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).