This work by Thinh Tran is the winning essay of the Eur-Asian Border Lab’s 2025 volumetric borders essay contest
Thinh Tran is an independent researcher based in Vietnam, with a strong focus on education, borders, and affective belonging. His work draws on interdisciplinary and decolonial perspectives to explore how individuals experience inclusion, exclusion, and emotional attachment across time and spaces.
I. Introduction
Between altitudes and algorithms,
I float in a numbered seat—
a body crossing cloud and code,
without a place to land completely.
Waiting in the hush before departure—where every ascent begins in uncertainty.
The cabin lights dim as the plane glides westward. Below, continents blur into cloud formations; above, a sterile silence hums through the pressurised air. Somewhere between departure and arrival, I hover — half-formed, half-approved — suspended not just in space but in meaning.
For many international students, mobility is not a straight line from home to host.
It is a choreography of deferral, translation, and recalibration. We do not simply move through space, we ascend into a zone where borders are atmospheric, encoded, and felt. Belonging, in this suspended state, is less about where the body lands and more about what it must pass through: the altitude of imagined futures, the algorithmic lattice of data systems, the quiet ache that settles into the ribs when one’s name is mispronounced or one’s story cannot be entered into a drop-down menu.
In this essay, I explore how students in motion inhabit a kind of borderfoam – a layered, unstable terrain where belonging is never fixed but continually assembled through flight paths, visa scores, and affective labor. These spaces are not marked on any map. They are volumetric: expanding and contracting in the air, in the code, and in the self.
What does it mean to belong when every step toward arrival is a negotiation, when even ascent feels conditional? Floating between recognition and refusal, we learn to dwell in suspension.
II. Conceptual grounding
There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of being an international student: you are constantly moving, and yet always waiting—to be seen, approved, recorded, allowed. The body travels, but belonging remains a negotiation, something contingent, suspended, and often withheld.
Belonging, as Yuval-Davis (2011) reminds us, is never merely a matter of presence. It is a layered process of political recognition and emotional attachment, shaped by shifting thresholds of acceptability. For mobile students, these thresholds materialise not only at immigration counters or in classrooms, but within the self, where one is required to perform gratitude before being allowed to express fatigue.
This experience unfolds within what Peter Sloterdijk describes as foams, the soft containers of modern life, porous and pressurised. Unlike solid geopolitical borders, these volumes are mobile and atmospheric: overlapping spheres of evaluation, aspiration, and anxiety. The international student drifts through these zones—floating from visa portals to group chats, from embassy interviews to learning management systems. These are not destinations, but transient dwellings.
Anderson’s (1983) imagined communities offer another layer: students belong often find themselves stretched between the territorial space of their country of origin and the institutional space of a university they have not yet entered. They may remain emotionally or symbolically tethered to national imaginaries, even as they step into new administrative, linguistic, or pedagogical worlds. In this in-between, they craft what we might call imagined belongings, ways of locating the self in fragments, platforms, borrowed languages.
To live inside this borderfoam is to accept that there may be no solid center—only co-habitation in temporary volumes. Here, belonging is not claimed once and for all, but felt intermittently, patched together through forms, friendships, and longing.
III. The altitude border: Belonging in the sky
Suspended thirty thousand feet above the ground, I watch clouds dissolve into each other like countries with no names. The cabin is dim. People sleep with mouths slightly open, heads tilted into dreams they will not remember. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, I realise I have no idea where I am, only where I hope to arrive.
In the space between departure and arrival. Somewhere above the Indian Ocean
This is the first border we cross: not always a line on land, but a threshold enacted through documents, scrutiny, and altitude. Even before takeoff, international students encounter state bordering at departure terminals—where airline staff may deny boarding without the right visa code, passport stamp, or e-approval.
These bureaucratic thresholds remind us that control often begins well before arrival, and sometimes even before departure. Altitude then becomes a second border: a suspended space of becoming, where aspiration meets regulation. Here, belonging is imagined vertically, an upward movement into futures that are both hopeful and conditional. International students often speak of “going abroad” as if rising from the constraints of their birthplace, but every ascent is tethered to an archive of permissions: visa approvals, language scores, one-way tickets that imply return.
“I wanted the sky to mean freedom,” one student said, “but I couldn’t exhale until the plane had landed, and no one had called me back.”
In the air, borders don’t disappear. They simply shift form. They become pressurised air, surveillance technologies, customs declarations waiting in seat-back pockets. The plane is not a neutral vessel—it is a transitional state, where belonging is postponed, pending further inspection.
Sloterdijk’s metaphor of foams is instructive here. The sky is not open; it is structured by spheres of access and exclusion. It contains those who are permitted to float, while others remain grounded, waiting for clearance to imagine differently.
In this altitude, international students occupy a suspended intimacy with power. We do not yet know if we are welcome. We are simply airborne—between departure and arrival, between our projected selves and the ones we’ve had to leave behind.
IV. The algorithmic border: Belonging in the data
Long before the flight lifts off, we are already in motion, inside servers, spreadsheets, scanned documents. Long before the self is greeted, it is calculated. The international student enters the system not as a name, but as a file: GPA, IELTS, proof of funds, passport history. Belonging begins in a backend queue.
Entry fields that decide if you’re legible. Or not
In this layer of the borderfoam, borders are not made of fences or flags, but of forms and filters. One is not welcomed but processed. The body, still grounded, is preceded by its data-shadow—its predictive outline—shaped by algorithms designed to decide who deserves to move.
“They never asked why I study poetry,” someone recalled. “They only asked if I could prove I’d leave.”
Here, citizenship becomes a kind of risk score. The algorithm does not see the whole person – only patterns. Your passport is low-trust. Your country is flagged. Your intention is uncertain. There is no one to argue with, only interfaces. A misclick, a missing field, and the entire future returns “incomplete.”
Yuval-Davis teaches us that belonging involves emotional attachment and political recognition—but what happens when recognition is outsourced to software? When your worth is read not in your words but in your PDF metadata?
This border, like the others, is soft in texture but hard in consequence. It requires no confrontation, only compliance. Sloterdijk’s foams shift here from spatial to computational. They become login portals, autofill menus, delayed status updates. Even hope becomes data-driven: tracked through application portals, checked compulsively like a heartbeat.
Inside this cloud of code, the student floats again—visible yet unheard, legible yet unread. Belonging, in this regime, is an abstraction you must continually justify, one line of input at a time.
V. The affective border: Belonging in the body
Even when the plane lands, even when the visa is stamped and the lectures begin, the borders do not dissolve. They migrate inward. They settle in the chest, the stomach, the skin. The affective border is not marked by law, but by sensation—by the unspoken rules of smiling more, apologising faster, and never seeming ungrateful.
In classrooms and cafeterias, on sidewalks and video calls, the international student curates a version of themselves that will not be mistaken for ungracious, ungrateful, or unworthy. A quiet pressure undergirds even the smallest exchange: speak fluently, dress appropriately, seem open but not too foreign. The body becomes the interface of belonging, rehearsing scripts of politeness and pride while hiding exhaustion, confusion, shame.
What remains untranslatable still anchors the self
“Sometimes I don’t know if I miss home,” one student said, “or if I just miss being known.”
Sara Ahmed (2000) reminds us that emotions are not private; they circulate, accumulate, attach to bodies in ways that reveal who is out of place. To feel discomfort is not simply to be unsettled, it is to be marked as the one who must adjust. In this way, non-belonging is made to feel like personal failure, rather than structural design.
This border is porous but intimate. It shows up in the longing to translate a joke no one laughs at, or in the silence after being asked, “Where are you really from?” It flickers in the moment you stop speaking in your mother tongue, not out of necessity but out of habit.
In Sloterdijk’s foams, these internal climates – humid with homesickness, dry with overperformance – coexist within fragile enclosures. The international student lives among these atmospheres, assembling fragments of belonging through WhatsApp voice notes, leftovers from home, and awkward but earnest friendships.
Here, belonging is not achieved. It is endured. And sometimes, gently, it is shared.
VI. Conclusion: Towards a borderfoam pedagogy
There is no single threshold at which belonging begins. For the international student, there are only moments of proximity, fleeting recognitions, conditional permissions, soft collisions with others who are also floating.
The borders we have crossed, be it altitude, algorithm, affect, are not anomalies of globalisation. They are its architecture. They form a layered geography that cannot be mapped, only moved through. To live in this borderfoam is to be continually reassembled across forms, fragments, and feelings. It is to belong partially, precariously, and sometimes – momentarily – with intensity.
But perhaps in this fragmentation, a new kind of pedagogy becomes possible. One that teaches not toward arrival, but toward dwelling in uncertainty. One that softens borders not by erasing them, but by making them more hospitable. A pedagogy of care, of translation, of refusal. A pedagogy that recognises floating not as failure, but as form.
Between altitudes and algorithms,
I no longer drift alone.
A name misheard, a meal remembered—
These foams begin to feel like home.
References
Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. Routledge.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.
Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Spheres I: Bubbles — Microspherology (W. Hoban, Trans.). Semiotext(e). (Original work published 1998)
Sloterdijk, P. (2014). Spheres II: Globes — Macrospherology (W. Hoban, Trans.). Semiotext(e). (Original work published 1999)
Sloterdijk, P. (2016). Spheres III: Foams — Plural spherology (W. Hoban, Trans.). Semiotext(e). (Original work published 2004)
Van Houtum, H., & Boedeltje, F. (2009). Europe’s shame: Death at the border of the EU. Antipode, 41(2), 226–230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00639.x
Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. SAGE.