Ab-normalising projects of third culture kid identity: Troubling the god trick

Abstract

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.