This paper explores how refugee-background students narrate their educational trajectories and negotiate their identities within higher education. While existing research has extensively documented structural barriers related to access, language, and institutional inclusion, less attention has been paid to how refugee-background students themselves experience university and make sense of their academic journeys over time. This study addresses this gap by foregrounding students’ narratives and examining identity as an ongoing, situated process through which meanings and self-understandings are negotiated.

The central research question guiding the study is: How do refugee-background students narrate their educational trajectories and negotiate their identities within higher education? More specifically, the study examines how students construct continuity and change across their educational lives, and how they position themselves in relation to academic expectations, institutional encounters, and everyday experiences within university settings.
This presentation draws on life history interviews with refugee-background university students in South Korea, focusing on how higher education is experienced and interpreted within the specific institutional and social context of Korean universities.

The study has two main objectives. First, it aims to develop an in-depth understanding of refugee-background students’ lived experiences in higher education by attending closely to their own narratives rather than externally defined indicators of success such as access or academic achievement. Second, it adopts a layered narrative approach that brings together extended life history accounts and event-centred narratives, enabling attention to both broader educational trajectories and specific moments in which identities are negotiated in practice.

The study is grounded in life history research in education, which understands higher education experiences as part of longer educational journeys shaped by migration, disrupted schooling, language learning, and transitions across education systems. Within this framework, the study draws selectively on small stories and narrative positioning as analytical tools to examine how identities are negotiated within specific narrated events. This layered narrative approach allows movement between extended educational trajectories and moments where identity negotiation becomes visible through educational practices, such as classroom participation, assessment experiences, or interactions with institutional actors.

While the broader research project has an international and comparative orientation, this paper focuses exclusively on the Korean case to develop early analytical insights. Beginning with in-depth analysis in one national context provides a grounded basis for examining how refugee-background students experience and make sense of higher education, while also informing the subsequent extension of the study to other higher education contexts.

The study adopts a qualitative narrative research design, with life history interviews as the primary method of data collection. Life history interviews are used to elicit extended narratives that allow participants to recount their educational trajectories in their own terms, with particular attention to experiences of access, academic participation and interaction, and senses of belonging within higher education. Participants are refugee-background students who are currently enrolled in or have completed higher education. The initial dataset comprises two participants interviewed in South Korea. Further interviews with refugee-background students in South Korea are planned as part of the ongoing data collection. From late 2026, the study will extend to include interviews with refugee-background students in Finnish higher education. This phased sampling strategy reflects the study’s exploratory design and its interest in understanding educational inclusion across different higher education contexts. Interviews are semi-structured and open-ended, encouraging participants to shape their narratives while allowing space for follow-up questions related to academic experiences, institutional encounters, and moments of comfort or distance within university life. Ethical considerations are central to the research design. Participation is voluntary, informed consent is obtained, pseudonyms are used, and participants are not required to disclose traumatic experiences unless they choose to do so. Data analysis follows a layered narrative approach. In the first stage, each interview is analyzed holistically to identify key phases, transitions, and recurring patterns across the educational trajectory. In the second stage, selected event-centered narratives are analyzed using narrative positioning concepts, focusing on how participants position themselves and others within specific academic and social encounters. Reflexive memos are used as integral analytic resources to account for interactional dynamics that are not fully visible in interview transcripts alone.

Based on the initial analysis of two life history interviews with refugee-background university students in South Korea, this study presents early but analytically meaningful insights into how educational trajectories and identities are narrated within higher education. Despite the small and ongoing dataset, the depth of the interviews allows attention to how identity negotiation unfolds over time and within academic experiences. Tracing Coherence and Tension in Educational Narratives Participants generally narrate their educational trajectories as coherent life histories, positioning themselves as learners who have navigated disrupted pathways. However, analysis of specific academic encounters—such as classroom participation, assessment, and interactions with institutional actors—reveals moments where this coherence becomes unstable. In these contexts, confidence and uncertainty, competence and perceived insufficiency coexist, indicating that identity negotiation continues within everyday academic practices. Ways of Narrating and Interpreting Challenge in Academic Contexts Challenging experiences are typically narrated in pragmatic and forward-looking terms. Participants describe ongoing judgement and adjustment in deciding when to participate, how to interpret implicit assessment expectations, and how to position themselves in interactions with faculty or peers. These narratives emphasise decision-making and adaptation within evaluative academic environments and are treated as emerging patterns given the ongoing data collection. Academic access, success, and experiences of belonging These findings complicate assumptions that access or achievement leads to a stable sense of belonging. Rather than being articulated directly, belonging emerges indirectly through accounts of reduced pressure, familiarity, or comfort within particular university relationships or situations, suggesting that belonging is recognised gradually over time. Overall, these preliminary observations highlight the value of a layered narrative approach for examining refugee-background students’ experiences of higher education beyond externally defined measures of academic success.

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