Eating a home: food, imaginary selves and Study Abroad testimonials

ABSTRACT

Discourses around Study Abroad (SA) consistently portray a transformational experience for participants who return home forever changed. This article investigates how such change is inscribed in texts addressed to Australian tertiary students considering SA. Acknowledging the significant role of the non-study component of SA in triggering change, this paper focuses on the non-academic domain of food, recurrent in the corpus, 102 SA testimonials from returnees from French-speaking environments of Canada, France and Switzerland, posted on an Australian Group of Eight university website. It investigates the templates provided to shape the imaginary of the readers as to their ideal selves and to legitimize and ascribe value to particular foods and related practices. Are students guided towards the perpetuation of their habits, or in these ‘foreign fields’, is there an opportunity to shift habitus, with food contributing to the reconstructed self? Drawing on Bourdieu and on theories of motivation and of the ideal self, the article proposes a reading that resolves the tension between the integrative use of food, and the future exploitation of the SA experience as a mark of distinction.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural capital
• food
• ideal self
• personal transformation
• Study Abroad

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Research Assistants who worked on different stages of this project, Dr Craig Adams and Ms Charlotte Chambers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Barbara E. Hanna http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8450-4243

Notes

1. «L’effet du mode d’acquisition n’est jamais aussi marqué que dans les choix les plus ordinaires de l’existence quotidienne comme le mobilier, le vêtement ou la cuisine, qui sont particulièrement révélateurs des dispositions profondes et anciennes parce que situés dehors du champ d’intervention de l’institution scolaire, ils doivent être affrontés, si l’on peut dire, par le goût nu en dehors de toute prescription ou proscription expresses, si ce n’est celles que donnent les instances de légitimation peu légitimes comme les journaux féminins ou les hebdomadaires consacrés à la maison.» (Bourdieu, 1979, pp. 84–85.)

2. The International Directors of 38 universities participate in the forum: the high response rate of 37 guarantees the reliability of the data.

3. The third kind of motivation, ‘conceptualised at a different level from the two self-guides’ (Dörnyei, 2009, p. 29), relates to the particular language learning experience and is of limited relevance here.

4. The construct of a negative self is clearly present in some language learning narratives, not necessarily helpfully. For Watson (1995), language learning is compromised by his inability to take on what he sees as the emasculated persona of the French student. See also de Nooy’s (2015) summary of the ways in which the narrators of her corpus find themselves constituted as lesser selves by their linguistic shortcomings. Here, discontent with the inarticulate self does not always encourage learning.

5. It is impossible to list all previous work on narrative constructions of sojourners and not all of it relates to texts likely to be consumed by a student readership. Of particular note is research by Pavlenko (2001a, 2001b), Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) and, in relation to Australians specifically, that by Genoni (2007), de Nooy (2012, 2015) and Hanna and de Nooy (2006).

6. Cf. also DFAT’s description of the New Colombo plan as ‘transformational’ (DFAT, 2015).

7. The author’s extra-textual knowledge of the French students allows her to recognize many of them.

8. On the prioritizing of ‘experience’ over academic results or an acknowledged concern for professional advantage, see Waters and Brooks (2010) on privileged UK students undertaking degree programmes overseas.

9. Testimonials are quoted verbatim, with no attempt to standardize language.

10. The yeast-based spread, Vegemite, eaten on toast, sandwiches and so on, is seen as quintessentially Australian, the comforting taste of childhood. Cadbury Australia’s caramello koala is a caramel-filled chocolate in the shape of a stylized koala.

11. Compare de Nooy (2015) and, specifically, her analysis of the dream of belonging entertained by the narrator of Buying a piece of Paris (Nielsen, 2007). The book’s opening fantasy is one of a successful transaction with the local butcher: ‘she describes her ideal as a form of daily life in Paris that entails interactions in French about French routines’ (de Nooy, 2015, p. 32). The construction of the identity of the local as a response to the displacement imposed by SA could also be interpreted in terms of Ellwood’s Deleuzian reading of adherence to a new normative discourse when the original molarized identity/habitus is disrupted (Ellwood, 2011, p. 964).

12. The life narratives of language learning elicited by Coffey and Street (2008) include representations of SA.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a University of Queensland New Staff Grant 2009 and by the 2013 Targeted Research Support Scheme of the University’s School of Languages and Cultures.