‘MY BLOOD IS IN IT’: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL DOCTORAL STUDENTS’ EMBODIED EXPERIENCE OF A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

Abstract

Reflecting its Cartesian underpinnings, academic scholarship privileges discourse over embodiment, resulting in a lack of research about international doctoral students' bodily experience of Higher Education. International students represent a significant income stream for UK universities and offer the opportunity for the meeting of different cultures, minds and bodies. Using phenomenological theory and taking embodiment as its starting point, this thesis explores the implicit dimensions of international doctoral students' everyday experience of campus. Walking interviews, photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviews with eight international doctoral students yielded embodied, visual and discursive methods. Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed and Arendt were used to theorise the interrelated embodied, material, social and political phenomenology of campus. Being-in-campus extended and interrupted students. When international doctoral students were extended, being-in-campus inspired creativity and imagination which they used to construct their identities, evoke a politics of place and buffer the effects of cultural disorientation. When international doctoral students were interrupted, their scope for agency, identity and social space was restricted, positioning them outside of mainstream social life. Fellow international students embodied familiarity enabling friendships across nationalities and ethnicities. Students' bodily experiences disclosed the intertwining of person, place, society and politics and the importance of embodied familiarity and embodied particularity to social inclusion. By not attending to students' embodied experience, institutions risk reproducing conditions of exclusion. Philosophically this thesis shows the utility of Merleau-Ponty's body schema with its focus on embodied familiarity and the importance of Ahmed and Arendt to show how dominant groups shape the social and political space available for minority groups. The thesis suggests that international doctoral students' social exclusion is an ethical issue and poses questions about how we live alongside different people in relationships that recognise and respect our common humanity. It argues that universities, as centres of thought, are ideal sites to address this ethical task.