Confronting marginalisation, seeking belonging

This chapter uses autoethnography to examine the author’s experiences as an Algerian Muslim international student in Spain, detailing her encounters with ethnicity and hijab-related discrimination. It also critically examines simplistic ICER adaptation models and highlights their failure to address power, systemic bias, and intersectionality. Through her experiences of exclusion, the author challenges the notion of Eurocentric integration and introduces the concept of ‘transformative adaptability’: adaptation reframed as critical engagement, conscious identity negotiation, and resistance against marginalisation, rather than merely resilience. This chapter problematises the ‘uncelebrated maverick’ concept through a decolonial lens. It criticises the concept’s potential to individualise systemic issues and explores the idea that marginalisation could be a form of epistemic resistance. Contributing to ICER’s ‘uneven tapestry’, the work advocates critical reflexivity, power-sensitive frameworks, and institutional transformation towards ‘genuine’ equity and belonging.