Intercultural friendship formation through the lens of cosmopolitan agency

This article explores a group of international students' experiences on intercultural friendship formation in one British university in the UK through the lens of cosmopolitan agency (Kudo, 2023), which is an ecological perspective of meaningful interactions between international and home students. Under the context that internationalisation continues to be on the agenda of higher education in the UK, this article examines how international students form and develop friendships among themselves and with home students within constraints mainly on power and privilege. Semi-structured interviews with 22 international students were carried out: Nigeria, Cameroon, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, as well as four British home students. Thematic analysis was used to explore their experiences in greater depth. The result indicated that the participating students demonstrated dynamic and discursive engagement with the four states of cosmopolitan agency, exhibiting specific manifestations of the agency relating to linguistic abilities, socioeconomic status, gender and religion.