By Jenna Mittelmeier
I recently received funding from the German Academic Exchange Network (DAAD) to conduct a piece of research focusing on international students and their interactions within their multicultural communities in Germany. The research aimed to look beyond university campuses to hear the stories of where students believe meaningful encounters with multiculturalism occur in their daily lives.
The research took the framing of “everyday multiculturalism”, which is a sociological lens for seeing where encounters with multiculturalism occur in small, mundane ways during our everyday lives and how these add up to formulate our internalised understanding of difference (see Wise & Velayutham, 2009).
We asked 41 student participants (including 35 categorised by their universities as ‘international students’ and 6 categorised as ‘home / German students’) to share photographs that they felt represented multiculturalism in their everyday lives. Below is a gallery of those who gave permission to share their photographs.
The analysis of the data is ongoing, but this gallery shows a few interesting themes for consideration:
- Students find meaningful multicultural encounters within their communities through interactions which from the outside may appear to be meaningless: at train stations, through picking up a parcel, when figuring out their bins, by eating lunch.
- Meaning is found in learning about Germany as a multicultural society, as the photos point to social learning opportunities across cultures within their German communities
- There is an interesting juxtaposition between outward markers of cultural differences (photos of festivals, tourist sites, etc.) and the solitary experiences that students have in creating an everyday life within it (photos of studying, exercising, eating, etc.)
- Green spaces and solitary activities are places for meaningful multicultural learning – community is found both in people and in place
- Food, as expected, is an important marker of social and cultural learning
Without further ado, I leave you to browse students’ photographs:
Thank you to Karen Broadhurst-Healey, Daian Huang, Myumyune Murtalib, and Limanzi Xu for their contribution to this work as research assistants.
Note: the cc-by license for this website does not apply to the photographs shared through this post. All rights remain with the author.