The Experience of International Students: Biographical Narratives and Identities

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a qualitative and comparative study on the cultural experience of international students in North and South Europe. I employ a narrative approach and the focus of the research revolves around the autoethnographies of 25 international students in Helsinki and 25 in Florence. The narratives were prompted by in-depth interviews following a template divided into the three phases of travel conceived as a rite of passage: departure–preliminal, transition–liminal, arrival–postliminal. To explore the meaning of geographical mobility in the lives of these young people, I sketched a series of self-identity types connected to mobility experiences: the Fated, whose biographical premises are all pushing-pulling toward the status of international student; the Academic, who is fascinated by the idea of becoming a worldly intellectual and sees the PhD as a natural step; the Globetrotter, whose mobility is an end in itself: the goal is the next city-country; the Explorer, who is abroad looking for new cultural challenges, with a genuine desire to discover and understand specific places and people; the Runaway, who feels like a stranger at home and is escaping abroad for political or existential reasons. I believe that the interpretation of international students’ sense of self-identity can be fruitfully achieved through the narrative path I have constructed (or a similar one).

The multidimensionality of everyday experiences of internationalisation using collaborative autoethnography (CAE): Narratives of belonging and crossing borders of two female sociologists

“…'culture shock'), envisioning internationalisation as a linear process that leads to cultural integration and assimilation whilst also negating their agency (Coate and Rathnayake, 2012;O'Reilly et al, 2013). While biographic narrative research on international mobility has increased (Nada & Araújo, 2018;Birindelli, 2023) revealing the importance of hearing academics' stories in their own words (Ibid), in Ireland and Slovenia, such studies which 'go deep' into people's everyday experiences are largely negated from contemporary HE research agendas (Moran et al, 2021).…”

“…"културни шок"), а интернационализација се посматра као линеарни процес који води до културне интеграције и асимилације, истовремено негирајући њихово посредовање (Coate & Rathnayake, 2012;O'Reilly et al, 2013). Мада се повећало истраживање биографског наратива о међународној мобилности (Nada & Araújo, 2018;Birindelli, 2023), које открива значај слушања прича припадника академске заједнице пренетих њиховим речима (Ibid. ), у Ирској и Словенији су студије које "дубоко залазе" у људска свакодневна искуства у великој мери запостављене у агендама истраживања савременог високог образовања (Moran et al, 2021).…”

"To be the person who is not the native speaker". Interculturality as empathy in cross-cultural experiences abroad

“…Cross-cultural sojourns in higher education provide a multidimensional scenario to explore how mobility and transitions across borders inform the political and educational framework in curricula decisions for professional education as well as the ideological load, attributed to otherness, intercultural relations, language, and identity. Although much information about the benefits of cross-cultural experiences and study-abroad sojourns is available to correlate institutional efforts for internationalization (Kinginger and Zhuang (2023), intercultural competence (Chédru and Delhoume, 2023, Qinhui et al, 2023, Coleman et al, 2019, global citizenship (Reiter, 2023;Birindelli, 2023;Appe et al, 2016), language learning and practice (Steele et al, 2017), not much has been studied from a bottom-up perspective. The bottom-up perspective demonstrates the lived experiences of the sojourners and provides elements to contest curricular ideological loads and the real impact of crosscultural experiences on students.…”