Home here and there: a spatial perspective on mobile experiences of ‘home’ among international students

This paper examines the relationship between student mobility and identity by exploring the meaning of ‘home’ and homemaking processes among international students. It unpacks students’ complex web of relations within and between places, across space and in time, and illustrates how students’ family homes, familiar places and home society inform and shape the students’ existence and ‘becoming’ while they are abroad. Applying a spatial approach, this paper exhibits that international students’ involvement is a spatial homemaking process that connects home as sensory everyday practices and experiences and home as a place of origin. Both relationships in distance and proximity are necessary and important elements in practices of homemaking processes among international students. By examining space relationally, the narratives of the students show a significant refiguring of an embodied self, concurrently highlighting the relational construction of the identity of place. The empirical findings of this paper bring new dimensions, such as the spatial, geographical, sensory, and affective nature of mobile belongings, to the research on youth mobility and internationalisation of higher education.