical responses to theorise questions about accounting for one another and ourselves as subjects of otherness. Decoding movements of posthuman commitments to disrupting universalising god tricks offer memories of encountering paradigms of ab-normality in TCK accounts as ruptures that open up new possibilities. Beyond restrains of normalising frameworks, unusual life stories flow in affirmative, relational, and creative accounts of responsive citizenship in between and among multiple countries and cultures.
Chapter
Full-text available
International schools typically promise to provide some form of global citizenship education or internationally minded perspective on the world. There is value added to global citizenship education by including neurodivergent and disabled students—students with brains and bodies that vary from those of their typical peers—well. The goals of global citizenship education imply an ability to interact with all people of the world, neurodivergent and disabled people included. Through a broad-spectrum literature review, the author examines the identities of international schools attempting to become global leaders in including by choice as well as the research basis supporting that goal and opportunities available to those schools.
Article
While the resources for biblical interpretation are multiplying, there are no current models for reading biblical texts in community with culturally hybrid persons. Contextual Bible Study (CBS) presents a pedagogical framework to help fill the gap. This article offers an overview of CBS as well as a case study that looks at a reading community (a specific group of culturally hybrid young adults) that uses a relevant experience (migration-related grief) to interpret a resonant text (Lamentations 1).
Article
Purpose This paper looks to study how adult third culture kids (ATCKs) perceive that their childhood international experience is linked to their career interests and choices in later adult life. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study is based on 34 semi-structured interviews analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The authors adopted social cognitive career theory as a theoretical framework for the work. Findings The findings indicate that regardless of the ATCKs field of expertise, their international childhood links to various international exposures and work experiences already in their early career. ATCK background can also be interpreted as an essential facet that promotes significant interest towards international roles, work tasks and careers because they are familiar with a globally mobile lifestyle. A global childhood was represented as a phenomenon that fosters stress tolerance, and ATCKs' unique international capabilities were perceived as an advantage for employment. The authors also found that they tended to set high goals for themselves in terms of education and career, in order to pursue high-end international positions. Practical implications ATCKs' value interpretations of their strengths, skills and knowledge highly relate to working in an international setup. When applying for jobs, ATCKs could find it beneficial to highlight their early international experiences and explain why this is valuable experience for organizations that are seeking highly educated, globally competent, and flexible employees. Also, information about ATCKs could be included in international business course curricula, in order to foster an increased recognition of the value and benefits of hiring individuals with a TCK background. Originality/value This paper is the first qualitative study which empirically examines ATCKs' longer term career interests and career decisions among individuals with adult work experience. This study contributes to the knowledge about how early life international experiences are interpreted in the context of work-life decisions from a social cognitive perspective.
Article
Full-text available
This study explored the affect of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) towards their home and host culture(s) and how this affect may indicate possible cultural identity shifts as distinguished in Sussman’s (2000) cultural identity shift model. To this end, the method of poetic inquiry was used. The poems were concerned with TCKs’ affective experiences (Prendergast, 2009). We also investigated whether TCKs described their belonging in terms of personal relationships rather than in terms of geographical locations. Twenty TCKs, ranging in age from 26 to 70 years and from five ‘home cultures’, expressed their early cross-cultural experiences through the free verse poem of “Where I’m from”. A mixed method approach of qualitative and quantitative research was applied, by combining poetic inquiry using a free verse poem format and clustering these data by means of coding in Atlas.ti. TCKs’ poems were analyzed using belonging, affect, and practices-food-nature-events as key codes. Findings revealed that TCKs expressed stronger positive affect towards their host cultures than towards their ‘home’ cultures, indicating a subtractive cultural identity shift. We also found that TCKs defined their belonging more in terms of personal relationships than in terms of geographical locations. This study shows that TCKs’ sense of belonging seems more related to the question who than where I am from.
Article
In the world of maritime lore and practice, tattoos were both commemorative and magical. Sailors frequently tattooed the words H-OL- D F-A-S-T onto the skin above each knuckle in the hopes of strengthening their grasp on the ship’s rigging. It gave sailors an edge at saving their own lives when the winds would howl and the ship tossed wildly on the waves, and they must hold fast or be thrown into the dark cold sea. This illustrated autoethnographic work will draw on the metaphor of the ship in transit, the slippery rigging, storied magic and the dangers of the chasm below, to interrogate the idea of the academy as literal and figurative home for transnational academics. In it, I will combine words and pictures to tell two stories of being. The piece concludes with problematizing the notion of “home” as a desirable construct in the context of the academy.
Thesis
Download here: http://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/record(8c6175be-feaa-4b28-9068-d4066dbf3135).html This thesis studies young people who experience a high-level of international mobility while they are growing up either directly (by moving geographically) or indirectly (by attending an international school with a transient student body). They are referred to as “Third Culture Kids (TCKs)” or “global nomads” in the Anglophone literature and popular discourse. I propose the need to view TCKs as “transnational youth” in order to move the analysis beyond the literature’s current methodological limitations, Eurocentrism, and focus on the individual to the neglect of socio-historical context. I use an anthropological approach, methodological cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial critique to contextualize the way young people experience international mobility and the cosmopolitan space of an international school in a capitalist, postcolonial world. Fieldwork was conducted for one year in 2009 and consisted mainly of participant observation of high school students (grades 9 to 12, about 14 to 18 years old) at an international school catering to expatriate and wealthy Indonesian families in Jakarta, Indonesia. I also conducted in-depth interviews with over 130 students, staff, and parents from the school, as well as alumni of international schools in various countries. With over sixty nationalities represented in the student body and over twenty nationalities in the teaching staff, the international school was a setting in which national and transnational discourses of imagined communities converged and competed with one another. Consequently, the students negotiate boundaries as a matter of daily living, yielding concentrated data for analysis relating to intercultural dynamics and cosmopolitan practices. The data show that cosmopolitan practices of peaceably engaging with the Other are diverse, situational, and embedded within relations of power. Whether or not these practices are recognized as cosmopolitan at the international school hinges on the way difference is defined by the notion of being “international”. I propose that the school’s ideology of being “international” is a vehicle through which both national and transnational class structures are reproduced. Becoming “international”, I show, is mutually constitutive with becoming “western”, becoming “Asian”, and even becoming “Indonesian”. Each of these processes represents ways of practising cosmopolitanism that emerges out of socio-cultural inequalities. Young people experience the educational space of an international school in diverse and complex ways. I explore these complexities by interrogating the ideology of being “international” that dominated the field site. I argue that the school’s vision is to educate students to become “international”, which the school articulates as a set of ideas and practices about engaging peaceably with others across difference. Notwithstanding this ideal, I propose that being “international” in the context of the school is characterized by speaking English, maintaining a sense of distance from the local, and being “western”. I argue that this is a Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism, which has implications for social relations on campus. This thesis examines the intricate ways in which transnational youth engage with the dominant ideology of being “international”, and find alternative ways to practise cosmopolitanism. The tension between the shared experience of a transnational (educational) space that privileges a Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism and the differing ways in which various actors experience this space draws out the thematic focus of each chapter. EXAMINERS' COMMENTS: “This is a very well structured and well-written thesis. It reports a piece of qualitative research that is thoughtfully designed and executed.” “[T]here is much in this thesis that should be published in major journals.” “As with any good ethnography, it makes its points through a wealth of telling details, particularly interviews.” “[A] welcome addition to the scholarly literature on this subject. It is clearly written, well theorized and offers a useful ethnographic alternative to the predominantly Euroamerican-centered approaches that dominate this topic.” “One of the strong points of the dissertation is that it takes the psychological and educational literature seriously, and offers ethnography, and anthropological analysis, as an extension and supplement, rather than setting up the existing literature as a straw man.” “Overall, I am very favorably impressed by this dissertation. I enjoyed reading it, and learned a good deal from it. I look forward to seeing this material further developed and published in scholarly journals in anthropology, but perhaps also in education and psychology.” ""
Book
For members of Cairo's upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more "modern" places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies - of Arabic children's magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants - Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.
Chapter
Cultural CapitalSocial CapitalConversionsNotes