In recent years a growing body of literature has emerged relating to what may be termed ‘student geographies’. In synthesising this literature pertinent to the geographies of higher education students, including their movements, [im]mobilities and identities, this paper seeks to achieve two objectives. First, to move beyond traditional geographical boundaries by incorporating important discussions from across the social sciences and second, to transcend inward/outward dichotomies in order to achieve a clearer understanding of the mobilities and concentrations of what is a complex and diverse social group. The paper explores the different scales which have been focussed on in this literature – from that on national and international student movements, through to those focussing on the more local geographies of students’ experiences of HEIs and their university location.

Recent research has begun to pay attention to the importance of place to the research encounter. This paper makes a contribution to these discussions through an investigation into the lived experiences of higher education students. Although there is a burgeoning literature on what has been termed 'student geographies' , there has been relatively little attention focused on the methods that we might employ in exploring these geographies. Here we consider 'walking interviews' as an approach to helping better comprehend students' experiences and understandings of University towns and cities. Accompanying students 'in the field' allowed us to explore students' narratives 'in place' while seeing first hand how some of the multi-sensual and multi-layered experiences of place might be captured and interpreted. We argue that such place-based interviews allow us to 'get into the gaps' of student experiences and understand how students' dynamic relationships with place shape their conceptions and narrations of their term-time location.

Our homes are important spaces through which emotions are produced, performed and regulated. They carry significant material and symbolic value and are inscribed with meaning and belonging that are often crucial in shaping and (re)producing collective and individual identities. Yet while research has explored the role of the home in the co-production of familial values, networks and behaviours, less is understood of the emotional geographies of accommodation occupied by non-related adultsdefined here as 'peer-sharing'. This paper responds to this gap by exploring how peer-shared living-spaces are emotionally constructed through a case study of students living in a UK university's halls of residences. In doing so, this paper examines how (1) the morphology of shared living-spaces contributes towards the production of sharers' emotions, (2) emotions become inscribed upon home-spaces through place-making activities and (3) diversity is enacted through the emotional work of sharers and how this is performed through friendship in shared living-spaces. This analysis concludes by emphasising the important role of emotions in coproducing different spaces, activities, knowledges and experiences among peersharers and how peer-sharing might be both performed in and influenced by living spaces.

Recent discussions of the geographies of students have drawn attention to the trajectories of UK students electing to leave home for university. While such debates recognise these important mobilities, little has been discussed as to how students interact within their term-time accommodation. Through a qualitative study of the living arrangements of UK students, this paper will demonstrate that much can be drawn from focusing on the micro-geographies of non-local students within their term-time homes. Student accommodation is more than simply somewhere to live. Student homes are intensely dynamic places, perhaps more so than family homes as they contain multiple, disconnected identities. This research contributes to research on the geographies of the home by unpacking how house-sharers in transition interact with each other, how they transfer their identities from one home to another, how they delineate their territory and whether they integrate or withdraw within their term-time accommodation. This paper addresses this by exploring (1) how students negotiate their habitualised behaviours in shared spaces and (2) how these behaviours become spatialised through the configuration and maintenance of boundaries.

This article makes the case for a more robust mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, in order to problematise the enduring binary of [im]mobility ('going away' versus 'staying local') and to challenge the presumed linearity of educational (and mobility) transitions in higher education. Through a discussion of two UK-based studies, we make the case for considering the complex and multilayered everyday mobilities of students who commute to illuminate a broader range of mobility practices that shape students' experiences and identities, and which are embedded in multiple and intersecting embodiments of class, gender, age and ethnicity.