Student Unions as Avenues for Inclusion and Participation of International Students: A Case from Finland

Abstract

Student participation forms an important part of university governance structures; however, international student voices rarely get included. While there has been some academic discussion about international student participation at an individual level, international students are seldom addressed as a collective. To fill this research gap, in this chapter we present our ethnographic study from Finland. Drawing on anthropological theories of sociality, we show that international students form a specific kind of collective compared to domestic ones, which we designate as ephemeral social groups. Moreover, we demonstrate that international student collective characteristics of ephemeral groups clash with the current ways of working in existing governance structures channelling student voices, such as student unions. Therefore, for student unions to become avenues for inclusion and participation of international students, they need to acknowledge and address that. More research into this matter is needed.