Understanding how International Graduate Students from Kenya Develop and Navigate New Racial Experiences While Studying at US PWIs

• In Event: Policy Perspectives & Pedagogical Practices: Engaging Diverse International Students

Proposal

Given the scarce literature related to experiences of international graduate students at United States Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), the purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was designed to understand how international graduate students from Kenya develop and navigate new racial identities while studying at PWIs in the United States (US). The study was guided by the Crenshaw (1989) intersectionality framework and the Cross (1991) psychological nigrescence framework. The intersection framework fits this study because of its emphasis on how people’s lived experiences are impacted by multiple social identities. As observed by Burt, Knight, and Robertson (2017), international students of color usually experience additional bottlenecks in relation to their place of origin, race, and language. When these students enroll in US campuses, they find themselves in new racial and cultural dimensions that are different from their home country (Burt, Knight, & Robertson, 2017). Most students from the African continent usually identify themselves based on ethnicity, class, rural or urban as opposed to racial colors of being White, Black, or Brown something that is inherent to the US culture (Manguvo, 2014). Following two one-hour semi-structured interviews that I conducted in the Spring 2021 semester with two international graduate students from Kenya, I was able to establish that navigating the racial dynamics in US PWIs while fulfilling graduate requirements can be a daunting task as well as traumatizing to most Black graduate international students. The events of Summer 2020 particularly mass protests against systemic racism and COVID-19 in the US provided an ideal context for this paper. This study proposed some policy recommendations that US PWIs can adopt to accelerate their internationalization efforts, among them diversifying the services offered to these groups of students both at departmental and campus level.

Author

• Emmanuel S Wanjala, University of Maryland College Park