(Re)Construction: Ways International Students Talk about Their Identity

Abstract

International students have often been spoken about in academic literature as a group with group problems and ‘identities’. In this article, I use postmodern and poststructuralist ways of analysing to look at the ways international students (re)construct storylines about themselves. Some discourses construct closed and limited subject positions for students based on difference and sameness. Others are more fluid and complex, and are based on reinvention and hybridity. Students show resistance to some positionings made available to them. Acknowledging and celebrating the diversity of subjectivities that international students (re)construct may begin a process of exploding international education out of limited and constricted binarisms that are so often used in talking about what it is.