‘Dear Epsom’: a poetic autoethnography on campus as home of an international doctoral student in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This article delineates my place attachment and sense of home in my Epsom campus, University of Auckland, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where I studied for my PhD in two periods of time: during the first year of my PhD programme, when my sense of home was established; and when I returned to Vietnam for my six-month research trip and was stranded due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to my sense of home in my campus being weakened and disrupted. Using poetic autoethnography as the methodology, I recount my personal experiences of how I grew attached to my university campus as a physical place, and social spaces of cultural diversity, friendship, and academic and PhD student identity development. The article offers an analysis of my unique emotional experience of being on and off campus involuntarily, which is hardly found in extant literature on international student mobility and students’ lived experiences.