Illuminating the Marginalization of International Students in the United States and the Ways Forward: A Collaborative Autoethnography

Background

The paucity of foreign students' voices in American academia, as well as learning about their obstacles, inspired us as a research team to critically and collectively analyze a case study, namely, an international Ph.D. candidate. We, the researchers, looked at the experience of one Ph.D. international student [Hoda in this case] who came to the U.S from a different cultural and educational background. Hoda, the first author of this manuscript, wrote autoethnography notes reflecting on her own experiences as an international Ph.D. student, documenting her experiences, feelings, and reflections from the time she arrived at Northern Arizona University through her Ph.D. graduation. We, the research team, then collectively questioned, pondered, explored, and researched Hoda's autoethnography to uncover the inequities, obstacles, or concerns incorporated in our area for foreign students using collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2016). As educators, we must always “reach beyond learning and address significant cultural, social, and political concerns that are part of education” (Romero-Hall et al., 2021, p. 223) in order to provide a just, equitable, and inclusive environment for our students in higher education.

The necessity of international education is discussed first in this chapter, followed by the definitions of case study and autoethnography. After that, we go on to our approach, positionality, and case autoethnography. The debate and conclusion will then bring the chapter to a close. The conclusions and limitations given in this chapter are clearly confined to the experiences of a single student. Readers should be aware that these findings and limitations should be interpreted with caution when applied to International students of different social identities and university settings.