International study and democratic consciousness: From formation to engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how international higher education shapes the formation of democratic consciousness in returnees to autocracies and anocracies, and how that consciousness is put into practice after return. Democratic consciousness is conceptualised as a generative mechanism: a reflective and moral orientation toward pluralism, accountability, and participation that emerges through contrast, dislocation, and critical encounter during international study. Drawing on qualitative data from 51 interviews with returnees across 30 countries, the analysis traces how this mechanism is enacted after return through five observed pathways of civic engagement: discursive reframing, building civic infrastructure, symbolic intervention, institutional infusion, and strategic bridging. These pathways illustrate how democratic consciousness becomes practicable in constrained political settings. The paper draws on theories of reflexive agency, transformative learning, and transnationalism, and contributes to research on higher education and democratisation by clarifying how international study can reshape moral and civic perception and support sustained, context-sensitive engagement under autocracies and anocracies. • International study fosters democratic consciousness in individuals from constrained regimes. • Democratic consciousness shapes how returnees interpret civic responsibility. • Five pathways show how returnees enact democratic values after returning home. • Reflexive agency enables civic engagement under autocratic and anocratic regimes. • Returnees identify civic footholds even in politically constrained environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".