The discursive negotiation of international student identities

Abstract

Research about identity has undergone a discursive turn in recent years, with a shift from conceptualising identity as an essentialistic, pre-existing construct that drives social interaction, to a more fluid and hybrid construct that is constituted through discourse. As a result, a number of recent studies investigating the construction of international student identities have supposedly adhered to this latter, postmodernist-inspired notion of identity in their analyses. However, upon closer examination, these studies appear to be premised on the assumption that what international students say can be equated with their identities, without critical attention being paid to the way in which identities emerge as a conjoint construct through interaction. In this paper, it is argued that identities are invariably jointly constructed by participants through discourse, even in interviews and focus groups where the researcher is ostensibly taking a neutral stance, and thus more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which identities are discursively negotiated through interaction.

Notes

1. See Koehne (2005), p. 116) for a similar example involving prompting by the interviewer of the student to identify with a ‘third culture’, which is seen as evidence for the hybrid nature of international student identities.

2. Thus, while other aspects of non-verbal behaviour, such as dress or gesture can clearly contribute to the construction of identities, it is primarily through ‘talk’ that we establish mutual understandings of the import for identities of such non-verbal behaviours.

3. Widdicombe (1998) also argues for an analysis of identity that is not only grounded in participant understandings but also theoretically-motivated, although her analysis is grounded in membership categorisation analysis.

4. These interviews were carried out by the author's research assistant, Louie Dragut, and the author himself. The author would like to thank both Louie Dragut for his assistance and the Faculty of Arts at Griffith University for providing funds for this project, which was part of a wider initiative aimed at providing assistance to international students entering the university.

5. The identities arising in this extract therefore contrast with those found in the previous extract. This was not an uncommon occurrence across these focus groups, where the multiple experiences and identities that arose were often found to be contradictory.