“Small experiences within daily living collectively create really powerful cultural learning opportunities”

Your study uses the concept of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ to analyse the lived experiences of international students in Germany. Can you start by briefly explaining why you chose this specific approach and what consequences it had for your analysis?

When it comes to research with international students, there is a tendency for studies to rely on a small number of conceptual frameworks, which get used time and time again. In recent years I’ve found myself really drawn to thinking about how we might be able to bring in lesser-used frameworks from other academic disciplines to tell new stories. That was important to me because there’s also a tendency for scholars to reach similar conclusions about international students: that they are not ‘integrated’ enough or that they are only experiencing challenges. These are narratives that I’m really critical of as a researcher because they reproduce harmful stereotypes of international students and of migrants more generally.

The lens of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ spoke to me in particular because it countered these really problematic narratives about international students as ‘missing’ from their local communities, as other research has argued. But my feeling was, how can you be ‘missing’ from society when you exist within it? So the opportunity to focus on the boring, mundane, and routine aspects of life helped illuminate these counter stories.

For our analysis, this meant changing our approach slightly. We had to set aside our own conceptualisations of ‘meaningful’ or ‘meaningless’, because from the offset many of the stories we report don’t seem very important. What’s so special about rubbish bins or picking up parcels, after all? But we had to look beyond this assumption to see where our participants saw meaning and what larger ideas these mundane experiences might translate to.

What are the main results of your analysis? Were there any findings that surprised you?

Our results have provided really rich stories about the meaningfulness of the meaningless, in a way. We looked at everyday life in students’ surrounding communities and how small experiences within daily living – buying bus tickets, going grocery shopping, buying a coffee, etc. – collectively create really powerful cultural learning opportunities. It’s this idea that our worldview is shaped through the lens of our everyday interactions, and these can in some ways be just as or even more powerful than grander gestures of cultural exchange. A lot of research with international students focuses on things like measuring the composition of their friendship networks or what media they watch or what social media they are active on. What our research shows, though, is that multicultural interaction and learning is happening beyond these proxies. There is a common assumption that international students aren’t authentically experiencing a culture if their friendship networks are predominantly from their own country, for example, and this work starts to counter that argument.

In terms of surprises, I expected that our research team might find it difficult to discuss this idea with students or that students might find it hard to think of examples of cultural learning through everyday life. But actually, we were surprised by how easily students were able to think of examples and reflect on what these moments meant in their lives and for their understandings of their local communities.

In your opinion, what conclusions for university practice can be drawn from the findings of the study?

Much of the resources or programming provided by universities tends to focus on academic transitions and friendship development — and that makes sense, because these are important. But our findings demonstrate how the majority of students’ interactions with local community members beyond the university is through everyday living. Students also form their impressions of German culture and people through acts of everyday living. Therefore, there is value in thinking beyond just friendship development towards how can universities support students with navigating everyday life in their host country? How can universities equip students with the linguistic and cultural knowledge they need to have meaningful everyday interactions? And how can universities provide opportunities for reflecting on experiences and encounters in their communities to unpack their meaning? In practice, this might, for example, mean rethinking pre-arrival materials to also consider preparations for interacting within local communities. But universities should also move beyond support for newly arrived international students to consider workshops or discussion activities for students throughout their degree programmes which center considerations for navigating everyday life.

Another issue we identified was the prevalence of students’ encounters with racism and xenophobia within their local communities, across all cities we collected data in. As hosts of international students, this places an onus on universities to be proactive in countering and dismantling these narratives in our local communities. In practice, one example of this from an institution we worked with was developing counter-protests and pro-diversity marches. Other considerations might be community-based workshops aimed at the general public for dismantling prejudices or developing greater knowledge about other cultures. But generally, there is much more attention needed towards recognising that racism and xenophobia are common experiences for international students, and working with student representatives to identify how institutions could most meaningfully support.