Who is a Global Citizen?

Abstract

Free The Children (FTC) is a youth-driven NGO that calls on participants to end poverty and become global
change makers. FTC’s success is in part how it appeals to young people in a culturally-sanctioned place where
youth can belong to a larger community of like-minded peers. The term ‘global citizen’ can be found
repeatedly throughout FTC’s promotional material. This is problematic, as the rhetoric of global citizenship
often serves to obscure the North’s complicity in perpetuating systems of dominance that ultimately create an
imbalance of power between the North and the South. Using FTC’s promotional on-line material, this paper
will employ a critical rhetorical analysis to explore the ways that the term global citizen is used. Using a model
of global citizenship as outlined by Shultz (2007) this paper will explore the way FTC uses rhetoric of global
citizenship and how participants are positioned as ‘global change makers’.