Navigating the Pandemic: International Students in Transnational Spaces

This paper examines how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, international students used the resources embedded within the transnational spaces they occupied to secure the affective support they needed. Based on 33 interviews and 23 follow-up interviews with international master’s degree students in Finland, this paper shows how digital connectivity became fundamental to the ways in which international students navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, how they made sense of their transnationality and how it acquired greater significance for them as they sought emotional support from their friends and family at home through the use of various communication technologies and social media. Their familial bonds were thus strengthened and led them to reimagine how they were positioned in the world. The major contribution of this analysis shows that it challenges the common understanding of how transnationalism is constituted by various empirical modalities. Instead, the paper shows how transnationalism involves dynamic processes of the ways in which human agents make sense of the shifting material conditions pertaining to cross-border connectivities.