Abstract
Research on international student belonging currently offers a generalised perception of international student experiences in higher education. This study commenced in a time when socio-political uncertainties like Brexit, differential restrictions on EU and Overseas international students' mobility, posed new challenges for UK’s higher education sector. This was often reflected through reports of growing feelings of ‘unwelcomeness’, student segregation, and racism in UK campuses (Brown, 2009).
By prioritizing the under-researched contexts of university clubs and societies this study addresses the recurrent research gaps which stress the immediate necessity for an in-depth, situated analysis of university contexts (Poteet and Gomez, 2015). Whereas most existing international student research homogenised and obscured the international student experience through presupposing social categories (Yao, 2015), this study uniquely combined a long-term linguistic ethnography with interpretive sociolinguistic discourse analysis.
The focus was specifically on theatre societies within a single institution because the convergence of the theatrical and the intercultural created critical performances and opportunities to witness interculturality in action over time and space, between culturally different home and international students, as they voluntarily engaged in varied theatre practices. This has been to find out if and how participation in extracurricular theatre practice within university theatre societies impacts the sense of belonging of the international students in the university context.
A multidisciplinary perspective drawing on intercultural communication, higher education, theatre, performance, and applied linguistics is unique, as it helps to bridge the crucial knowledge gap by analysing the discursive, performative, and communicative nuances and processes of mixed students’ everyday interactions.
This approach helps illuminate the currently unknown patterns of inclusion and exclusion in non-academic, extracurricular contexts and particularly highlights the unexplored role of community theatre practice, in mediation and construction of international students’ sense of belonging. The findings reveal the multilingual diversity in UK universities (Preece, 2011), offering fresh directions for future research, and current university policies and practices that aim to foster diversity, inclusion, and belonging on UK University campuses.