Being affected by a serious or life-threatening illness implies an existentially changed situation that is accompanied by a number of questions about the illness itself, consequences of the illness in an everyday context and implications for the future. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine people’s meaning-making when they are affected by a serious illness and to determine how the illness acquires meaning in the context of their lives. The dissertation thus deals with what can be referred to as existential meaning-making. A hermeneutical approach was adopted, drawing more specifically on Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory that emphasises the importance of different dimensions of time and memory in the understanding of narratives. An empirical study was carried out of illness narratives collected in research interviews with six women who had been diagnosed with serious illnesses, such as cancer, stroke and heart attack. The analysis reveals that the discovery of the illness and the period following was characterized by chaos and a lack of time perspective, feelings of lack of freedom and thoughts about death, but also feelings of responsibility towards the family. Experiences of the health services were also important in accounts of this early period, particularly wishes for more empathic encounters with the professionals. In the women’s accounts of the long term living with the illness, death continues to emerge as a back drop to their everyday experiences of the illness, but gradually more as confronting the problem of death rather than giving up life. Over time, relationships to significant others and the importance of everyday life also constitute increasingly important themes. In their expectations for the future, the women account for some experiences that have been important in creating a sense of hope and heightened vitality, and thus a new ‘wholeness’, such as being close to nature as well as their religious or spiritual experiences. These results are discussed in terms of how memories of significant events or places play an important role in existential meaning-making, and also how reflections on these memories can be seen as a process of existential ‘learning’.

Study abroad has received much attention as an effective educational practice in today’s globalized world, and a wide range of skills, attitudes, and knowledge has been recognized as potential learning outcomes resulting from it. Accordingly, in the context of higher education, international students’ learning experiences have been understood in terms of measurable outcomes. Outcome-oriented understanding, however, has put international students’ learning experiences into a binary category of successful or failed learning experiences, based on whether they learned what they were supposed to learn during study abroad. This study takes a critical stance that binary understanding of student learning during study abroad fails to grasp the uniqueness and complexity of each international student’s learning experiences and aims to go beyond binaries to provide a more nuanced understanding of them. Through autobiographical narrative interviews, five students’ narratives about their learning experiences during study abroad were collected. The five students were graduate students studying in Sweden, which represent an under-researched group in the previous literature. Their narratives were comparatively analyzed using thematic narrative analysis, from the perspective of existential learning theory. The results demonstrated the uniqueness of the five international students’ learning experiences, by showing that they experienced existential learning with different dimensions of their existence and in different settings, including formal and informal settings. The results also highlighted the complexity of their learning processes, where each student sought to learn in a way in which the new values, beliefs, or knowledge that they encountered could be consistently integrated into their own biographies. This study shed new light on international students’ learning experiences, highlighting the uniqueness and complexity of them from the perspective of existential learning theory.