In an increasingly globalised society, the internationalisation of higher education has become a prime goal for many universities, which seek to promote the development of intercultural competencies and insert their actors in dynamics of academic cooperation, knowledge construction and negotiation of meanings in an environment of respect. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is the fact that university campuses are already intercultural spaces by nature, even in the absence of internationalisation initiatives; in other words, university campuses are places where diversity abounds, making it possible to experience intercultural encounters, leading to the development of intercultural competencies. This article presents the narratives of four students and their home-making experiences at a Colombian university. Through their stories, these students give us a glimpse of the intercultural challenges they face when they try to create a sense of belonging while developing, constraining or reaffirming their identities on campus. The article analyses the student narratives through the lenses of new materialism, social semiotics, intersectionality and intercultural communication to understand the complexity of building a home with others amid diversity and, sometimes, adversity.
Colombia is a multilingual and multicultural country in Latin America that displays a rich and complex landscape of diversity: Indigenous, Black and
With this in mind, this article explores the experiences of four students from the University of Valle, in Cali, Colombia, and their narratives of home-making on campus. These participants are pre-service teachers or recently graduated foreign-language teachers who were, at some point, the author’s students. The voices are those of an Indigenous student, a transgender male student, a blind student and a deaf student. Together they merge to expose the intercultural challenges they have overcome to develop their individual identities while engaging in processes of home-making and building a sense of belonging on campus. Here, the concept of home ‘certainly is not limited to just geographical, physical, or architectural, but also includes relevant personal, interpersonal, or sociopolitical spaces, and also includes cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial, historical, psychological, spiritual, and other spaces in relation to various relevant contexts’ (
The article begins with an overview of the main theoretical tenets of home-making, and the intertwining of intersectionalities, new materialism, and intercultural communication as fields of study that can contribute to understanding home-making processes on a university campus. After some theoretical considerations, it then presents a study of the narratives of the author’s four former students. Finally, it shows how universities can promote intercultural understanding as the cornerstone for making the campus a hospitable place to belong.
For the purpose of this article, the concept of home is understood from the definition proposed by
Fundamental to the understanding of home are the notions of identity and belonging. For
In the social sciences, there seems to be a consensus about the multilayered and plural nature of identity, and therefore the concept of intersectionality has gained currency to refer to the ‘overlapping and interlinked social dimensions’ (
In trying to understand the complexity of identity multiplicity,
The perspective of new materialism compels us to reformulate phenomena that are considered exclusively inherent to and centred on the human being, such as culture, language and communication. Thus, from this vantage point, it is worth asking questions such as: How do we establish cultural and interpersonal relationships with others? How do we communicate to express and negotiate the multiplicity of our identity constitution? How do we build meaning in a complex system of networks and relationships between entanglements, which are at once hyperconnected to other entanglements that exert constant agency on and through them? Although responding to each question would be materially impossible within the limits of this article, it is worth outlining a first attempt at an answer, drawing on the definitions of culture and intercultural communication proposed by
Similarly, this article adheres to the definition of intercultural communication proposed by
Thus, the encounter between individuals who bear different repertoires of cultural and multimodal semiotic resources sets the context for intercultural communication, for the expression, negotiation and (re)configuration of their identities and for processes of home-making. In other words, and considering the campus setting that concerns us in this article, students bring to the university a vast array of semiotic chains (
This study followed a narrative inquiry approach (
All four participants in this study were, at some point, students of the author. They were invited to participate in the study due to their close relationship with their former professor, and to the fact that they had previously shared several details of their journey navigating life on campus. Each narrative was elicited by means of a semi-structured, face-to-face interview that started with a single question: ‘Do you think you managed to build a home on the university campus during your time at university?’
After the free narratives of each participant, new questions arose about the challenges they faced to build a sense of belonging, to develop their identities and to establish relationships of diversity while embracing their own diversity. After the interviews, some participants would recall chunks of stories that they deemed important to be included in their narratives, and some of them continued to share excerpts of their stories and later memories with the author through WhatsApp messages. All participants authorised the use of their interviews and messages by signing an informed consent. Due to the sensitivity of certain topics shared by the participants, and to preserve their identities, their names have been changed. All the narratives and audio messages were transcribed in their entirety and analysed in light of the postulates of new materialism. Below are the profiles of the four participants, based on their own stories, and retold by the author.
Artemis is an Indigenous woman, who is about to graduate as a foreign-languages teacher. Coming from an Indigenous territory with a peasant context, Artemis asserts that she faced several challenges in learning how to navigate the context of the city. Her home-making process took place mainly at the university Indigenous council and at the Indigenous temporary residence, a space where Indigenous students welcome their fellows who arrive in the city for the first time, feeling out of place and in need of a helping hand to guide them through their new life. There, Artemis’s first intercultural encounters and challenges took place with Indigenous people from other communities and other languages, through relationships that arose easily because they all shared the same need to make a home away from home. Relationships with her
Ikarus is a transgender man who transitioned in college. His first steps towards transition were adopting a new name and talking about his decision with his closest circle. This implied his first intercultural challenges, in which he lost some relationships and gained experience in how to approach, discuss and negotiate his position on the issue of gender transition in a mainly hetero-cisnormed society. Ikarus talks about the bodily challenges he took on to feel comfortable in his own skin: he got a tattoo on his arm; he would bandage his breasts despite the injuries and burns this caused to his skin; and he would wear a prosthesis to urinate while standing up, which gave him a boost of confidence in the male restrooms on campus. Despite the discomfort of wearing the prosthesis all day, the bulky appearance and the possibility to use a urinal provided Ikarus with a sense of assurance and safety, at a time when his hormonal treatment had not yet begun. After his treatment, the physical changes allowed Ikarus to feel content with his appearance and to put aside the use of the excruciating prosthesis. Many of these behavioural and physical modifications, Ikarus says, were self-imposed from his own preconceptions about what others supposedly expected of him. Little by little, he realised that belonging on campus as a man did not require all the changes that he was willing to undertake, sometimes hastily, and even at the expense of his comfort and health. Towards the end of his narrative, Ikarus comments wistfully that the campus did become his home, and, paradoxically, the house and the family in which he grew up no longer felt like home, as his new body and aesthetics were no longer welcomed. Ikarus graduated dressed in a suit, proudly sporting a short beard, albeit with a female name on his diploma, which he hopes he will be able to change legally.
Carya is one of the few blind graduates of the Foreign Language Teacher Education Programme. For Carya, the process of home-making on campus is related to the people who inhabit the campus, and not so much to the places, as these are still sometimes inhospitable and hostile to blind students. We talk while walking on campus, and her guiding stick gets tangled several times in the cracked pavement. Carya, then, takes advantage of the opportunity to teach me about the different tips that she adapts to her cane to break through. Carya explains that all her relationships are intercultural by nature, since her whole life has revolved around learning about the world of the seers, as well as teaching them about her world without vision. However, Carya says, she would like these mutual learning relationships not to occur with just a few people, but to be more common and prolific, both on campus and in society. Towards the end of her story, Carya returns to the initial question and concludes that, despite the time she spent on campus, she did not manage to build a home within the physical facilities, but that a sense of home and belonging definitely does exist in the relationships she built with her sighted and blind peers, all of them invisible, but real friends nonetheless. Now, as a professional, Carya returns to the campus frequently because she works as a guide helping new blind students to map the campus in their minds and find the most blind-friendly paths.
Adonis speaks to me with his hands, and I conduct the interview through a Colombian Sign Language interpreter. He is the only one of my participants who belongs to another academic programme. Adonis is studying to be an interpreter and guide-interpreter for the deafblind. He says that the sense of belonging is only present for him when there are other signers; otherwise, he is always isolated in his world of silence, subject to a few linguistic transactions that he manages to establish, out of necessity, through written Spanish. His signs are fast, as he likes to speak his mind, but he remarks that on campus he has little chance to chat with others, unless he is surrounded by his fellow hearing classmates who are also studying to be interpreters, and who master his sign language. When I ask him about the intercultural challenges he has experienced, Adonis smiles and tells me, almost as in Carya’s story, that his entire life has been a constant process of teaching and learning, and comparing the hearing culture with the deaf culture. His anecdotes are humorous and bring up instances in which he has knocked on the door or made a video call by mistake, at times when we listeners value silence the most. For Adonis, home is the place where you can express yourself and be understood, and this is only guaranteed if there is an interpreter with him.
Although the interviews were conducted in Spanish, verbatim excerpts have been translated into English, paying close attention to the original tone, register and word choice used by participants.
One of the recurring themes for almost all the participants in this study has to do with the way the body and the use of certain artefacts are determining instances in home-making processes. The human body reaches out through sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch to help us apprehend the reality around us, and therefore we engage in meaning-making practices through all our available senses in order to understand the space–time and gauge whether that is where we want to – or are allowed to – belong and make our home. Similarly, we also engage in meaning-making practices by means of the objects and artefacts we use to relate with our surrounding reality. Not only do objects leave prints in the lives of those who utilise them, but they also contribute to shaping our life narratives (
When I come to campus, I know that I have to be prepared with all the tip ends of my cane, because the ground here is extremely uneven, and sometimes I fear tripping and falling on rocky spaces, or slipping on smooth floors like the one in the library. Oh! And when I’m meeting other blind friends, I use a cane tip that clicks loud against the floor, so the others know I got there first and find me more easily!
Carya’s testimony is an example of what
Before I started my hormone treatment, I wanted to speed up my transition, so I used a prosthesis to urinate standing up in the men’s bathroom. It was horrible because it [the prosthesis] was uncomfortable, and I had to secure the prosthesis to my body with straps that lacerated my skin and itched, but I didn't care, I liked the fact that there was a lump between my legs, and I liked feeling like I could use the urinal like any other man. That gave me confidence.
The agency of a prosthesis in Ikarus’s body and Ikarus’s agency to enact his masculine identity by using the prosthesis are examples of the ‘material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another’ (
Sometimes when I go to the academic registration office, I realise I am about to get there because there are some trees that smell good, and my classmates are surprised that I can locate myself with my nose because for them it doesn’t smell like anything special. For me, the sense of smell has been fundamental for me since childhood because that is how we learn to cook, to notice when someone is near us, and that is how it is.
In this regard,
There is a lot of ignorance about our deaf culture and about our language. There are always people who think that we only make gestures without meaning or structure, and others think that it is enough to learn the alphabet in signs and spell all the words in Spanish to communicate with me.
Similarly,
In her interview, Artemis recalls her challenges with a particular sense while home-making on campus – the sense of time:
It was very difficult for me to learn to measure time in the city. In my territory, time seemed to pass more slowly, and here in the city everything is faster, more accelerated. In the countryside, we plan and do our duties thinking of the parts of a day in big chunks, often marked by the sun, but here in Cali [the city where she lives now], I had to learn to break the day into little pieces so as not to be late, to fit in with the routines and schedules of the city and the university.
Regarding the sense of time,
The definition of home and the processes of home-making depend on a complex dynamism between the dimensions of time, space and relationships (
Restrooms will always be an uncomfortable topic. Now there are gender neutral restrooms on campus, but back in the day, there were not, and therefore I avoided using restrooms at the university that weren’t in the building where I took classes. The same thing happened to me at the academic registration office. I hated and avoided going to those offices as much as possible because there was always the issue of my old name ... one feels exposed.
Ikarus’s words are a reminder that ‘home is never a neutral term, image, or reality; it always evokes feelings often polarised’ (
I feel I belong on campus when I am with my classmates or teachers who know Colombian Sign Language, but I hardly feel at home when I am by myself. It makes me anxious to be alone because a communicative challenge may arise that I cannot solve with written Spanish. The university usually talks about policies of inclusion, but it is still difficult to get interpreters. Going to the registry office is almost impossible if you don't bring your own interpreter, it is outrageous that the university offers an Interpretation Programme, but at the same time, there is no official sign language interpreter for administrative and functional matters on campus.
Adonis illustrates how belonging in a place depends on what
My Indigenous identity goes with me everywhere, but I definitely feel more appreciated as an Indigenous when I am in the council, or when I am in
Artemis’s words confirm that ‘By re-territorializing and engaging in material and symbolic rearrangement of the university campus, indigenous students revitalise their ancestors’ cultural semiotic practices and open up spaces for the recognition of their ways of being, thinking, and languaging in multilingual universities’ (
The narratives in this article are just a few examples of the great diversity that abounds in the university campuses in Colombia. The participants in this study revealed and communicated their ethnic, gender and functional diversities through various semiotic resources, such as the use of objects, their gestures and, of course, their languages. The canvas of their bodies was shaped, tattooed and clothed in multiple ways, and, in doing so, they learned to negotiate positions, viewpoints and power relations with others.
As stated at the start of this article, Colombian campuses are small-scale representations of the country’s cultural situation and of the challenges of home-making and, therefore, peace-building amid conflictive diversity. It is worth reflecting, then, on this rich diversity on campus in relation to global – and often market-driven – discourses on the internationalisation of higher education. Although the internationalisation of a campus is desirable, there are often missed opportunities in the local diversity that, if taken advantage of, would constitute a rich source of intercultural practice, of empathy for otherness, of openness to difference and, above all, of knowing how it is that we engage in interaction with a different other. These local intercultural practices would be solid foundations for promoting intercultural relations abroad, based primarily on the recognition of who we are, in order to respect who others are.
Internationalisation does not necessarily produce intercultural competency. It is indeed possible to develop these competencies even without campus internationalisation processes. Internationalisation endeavours, however important and desirable they may be for the development of institutions, might remain only in experiences of superficial linguistic transactions, as well as the exchange of shallow aspects of culture, which are not necessarily a proxy for actual intercultural capacities. However, the home-making processes experienced by local students allow us to observe the relational challenges they face, as well as the multiple decisions they make for the strategic enactment of their identities, and the emancipatory construction of a sense of belonging. Likewise, students bring to campus unique configurations in cultural terms, and, along with them, come multiple semiotic resources for expressing their identities, which constitutes a needed jolt in understanding communication from a much wider perspective.
We all need a home to belong to, whether it is a physical place, or even our own body as in the case of Ikarus, and in building such a home, students develop, apprehend or adapt a plethora of intercultural moves to navigate the campus; this wealth of intercultural knowledge and competencies that students develop on their own must be studied, strengthened, capitalised on and promoted by the institution, in such a way that they become the bases on which critical intercultural relationships, equity and peace construction are strengthened, even before the advent of possible intercultural relations with foreigners. Put differently, students’ narratives unveil ample repositories of intercultural and communicative strategies that can and should be systematised and intentionally fostered through curricula for the benefit of a meaningful and more humanistic education (
Thus, we must rethink the objective of the campus, so that it becomes a place of healthy and safe practice to build a home and to cohabit with others. To do this, the university administration can further a multimodal social semiotic perspective on intercultural communication that implies offering spaces, buildings and settings that are welcoming of difference (
In certain situations of social tension, the multiplicity of identities tends to shrink into one identity that becomes excessively static (
The author conducted the research reported in this article in accordance with the Interinstitutional Doctorate in Education standards, at the University of Valle.
The author declares that research participants’ informed consent to publication of findings – including photos, videos and any personal or identifiable information – was secured prior to publication.
The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.