A critical understanding of students’ intercultural experience: non-essentialism and epistemic justice

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss a critical understanding of students’ intercultural experience at a UK university. I critique the potential issues of: a) using essentialist categorisations to understand students’ intercultural experience, and b) imposing epistemic injustice to students by undervaluing their epistemic agency in intercultural experience. Based upon the paintings of five students, I problematise the essentialist categorisations reproduced in the students’ meaning-making about their intercultural experience, which could reinforce prejudice, neo-racism, otherisation, and segregation. The students were, however, able to negotiate with such an issue of essentialism through a non-static and back-and-forth process in their painting. They also demonstrated an active epistemic agency in navigating the complexities of their intercultural experience. Therefore, I suggest intercultural research to adopt a non-essentialist and epistemically-just lens to understand students’ intercultural experience in the increasingly fluid world.