Study abroad offers a rich environment in which to explore the discursive negotiation of identities in multicultural, globalised settings. Students who study abroad often encounter sociocultural discourses which go against prevalent ideologies from their home contexts, resulting in a ‘forced’ (re-)engagement with ideological structures, and leading to implications for identity work. As part of an exchange student’s identity negotiation toolkit, however, there is a reliance on internalised discursive frameworks which both constrain and shape their interactions.
My research adopts a bidirectional approach to examine how nine exchange students (French and Francophone participants in New Zealand and New Zealanders in France) navigate transitions to/from the host country. Applying a social constructionist lens, I seek to uncover the micro-processes involved in using language to construct identities and examine these in light of wider social discourses and ideologies. Data collection spanned a period of sixteen months, and included naturalistic interactional data supported by ethnographic data, including interviews, ‘deep hanging out’ and social media accounts. I prioritise discourse analysis to acknowledge the dialogic threads in any interaction.
My data reveal several occurrences of participants constructing identities within dominant ideological frames, notably ideologies of gender and sexuality. Participants variously drew on, reproduced, and challenged LGBTQ and sexist discourses. This presentation explores some of these occurrences in both the French and New Zealand settings. By focusing on selected interactions, I show how these ideologies are indexed (and often perpetuated) in ‘ground-level’, everyday talk. We see that participant engagement with these wider structures was sometimes explicit and conscious, while at other times it appeared to function below the level of consciousness. Analysis shows that engagement with sociocultural discourses was an important part of participants’ study abroad trajectories, throwing intriguing light on the manifestations of agency within ideological constraints. I conclude by emphasising the value of these ‘meta-discussions’ between participants as a salient interaction type, both in helping participants make sense of their new realities and for the rich analytic resource they provide.
