Negotiating Belonging: Storytelling and Witnessing among Global South International Students in Italy and China

The internationalisation of higher education has brought increasing numbers of students from the Global South to non-Anglophone destinations, yet research on their experiences remains concentrated in English-speaking countries and on asylum-seeking populations. Virtually no research has examined how degree-seeking international students in non-Anglophone contexts such as Italy and China use everyday storytelling to negotiate belonging. This thesis addresses that gap by examining the narrative practices of 18 postgraduate students from the Global South at University A (Italy) and University B (China). Drawing on a conceptual framework that brings together belonging (Antonsich, 2010), epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), and witnessing (Felman & Laub, 1992; Oliver, 2001; Boler, 1999), the study treats storytelling not merely as a data-collection technique but as a situated social practice whose conditions of reception, who listens, how, and with what degree of ethical engagement, are as analytically significant as its content. Interviews were analysed using thematic and narrative analysis, attending not only to what participants spoke about but also to how and under what conditions they chose to speak at all. The analysis revealed the following: belonging was experienced as conditional and shaped by racialised recognition; silence functioned as a rational, strategic response to perceived risk; witnessing, understood as active and ethically engaged listening, was the condition under which students felt genuinely heard and recognised; and the two national contexts produced contrasting configurations of institutional support and constraint, with China offering more structured material provision but greater political restriction on voice, and Italy offering more discursive openness but less systematic institutional support. The study contributes empirically by offering one of the first in-depth comparative accounts of Global South students in two non-Anglophone settings; methodologically by shifting analytical attention from the content of stories to the conditions of their telling; and theoretically by advancing witnessing as a productive alternative to testimony in research on migration, education, and belonging.