REPRESENTATIONS ET COHABITATIONS ESTUDIANTINES: CAS DES ETUDIANTS ROUMAINS ET AFRICAINS A L UNIVERSITE DE PITESTI EN ROUMANIE

This research aims to analyze the themes characterizing the relationship s between African and Romanian students at the University of Pitesti, as well as the effects that sociolinguistic representations have on their academic coexistence. A semi-open questionnaire drafted in French and subsequently translated into Romanian by two native speakers was used to collect data from thirty-seven Romanian students and six African students. The information was manually processed and grouped by question to form a corpus reflecting the students collective perceptions, while accounting for both the common patterns and the unique characteristics that emerged across individual responses. The collected data are analyzed through the lens of the Theory of Spaces (Atchikpa, 2021) which posits that space acts as a determinant for linguistic, cultural, and intercultural dynamics in dialogue with the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1961; Jodelet, 1989) and Byrams (1997) model of intercultural competence. The findings indicate that student mobility serves both as a factor for deconstructing existing patterns of inequality and as a catalyst for the creation or reinforcement of new sociocognitive frameworks among students of different nationalities.