The Self, the Other, and the International Student

Strangerhood is a constant dimension of my mentoring practice with international students in Prague. More accurately, these are transnational students - that is, foreign nationals studying at the International Program of an accredited American college in Prague. The situation is culturally more complex: most of my students are not Czechs, but have come from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Central Asian countries of the former USSR. As such, many are making social and cultural adjustments not only to their American learning environment but also to the national culture of the Czech Republic.Most of my students tell me that they feel like strangers in a strange land. They do not mean that they have not adjusted culturally to their surroundings - by and large they have, and they are well able to navigate the new context within they find themselves. Nevertheless, they still regard themselves as strangers and know that they are perceived as such by those around them. These students often talk of distance and separation. In a paradoxical life-world - where increased globalization has sparked nationalism, growing migrant mobility has fueled xenophobia, and a preoccupation with social engagement has spurred narcissistic selfpreoccupation - it is perhaps not unexpected that strangers and the state of strangerhood are perceived negatively, and these international students certainly sense the negativity. Feelings of strangerhood are strong in the student's first year of study, but they persist in differently-expressed ways throughout the four-year academic program. These are not constructive feelings, or at least students do not regard them as such. They are usually associated with a sense of isolation, alienation, and of being on the periphery of something that cannot be entered. These feeling are neither unusual nor idiosyncratic; indeed, they seem to a fairly common element of the international student experience (Sakurai, McCall-Wolf, & Kashima, 2010; Sawir, Marginson, Deumert, Nyland, & Ramia, 2008).Being a stranger is relational - it only comes about through opposition with the Other. The stranger assumes that those who constitute the Other have a high degree of cohesion and relatedness. This is rarely true; in fact, it is the contrasting presence of the stranger that actually defines and solidifies the Other's identity. As Pietsch and Marotta (2009) observe, "the Self's identity is constituted through its opposition to the Other, that is, where identity is subject to a differential logic of opposition in order to establish difference" (p. 188). From the other side of the divide the Other often finds strangers confusing, not to say disconcerting, because they "befog and eclipse the boundary lines which ought to be clearly seen" (Bauman, 1997, p. 17).It is this differential logic of opposition that is most important for international students to recognize. Strangerhood is not an inherent property - positive or negative - of the individual. It is an experienced relational difference, and within this experienced difference we can learn more about ourselves, just as the Other can better define his or her own identity. Being recognized as a stranger - by both the individual and the Other - provides a starting point for exploring difference. It provides an opportunity to compare, contrast, and develop a growing discernment about how we are different, and from what we are different. This is likely what Georg Simmel (1950) had in mind when he claimed that "to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction" (p. 402).Simmelian strangers appreciate a simultaneously nearness and remoteness from the Other that unburdens them from the familiarity of previous interactions and speculation about future relationships. Simmelian strangers are engaged in a process of perpetual transition. They are not permanently located in their origins, nor do they seek incorporation in the places through which they pass. …