Positioning the Researcher in the Studies of International Student Identities

Abstract

Previous studies on international students have helped identify issues that explain these students’ intercultural identities in relation to the learning in English-medium contexts. Scholarly attention has attached importance to the ‘results’ or the ‘process’ of the identity movements in the context of international education. Little attention has been paid to the conversations on the epistemology and theoretical framework that educational researchers have been using. This study is a response to Dervin’s plea (2011) for a change for the qualitative studies on international students’ interculturality. With a Post-structuralist Bourdieuian thinking, I demonstrated how analyzing and providing the researcher’s positionality enhance the understanding towards the unspoken data and its analysis especially for the studies on international students’ identities.