Student mobility has become a key feature in the drive toward internationalization of higher education in the United States. International students contribute to the academic culture of universities, yet, often face isolation, discrimination, and experience difficulties transitioning to new environments. As a result, conational networks have formed to provide support to international students in foreign institutions. This article examines the different ways membership in a conational support group mediated international students’ experiences in a university campus. Contrary to theories that suggest insularity such as fortressing and cultural enclaves, our findings suggest that conational groups are sites of creative potential where group members are consistently forging complex assemblages between norms that are familiar and experiences that are new. Although significant personal transformations ensue as a result of these assemblages, they are occurring in a setting and a pace that is determined by group members and perceived to be safe. We argue that conational groups should not be conceived as static spaces that reproduce cultural norms, but rather as sites of contestation and cultural negotiation. Based on these findings, we question whether “integration” should be a guiding institutional logic for international student engagement, suggesting instead an approach based on the concept of “inclusion.”

Increasingly, colleges and universities across the United States are encouraging students to study abroad, citing enhanced cultural appreciation and critical thinking skills as intended outcomes. However, on every campus, there are students who cannot participate in learning-abroad opportunities because of visa, financial, familial, or other personal reasons. At the same time, some students are more drawn to opportunities for engagement in their own communities than outside the United States. This article discusses a study that focused on student outcomes for alumni of domestic and international programs designed to be cross-cultural and experiential in nature. The findings suggest that U.S.-based servicelearning opportunities that are intentionally experiential and contain cross-cultural elements may be just as effective in developing students' cultural appreciation and critical thinking skills as international experiences. Results also indicate that programmatic elements may be as strong of a predictor of student outcomes as location.

The Covid‑19 pandemic has revealed the abilities or lack thereof of many higher education institutions to adequately support the academic and co‑curricular needs of students in times of crisis. In this reflective practitioner account, Schlossberg’s Transition Theory is used to analyse the transitional experiences of students amid the Covid‑19 pandemic and how the Office of Student and Community Affairs (OSCA) team at Ashesi University successfully supported students as they navigated the academic semester. One-to-one interviews with department heads of the five OSCA units were conducted alongside focus group discussions with a cross-section of 17 students. The findings suggest that (i) advising, (ii) engagement, and (iii) timely online support interventions contributed immensely to students’ success in transitioning from in‑person to remote learning.

In Ghana and Zanzibar, Tanzania, first-generation students navigate uncertain and precarious conditions in the pursuit of becoming graduates and achieving their educational aspirations. This essay argues that youth in the Global South perform two entwined navigational capacities in this pursuit. First, the capacity for action, or collective agency, harnessed through relations with people in youths’ families, schools, and communities. Second, the capacity to hustle, which is a strategy of mobilizing social connections, life experiences, and tenacity to persevere through struggles and uncertainties. Narratives from fifty-eight first-generation secondary school and university students in Ghana and Zanzibar inductively reveal hustling as a strategy for engaging collective agency in the process of navigating structural barriers. The authors draw on youth-centered methodologies—popular theater and life history approaches—to show the complexity of youths’ experiences in negotiating the challenges and uncertainties in their lives while pursuing an education.