Student migration and domestic improvisation: Transient migration through the experience of everyday laundry

In this article, we develop a novel approach to transient student migration: by studying it through the mundane everyday. We focus on the private worlds where migrants encounter and improvise with new domestic technologies - through their laundry - by drawing on our video ethnography of Indonesian students in Australia. Such an analysis creates insights into some of the most fundamental, but usually invisible, aspects of migrant experience: their relationships with the routines, materiality, infrastructures and weather environments of everyday life. As such, it offers an alternative route through which to understand international student wellbeing, which we argue needs to be accounted for alongside more conventional and institutionally-oriented foci in this field of research.