With globalization reaching Higher Education Institutions (HES), asymmetries and the circulation of talent have become widespread (Finlay et al 2012), contributing to reinforcing neo-colonial relations and/or coloniality. One key component of the internationalization of higher education around the world is to recruit and graduate international students, however once they arrive to their hosting institutions, they are not treaty equally. International students are a very diverse pool of people, yet this diversity is not recognized. In fact, their culture and language tend to be downplayed and are expected to assimilate to become the future representatives of the country/institutions they studied at. This panel brings together research that involves international (or minority) students from the Global South who have chosen to study in the Global North, discussing from their own perspectives and experiences how they cope with becoming an international student (or minority/underrepresented student, their process of homemaking, the process of ethnicization or racialization experience, etc. Vaillant Cruz, Ramirez and Padilla presentation is about the underrepresentation of Latinx@/x and Latin American in Universities in the United States —they face a multiplicity of barriers based on their socioeconomic, linguistic, and migratory statuses. This ethnographic study takes qualitative data from semi-structured interviews to contextualize their varied experiences of Latinx and Latin American college students. The narratives collected through these ethnographic interviews give insight into the experiences of Latinx and Latin American college students and how they navigate post-secondary spaces at HES, assessing problem areas. Alphonse Opoku presents on the homemaking process of African international students in the United States and their agentic practices of integration, based on data collected through semi-structured interviews with international students from African countries and conducting content analysis of the blogs built for international students, comparing and contrasting this set of data. Along similar lines, Shuvechha Ghimire Sharma brings the case of Indian international students in Germany, focusing on their home-making process, uncovering the negotiation of multiple attachments of being and belonging, navigating between the “imagined” and “lived” experiences of space creating. Raquel Matias discusses the case of African students from the former Portuguese colonies studying in Portugal, their experiences of inclusion and exclusion including language discrimination.

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Higher education,Global south,International students,Minority students