Challenging the comfort zone: self-discovery, everyday practices and international student mobility to the Global South

Abstract

This paper scrutinises the underlying motivations of short-term international students by unpacking the notion of ‘leaving the comfort zone’ for self-discovery and self-change. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Canadian exchange students volunteering and studying in the Global South, the paper contributes to scholarship on everyday and emotional geographies of international student mobility and wider debates in mobility by examining how emotions of comfort and discomfort as well as everyday practices are productive for self-discovery, belonging, home-making and distinction. It reveals how students align the boundaries of their comfort zone and an un/reflexive self along the international and imaginative borders of the Global North/South. Contrary to tourism and mobility studies, I argue that students view everyday life and their relative immobility while abroad as both a distinctive and reflexive exercise. I suggest that students want to extend the boundaries of their comfort zone and their sense of ‘home’ to the Global South.

Keywords:

• International student mobility
• comfort
• sense of self
• everyday practices
• home
• emotions
• self-discovery

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Katherine Brickell and Katie Willis for their comments on earlier drafts and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback. I am also very grateful to the students who took part in this study.

Notes

1. The term ‘Global South’ is defined broadly by the United Nations Development Program (2004, 2) as countries in Africa, Latin America, Caribbean and Asia with a range of different social, economic and political contexts but with a ‘shared set of vulnerabilities and challenges’.