Abstract
This paper examines how international student mobility mediates students' negotiations of self, knowledge, and possibility, drawing on five narrative cases from a cross-national ethnography of higher education in the UK, Denmark, and Germany. Focusing on postgraduate international students who moved across national and institutional contexts, the analysis traces how mobility becomes entangled with efforts to navigate competing cultural expectations, family obligations, gendered norms, and desires for autonomy and transformation. While educational mobility is often framed in terms of adjustment, aspiration, or future capital, this paper highlights the tensions, ambivalences, and affective negotiations through which international students engage with multiple, and at times conflicting, ways of knowing and being. Inspired by Mar & iacute;a Lugones concept of 'world-travelling', I explore how international students inhabit different moral, relational, and epistemic worlds, not all of which are entered by choice, opening up both constraints and possibilities for becoming. The paper contributes to growing efforts in the ISM literature to centre international student agency by illustrating students' own interpretive and affective practices. It also attends to the layered conditions of possibility that shape what forms of becoming are imaginable and liveable, expanding how we conceptualise the spaces and forms through which (educational) becoming unfolds.