Privilege and precarity: African international students in South Africa

Tagliabue, Veera Vilhelmiina (2023). Privilege and precarity: African international students in South Africa. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Tagliabue2023PhD.pdf
Text - Accepted Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 31 December 2024.
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (9MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

South African higher education institutions are key sites in which persistent inequalities regarding race, class, and gender in the post-apartheid era have been challenged. However, despite their large presence, international students have often been neglected in these discussions. Focusing on the historically White Rhodes University in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, this thesis examines the ways in which students from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region experience, interpret, and practice social class as migrants. Using a variety of ethnographic methods and drawing on relevant theories of class, I argue that SADC students’ transnational identities are a source of both privilege and precarity in the South/southern African contexts of race and class. As highly regarded students who easily adapt to the middle-class campus environment, they are sometimes misrecognised as particularly privileged. This, however, contradicts their own experience of social and emotional precarity. Families’ investment in their children’s transnational education creates pressures of success, while encounters with culture shock and xenophobia aggravate SADC students’ sense of non-belonging in South Africa. Renegotiations of class between home and South Africa leave them feeling never fully ‘at home’ in either place, constantly looking for a better future elsewhere. SADC students believe in eventually becoming successful ‘future leaders’ and facilitating their families’ intergenerational class-making projects. Educational migration thus generates regional networks that reproduce class advantages. This thesis makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the pivotal topics of identity, aspiration, and belonging in contemporary South Africa and beyond and offers a fresh lens on social class through the dynamic and fragmentary processes of privilege and precarity.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):