In increasingly complex and diverse world, Citizenship Education (CE) and Global Citizenship Education (GCE) are considered to have potential to play a significant role in tackling global issues. CE is widely understood as education about democratic values, citizenship rights and responsibilities, civic identities, and people relating to one another and to the broader society. GCE is generally understood as CE within the global context.

At the same time, there is a consensus in CE/GCE scholarship that the CE/GCE discourse is overwhelmed by the Western and neoliberal hegemony that focuses on individuals’ capacity to be productive and successful members of society. While much has been written about citizenship and CE/GCE, little is known about how youth from culturally diverse and migrant backgrounds conceptualise and experience citizenship and CE/GCE. This creates a risk that the way citizenship values and concepts are taught and framed in schools is disconnected from how culturally diverse and migrant youth experience, practice and envision their citizenship identities and values.  

There is also a lack of socially just and critical approaches to CE/GCE that draw on the immense diversity of the world’s knowledge and perspectives. A large proportion of our society’s cultures, ways of understanding and being in the world are not represented in CE/GCE, which yet remain to be decolonised (Pashby & da Costa, 2021; Osler, 2015). Therefore, seeking and meaningfully embedding culturally diverse and migrant youth experiences and perspectives in CE/GCE may help address these gaps while providing relevant insights into what matters to young people. 

This study aims to address concerns about the absence of diverse epistemologies and perspectives of culturally diverse and migrant youth in CE/GCE and to contribute to socially just, culturally inclusive models of CE/GCE. The research questions relevant to this paper are: 1) What are the perspectives and lived experiences of citizenship and CE/GCE among culturally diverse and migrant youth in intercultural contexts? and 2) How do culturally diverse and migrant youth envision a more culturally inclusive, and socially just CE/GCE?  

To answer these research questions, this study explored methodological possibilities of the transformative paradigm (Hurtado, 2025; Mertens, 2021) and decolonial theory (Bhambra, 2014; Le Grange, 2023; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) when engaging with culturally diverse youth, while contributing to a more inclusive and socially just CE/GCE. Transformative paradigm (Hurtado, 2025; Mertens, 2021) is a philosophical worldview focused on the lives and experiences of the marginalised communities and people in nondominant cultural groups, examining unequal power relationships, pursuing social justice and positive social change.  

The theoretical perspective aligned with the transformative paradigm and this study is decolonial theory, or decoloniality. Decoloniality is a theory and praxis, and an ongoing process (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) recognising the impacts and injustices of colonisation of vast parts of the world. Decolonial scholars have used this term to describe many possible, alternative ways of living together well, and in harmony. Moreover, critical and decolonial conceptualisations of GCE aim to transform learners and society; they require to “question structures and systems of power that maintain inequity and injustice”; decoloniality can be explored within various contexts and with diverse groups of students (Pillay & Karsgaard, 2023, p. 7).  

This paper presents a part of the findings from the study that engaged with thirty-three culturally diverse and migrant young people between 15 and 25 years of age, mostly from Europe and Asia, and residing in Australia at the time of participating in the study. Sixteen young people between 15-17 years of age participated in individual active phenomenological interviews (Moustakas, 1989; Romm, 2018; Nglube, 2017), where they discussed their experiences and perspectives of citizenship, CE and GCE. Following the interviews, seventeen young people between 18-25 of age took part in four focus groups, co-analysing phenomenological interviews and envisioning a decolonial, socially just CE/GCE. The focus groups were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022). Another significant aspect of methodology was reflexivity. The researcher, as a female, heterosexual, able-bodied migrant from Serbia living in Australia, embedded deep reflexivity into the study. This reflexivity included the insider-outsider positioning (Dwyer & Buckle, 2018; Liu & Burnett, 2022) on multiple levels and in multiple directions, and continuous reflection about how this complex dynamic affected the study, the researcher’s relationship with participants, with herself and her place in the world.

The experiences and perspectives of citizenship and GCE shared by the study participants in sixteen interviews and four focus groups include concepts highly relevant to human rights, children’s rights, and social justice, such as the concerns about experiencing racism and discrimination, as well as barriers to practising and staying connected with one’s culture, faith, language, and identity. Young people’s active participation in the study that concerns their education, their values and their future, enacted the dimension of hope that has increasingly become an important notion in the CE/GCE discourse (Andreotti, 2021; Tarozzi, 2023). It is expected that the research findings will significantly contribute to understanding the lived dimension of youth citizenship and provide insights into how young people from culturally diverse and migrant backgrounds perceive and imagine a socially just, culturally inclusive CE/GCE. At this stage of the study, it is recommended that to embrace more socially just and decolonial approaches to CE/GCE, young people from culturally diverse backgrounds should actively participate in the CE/GCE discourse. The paper also proposes that further transformative CE/GCE research with culturally diverse migrant youth can contribute to a CE/GCE that plays a more relevant role in strengthening social cohesion internationally and in amplifying possibilities for more hopeful societal and environmental futures.

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