Learning by contesting: intercultural responsibility through sustainability-driven higher education

This paper explores how sustainability-oriented higher education, when designed to view intercultural responsibility as an ethical and relational practice, enables students to position themselves as globally responsible actors. Based on a narrative analysis of Thai undergraduates, the findings show how programme students experience ethical transformations from initial discomfort to dialogic accountability, and from competence-based skills to lived responsibility. The analysis demonstrates how reflexive positioning, vulnerability, and solidarity are central to addressing injustice and ecological crisis. These findings are used to argue that dialogic and participatory educational spaces foster students’ ethical reimagining as intercultural agents of change.