Student Accommodation and Home

While students are stereotypically a young, privileged, hypermobile group whose housing transitions are supported by institutions and families, they are, in fact, a heterogeneous population with diverse socio-economic backgrounds and housing needs. Yet, literature on home-making has generally neglected student accommodation, perhaps given its short-term, temporary nature. This chapter aims to contextualise student home-making at a variety of scales and, in doing so, to paint a more nuanced portrait of diverse student subjects’ experiences of home. We begin by examining how student homes are made beyond their direct control by dominant actors such as politicians, real estate investors, neighbourhood organisations, and universities, at global to local scales. We then consider students’ own experiences and practices of finding and making homes. Finally, a vignette of one international student family’s experiences in Canada illustrates how home can be at once in transition, insecure, and actively made through family and culture. This vignette shows how some students’ home-making experiences can be vastly different than that assumed of the stereotypical student.