Home-making in the internationalised university: a theoretical and personal encounter through SWANA Forum for Social Justice

Abstract

In this article, the internationalised campus is understood as a higher education institution, a stage and a platform, with its own cultural and legal practices and processes, on which and in which social and multiple cultural interactions are performed. Sensitive to Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjects, we – three postgraduate students from the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region – describe an intercultural encounter with each other and with a higher education institution in which we create a sense of belonging. As the three co-founders of SWANA Forum for Social Justice, we describe our experience of community building at the UCL Institute of Education, London, UK. Using our preferred conceptual framework, and reflecting on our personal narratives bearing on the question of belonging and home-making, we offer a metatheoretical conversation that draws on Bourdieu’s notion of field, habitus and capital when describing what happens during community-building practices in internationalised university campuses; an engagement with social justice in education through concepts such as recognition, safety, belonging and success; and a pragmatist philosophical conceptualisation of community as a democratic public, and its potential for action and change.