In times of globalised flows of students, this paper offers an alternative way of conceptualising identity change in the experiences of students on study abroad or student exchange programmes. Despite the "identity turn" of recent years, modernist notions of identity continue to impact on the ways in which study abroad experiences are conceived, resulting in failures both to facilitate productive change and to recognise blocked, or "knotted", attempts at change. The discussion considers data collected in an ethnographic study of a tertiary-level English language programme in an Australian university and suggests that a closer look at the specific experiences of four individual study abroad students, through the lens of the Deleuzian concepts of the molar, the molecular and the line of flight, offers a way looking at identity which may help both educators and learners open more usefully to the possibilities for self-transformation.