Abstract
This paper examines how international students engage in knowledge across disciplinary and institutional contexts, and how such engagement is shaped by pedagogical structures, disciplinary norms, and students' academic and cultural trajectories. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across six master's programmes in the UK, Denmark, and Germany, it explores how the 'international classroom' is lived and negotiated in practice. The analysis shows that disciplinary assumptions - particularly ideas about what counts as legitimate knowledge - profoundly influence teaching practices, student collaboration, and the extent to which epistemic diversity is recognised or marginalised. While hard sciences often present knowledge as universal and context-free, applied and interdisciplinary fields more readily acknowledge knowledge as situated and culturally embedded - though not without tensions. Across all settings, students' engagement with knowledge was not solely shaped by their academic and cultural backgrounds, but by how these intersected with disciplinary norms and pedagogical arrangements that structured opportunities for participation. Rather than treating internationalisation as a fixed model or policy ideal, the paper develops a situated account of how it is enacted through everyday classroom practices. In doing so, it highlights the importance of more dialogic pedagogies and reflexive approaches to knowledge that engage with, rather than abstract from, epistemic difference. The paper contributes to debates on internationalisation and decolonisation in higher education by foregrounding the relational, uneven, and contested nature of knowledge engagement in diverse educational settings.