“When You Are in Rome, You Behave like the Romans”: International Students’ Experience of Integration Policies at a UK University

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Set within the context of the calls for a critical approach to the integration of international students, this paper draws on decolonial theories to examine the experiences of international students from Asian and African countries as they make sense of institutional policies designed to support their integration. The study uses a phenomenological approach to analyse focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with international postgraduate students. The findings reveal how international students demand the decolonisation of a “Eurocentric” curriculum and a pedagogical framework that acknowledges their experiences and agencies as epistemic equals. Participants expressed diverse opinions about the institution’s academic culture, while inclusion policies are perceived as “tokenistic gestures” that fail to address racial invalidation and microaggressions. Findings from this study suggest the need for institutions in “post-race” times to transcend superficial equality discourses that commodify diversity as “good business sense”, targeting raced, mobile, and gendered “others” for inclusion by situating EDI strategies within a much longer history of global entanglements shaped by colonial, capitalist relations, rationalities, and subjectivities.