EXPECTATIONS,HOPES AND CHALLENGES IN SOUTH-NORTH MOBILITIES.A CASE STUDY OF AFRICAN INTENATIONAL STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PADOVA.

Global north states have been at the centre of immigration debates over the past decade, from being portrayed as “spaces” for people seeking to move to get better opportunities to accusations of mistreatment and brutal expulsions of those seen as “illegal”. Nonetheless, academic and media coverage has largely focused on refugees and asylum seekers, or people seeking better employment opportunities, and there is still little understanding of South to North student mobilities, and the impact these mobilities are having both on African students who choose to study elsewhere on the continent and on their host societies. In Italy for instance, international students have been a common place for the last decades, bolstered by successive government commitment to higher education. However, there is little understanding of who these students are, how they make sense of their experiences, how the securitization of mobilities might be shaping their studies and daily lives. How have these processes affected the hundreds of African students based in the country? Based on interviews with students in different departments of the university of Padova , this thesis analyses the strategies they have developed to navigate the challenges of linguistic and cultural barriers, as well as their encounters with racism. It examines the variety of ways in which discourses of identity, race and belonging are structured by individual trajectories as well as local and national debates