Campus convivialities: everyday cross-cultural interactions and symbolic boundaries of belonging in higher education

ABSTRACT

Research on intercultural interactions in higher education focuses on measuring student attitudes and degrees of cosmopolitanism, but there is little theoretically and empirically informed effort to understand 1) the nature of these campus interactions as ordinary, embodied, and routine, and 2) the cultural and social impact of campus intercultural interactions. Based on a qualitative study of ethnically diverse, newer migrant university students’ experiences in Australia, our research examines ways intercultural interactions occur in everyday routines of higher education and how they reinforce ethnically-based relations of power. We employ and revise the concept convivialities – the everyday, routine, and embodied nature of intercultural interactions that are not directly about ethnicity or ethnic difference – to offer a nuanced perspective on everyday campus interculturality. We argue ordinary cross-cultural campus interactions can reinforce relations of dominance and subordinance through constituting symbolic boundaries for belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• convivialities
• ethnicity
• higher education
• intercultural interactions
• symbolic boundaries

Acknowledgements

The authors thank those who participated in the study for offering their time and their stories, making this article possible. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their time and thoughtful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There is a parallel body of research on university geographies of encounter, which analyses how physical spaces and peoples’ proximity to difference shape and facilitate interactions across difference. Some of this human geography scholarship focuses on understanding how ordinary, routine, and embodied experiences of encounter result in contradictions between discourses of university inclusivity and actual experiences of exclusion (Andersson, Sadgrove, and Valentine 2012; Hopkins 2011). Hopkins’ (2011) study of British Muslim university students is particularly apt in describing how marginalised students’ narrations of their experience of being both included and excluded reflect the paradox of a social environment undergirded by ideals of inclusivity while also being subject to racist political debates and discriminatory policies. These scholars offer a view beneath students’ stated values of cosmopolitanism toward an understanding of how their experience of intercultural encounter reflects social power inequalities. While our development of convivialities builds on these insights, we construct our analysis of embodied encounters as practices that symbolically reinforce and/or challenge social relations of dominance and subordinance. Analysing the making/unmaking of symbolic boundaries, the emphasis here is on viewing everyday practices not only as reflective of broader racialised relations, but as the very elements that constitute these racialised relations in everyday spaces.

2 Our previous work (Harvey et al. 2018) describes numerous examples of ‘positive’ interactions making a symbolic space of belonging and legitimisation for newer migrant students. The empirical work in this article, however, focuses on convivialities that reinforce racialised hierarchy, with the aim of emphasising our argument that, when theorised as symbolic convivialities, the concept has wider application for understanding how seemingly positive and negative intercultural interactions constitute convivial multiculture.

3 While other research describes mainstream domestic student views, or those of international students, we purposely present the experiences of domestic students with minoritized backgrounds.

4 The authors’ referenced 2019 article draws on Bourdieu and critical race theory to describe in more detail the relation between migrant students’ alternative forms of capital and the dominant cultural capitals institutionalised in higher education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department of Education and Training: [Grant Number E17-018].