African Students in Russia: Peculiarities of Social Adaptation and Relationship with the Receiving Community

Abstract

The paper is devoted to an important problem — the adaptation of foreign students to the new socio-cultural environment in the country of instruction. The relevance of the issue is determined by the realities of modern global society, the active development of international educational ties, and the growing number of educational migrants in the world on the whole and in Russia in particular. For countries offering training to citizens of other states, foreign students are not only a source of economic profit, but, above all, an important resource of international influence, a factor of “soft power”. The paper presents the results of the survey conducted in 2014–2015 a complex socio-psychological research aimed at identifying the features of socio-cultural adaptation and the relationships between the host society and the African students who either study or have completed their studies at universities in Russia and the USSR. The research has made it possible to identify and analyze the factors determining the degree of success in adaptation, the main barriers that hamper the inclusion of African students into the new socio-cultural space, as well as the specificity of their interaction with the host society. The socio-cultural adaptation of African students who study in Russia is a complex multifactor process during which they attempt to achieve socio-psychological compatibility with the cultural environment new to them. As a result, the analysis of the adaptation process for students from African countries has enabled the authors to single out and determine effective mechanisms that can optimize it. Apart from this, the research contains recommendations that can facilitate the process.