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This talk addresses the insights to be gained through a comparison of the use of a politically constitutive concept that delineates unlike but connected ‘cases’ of a concept-in-use. Global Citizenship is a concept with increasing currency. The talk compares two different but connected ways in which the concept is being put to work by two different groups to achieve political aims. One is an educational reform movement, the other is a corporate lobby group. Both claim a progressive political platform under the banner of Global Citizenship. Both are trying to entreat people to see themselves as Global Citizens and in so doing change the world through the ‘transformation’ of the self. The Global Citizen created by this education and elite-led mobilisation will ostensibly solve the world's problems through their knowledge of it and make the world ‘a better place’. What methodological issues arise when these two ‘cases’ are compared?

April Biccum is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial International Relations, School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University, and co-convenor of the Interpretation, Method and Critique network. This talk is based on an article of the same title published in the Australian Journal of Political Science (59.4, 2025).

Note: This is a hybrid seminar with the the speaker in person at ANU: if you are on campus please join us at Seminar Room 3.72 in the RSSS Building.

To join online: https://anu.zoom.us/j/3364169330?pwd=ZStOdm4vTWpwS1RMbmFYUisxWVB2UT09

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