While debates about internationalisation of higher education in the United States have traditionally been shaped by domestic political and economic interests (Hovey 2004; Reilly and Senders 2009), this article focuses on the peripheries of these domestically driven conversations, the terrains where study abroad takes place. We bring in voices of students whose publicly engaged work while abroad addresses critical sociopolitical issues from a transnational perspective. We use the concept of performative democracy (Matynia 2009) to frame these democratic interventions of students. Through speaking and acting in the public realm, they transcend individually and domestically oriented learning paths and engage with civic matters through a deterritorialised global imagination (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The students’ work, we suggest, challenges the continued pervasiveness of the homeland perspective in internationalisation policies and asks for their more expansive geopolitical framing.