"If we put Algeria in the title, no one will come!" This is the debate we were having as we prepared to present our reflections from a phenomenological (Van Mannen 2014) collective biographical inquiry into academic time, space and self as international students (Bank and Armstrong 2014, Davies and Gannon 2006). Our inquiry embraced multi-modality and invited the potential for a wider than campus frame to our academic location, as we conducted dialogue walks through the city (Ingold 2015), used the local art museum as provocation for  our drawing and metaphor based explorations (Speedy 2008) and drew on our wellbeing practices at gym and mosque to inform embodied activities where we sculpted our graduate destination dilemmas (Boal 1979, Schamer 2015).  For our own Arabic-European translocation we were seeking to understand what Lee (2012) terms enculturation, a process of socially becoming attuned to the academic world and the national culture so that a sense of belonging that enables study is established.  To do this we opened up the many forms of literacies (New London Group 1996) that were in play.

We kept Algeria in the title of our presentation.  However, a series of immigration hurdles meant none of the Algerians in the team would be able to travel from UK to mainland Europe for the presentation.  Reluctant to cede the floor to the only UK and full time member of academic staff on the team, we recorded a dialogue between that staff person and one Algerian student and sent the staff member to introduce the video at the conference in an attempt to maintain our commitment to a nonexploitative, accessible research process (Lapadat 2017).  As it turned out, our presentation was scheduled parallel to the key organiser’s presentation in the main auditorium. Only the other presenters, chair and one other person strayed into our session in a side room.  The mood was subdued to say the least.  The other speakers overran and by the time our turn came, the chair was reluctant to take the time for the video presentation to run.   In microcosm, this encapsulates the many challenges our attempts to find a place of belonging, from which to develop our work and academic profile, have encountered.

Given that longitudinal qualitative studies of international student experience are relatively rare (Gray and Crosta 2019). We take the opportunity of this conference to reconvene our inquiry group four years on, to assess how the provocations and loose threads prompted by our earlier work have resonated across experiences of tenuous belonging, PhD interruption, pandemic dislocation, thesis completion and viva defense in light of more recent work done by Elliot et al (2023). Our process involved reviewing artwork and media, rereading and writing back to earlier journal entries (Speedy 2008). Our presentations reflects on this longer process of reflection and slower knowledge formation (Leavy 2019).

Through our work we found that to understand cultural differences and their impact on our studies and selves (Fulford 2017), requires more than passing reference to those challenges within an induction session, but require time, space and consistent affective affordances for the engrained embodiment of lived culture to surface and be questioned. More than the monetised output of a neo-liberal entity, PhD work is a perceptive, productive bodily experience that is deeper and more complex than can be contained in a thesis submission. The intercultural dialogue is not only with the words, ideas and perspectives, but also with those who write it, the spaces, temporal pace and relational dynamics through which we find our purchase within academic terrain. Video links: Presentation Dialogue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_HftdCqge75WpxQoy3S1gtd3kQZR_Er/view?usp=sharing Montage of Activity: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1myXK6CpeomuorHsTzOlYVOaRcwEspTJq/view?usp=sharing Embodied Dilemmas https://drive.google.com/file/d/12M4UHcA3ohqTueweG8y5N58ITn6FcC1G/view?usp=sharing

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