ABSTRACT
Students travel. As part of their curriculum they frequently go on field trips to a broad range of international destinations. They travel on gap years as backpackers and they travel in search of, and to develop, their identities as volunteers. Students are thus a very mobile section of society (Duke-Williams, 2009). Be it emigrating to another country for an entire course, a shorter period abroad as a segment of their studies, a gap year travelling or working abroad, studying within a different region within their own country or studying locally within their country of origin and having to tackle the daily mobilities this entails, all contribute to the growing complexities of student life (Bhandari & Laughlin, 2009; Duke-Williams, 2009; Holdsworth, 2009). Holdsworth (2009: 1852) adds that ‘[s]tudents are constantly on the move: between halls; from place of residence (which may be halls of residence, privately rented accommodation, or parental home) to campus; as well as from “home” to university’. She goes on to argue that local students’ mobility patterns are much more extreme than those who move region or country and that they are often trivialized by policy makers who state that ‘going to HE [Higher Education] was . . . the same as going to school or college, all that was different was that they caught a different bus’ (Holdsworth, 2009: 1860).
