African Students in Russia: Peculiarities of Social Adaptation and Relationship with the Receiving Community | South-Russian Journal of Social Sciences
African Students in Russia: Peculiarities of Social Adaptation and Relationship with the Receiving Community
Vol. 19 (2018) No. 4, Sociological Interpretations
Vol. 19 (2018) No. 4
Sociological Interpretations

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

Camara I.
University of Letters and Human Sciences of Bamako
ORCID ID 0000-0003-4040-8775
Rakachev V.N.
Kuban State University
ORCID ID 0000-0002-6505-4208
PDF (Russian)
https://doi.org/10.31429/26190567-19-4-164-179
https://doi.org/10.31429/26190567-19-4-164-179

How to Cite Array

Camara I., Rakachev V.N. (2018) African Students in Russia: Peculiarities of Social Adaptation and Relationship with the Receiving Community. South-Russian Journal of Social Sciences, 19 (4), pp. 164-179. DOI: 10.31429/26190567-19-4-164-179 (In Russian)
Submission Date 2018-06-26
Accepted Date 2018-10-10
Published Date 2018-12-23

Copyright (c) 2018 Ишака Камара, Вадим Николаевич Ракачев

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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.

Keywords

foreign students, educational migration, students from African countries, Russian universities, international education, socio-cultural adaptation

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