Study Overseas: Ethnography about Ambivalence among Iranian Students in Germany

Abstract

In this study, immigrant students’ lives in Germany have been investigated and the aim was to understand the subjective meanings of agents with respect to the questions of the study. We can say that a student who moves to another country to continue his education, finds himself in a new culture, (the general culture of country of destination as well as its academic culture.) he experiences the trends of changes starting from the time he decided to leave his own country and lead to his final act of returning or staying in country of destination forever. These changes happen in the lives of students through different phases that it can be said each experience in student’s life is a phase for him to change and every change, stimulates a feeling in him. Therefore, in this study, unlike other studies on this field, research efforts to investigate lived experience of participants. To achieve this goal, observation, participant observation, in-depth interviews and group interviews were used and eventually it became clear that the final act of the participants in this study was associated with a sense of ambivalence. Thus “Ambivalence” was driven to write ethnography. This feeling, regardless of their act, is always with them and its strength depends on the duration of inhabitancy and the success of their coordination with the host society and it reminds some notions in post-colonial theory which are called being on threshold, being in the middle and third space and being linked. During this study, we try to survey paths, each students traverse to study in Germany to answer why this feeling exists.

Keywords

• academic migration
• ambivalence
• ethnography of migration
• post-colonial theory
• study in germany