Defying grand narratives of ‘being an international student’: finding ‘home’ in the Other

Abstract

The PhD students in this study create a sense of being at home as part of their own way of being themselves. Their programme requires and allows considerable autonomy in how they choose to be with the people around them. Different to common expectations of the ‘international student’, their nationality and its ‘culture’ being apart from the ‘culture’ they find is not the major factor. Instead they draw resources from their personal cultural trajectories within which their lives in Britain form another stage in a lifelong journey of identity construction. They do not ‘assimilate’ in the expected sense. Their friends are not mainly ‘British’. Their brought multilingualism is characteristic of a natural hybridity that prepares them to be different selves in diverse social locations and with people of diverse origin on and off campus through an ongoing negotiation process of small culture formation on the go.