Exploring the lived experiences of South African students in international student mobility programmes: a phenomenological study.

Abstract

This study offers a phenomenologically grounded account of South African students’ lived experiences of international student mobility (ISM), foregrounding the voices of ten first-generation students from two South African universities. Situated within the enduring inequalities of South Africa’s higher education landscape and the asymmetries that structure global internationalisation, the research examines student mobility to institutions in the Global North. The data were generated in the post-COVID-19 period, a context that heightened institutional uncertainty, intensified resource constraints, and reshaped imaginaries of global participation. Conceptually, the study draws on phenomenological, sociological, and interpretive theoretical traditions to frame mobility as an embodied, relational, and structurally mediated experience. Phenomenology provides the ontological and methodological grounding for attending to lifeworld, intentionality, and intersubjectivity, positioning lived experience as the primary site of meaning. Sociological perspectives illuminate the structuring effects of habitus, capital, and global stratification, while interpretive and affective frameworks foreground relationality, emotion, and the circulation of power within transnational spaces. An explicitly intersectional and decolonial orientation challenges celebratory and technocratic accounts of internationalisation, interrogating instead the epistemic hierarchies and structural constraints that shape who moves, under what conditions, and toward which futures. Methodologically, the study is based on in-depth narrative interviews analysed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This approach enabled a detailed exploration of participants’ sense-making across the full arc of mobility, from pre-departure processes and expectations, through academic and social encounters abroad, to post-return reintegration. The findings reveal that mobility is neither a linear pathway to global competence nor a uniformly transformative experience. Instead, it unfolds as a complex negotiation shaped by aspiration, constraint, and agency. Participants described opaque selection procedures, uneven funding structures, and perceptions of institutional gatekeeping during the predeparture phase. While abroad, they navigated unfamiliar pedagogical cultures, racialised and classed positioning, and the emotional labour of adaptation within Global North institutions. Upon return, many encountered limited institutional recognition of their expanded knowledge and shifting identities, producing tensions between personal transformation and institutional inertia. Across these phases, students’ lifeworlds, shaped by rurality, race, gender, and first-generation status, travelled with them, mediating both opportunity and exclusion.