Foreign students, loneliness, and the Swedish language : Analysis of social and cultural experiences of creating a community in Uppsala

Sammanfattning: This Bachelor thesis is about international students, who travelled to Uppsala to study abroad during the autumn exchange term, which took place between September 2021 to January 2022. Four students from different countries were interviewed about their cultural and social experiences when the students studied abroad and how they oriented themselves in a foreign environment. This thesis focuses on sensory anthropology, which is a subfield. The sensorial aspects are about the international student's experiences and the primary ones are light and darkness, space, flavors, and memories. When it comes to local belonging and imagined communities, the sensory aspects are about the value of individual experiences as well as the collective aspect of establishing a new community. In the period where international students learned, they clarified whether they felt a local belonging to Uppsala.  When it comes to whether the students feel a sense of local belonging in Uppsala, the student's own educational experiences, local belonging, and communities in their home countries are compared to the Swedish students' existing communities at Uppsala. Foreign students also describe their native languages and their encounters with the Swedish language, and how the contrast resulted in feelings of exclusion from the Swedish society.