‘Mobile Consumers’: Interpreting the Consumption Perceptions, Practices and Experiences of Mobile Brazilian International Students in London

Abstract

This paper advances existing work on the mobilities and geographies of students by examining the complexities and contestations affecting international students' consumption perceptions and experiences. This is important in positing new ways of understanding how educational mobilities, in both their meta and micro forms, can influence, and be influenced by, consumption practices and ideologies. Drawing on a set of semi‐structured interviews with Brazilian international students living and studying in London, UK this paper draws together mobilities and consumption theories as a lens for interpreting consumption knowledge and practice as an evolving and iterative set of performances that align closely with an individual's life‐course opportunities and barriers. This paper makes two contributions. First, we identify mobile consumption as a way for international students to reflexively connect their past and present experiences when adapting to new or unfamiliar consumption practices and places. Second, we recognise consumption to be potentially burdensome for international students whose mobilities mean that consumption practices are temporal, intersecting between past, present and future experiences that shape how international students relate to their belongings and make liminal consumption decisions, knowing their time in in their host city is limited.