Search

This article investigates how regional inequalities shape the employment seeking experiences and behaviour of graduates by drawing on the case of Chinese Master's graduates under COVID-19. Based on interviews with graduates who chose to work as the 'targeted selected graduates' (TSG) of "University A," located in the underdeveloped regions of North-western China, we show how their employment seeking was jointly impacted by three different but inter-related fields, the national economic, higher education, and graduate employment fields. These students were situated in a unique juncture across these fields; while their elite credentials from "University A" qualified them for these elite TSG programmes, they were disadvantaged by being excluded from TSG recruitments at economically developed regions. Importantly, we highlight that institutionalised cultural capital in the form of academic credentials from elite HEIs does not work in a 'straightforward' manner, but it has to be considered in conjunction with the geo-economic locations of their HEIs. We, therefore, propose the notion of 'geography-mediated institutionalised cultural capital' to capture this significant but under-theorised aspect of the graduate employment scene. This conceptual innovation enlightens the analysis of regional differences in different countries by considering how official or unofficial regional authorities' interventions shape graduate employment.

This paper draws on 'diaspora at home', a concept that encapsulates the unique dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China, as an analytical tool to explore the cross-border experiences of 23 Hong Kong students at 11 universities in mainland China. It empirically ascertains how the made and imposed claims and identifications of these Hong Kong students resulted in inclusion and exclusion as their interactions with their mainland peers and institutions deepened. Specifically, it highlights how their 'diaspora at home' status offered exclusive access to privileged higher education opportunities, preferential treatments and opportunities for upward social mobility. Meanwhile, such a status also resulted in an overwhelming sense of political liability as they unwittingly became 'political tokens' and suspected political subjects amid the increasingly tense political atmosphere between mainland China and Hong Kong. This paper pinpoints the relevance of class and politics in understanding how diasporic groups engage with higher education.

The Chinese international students are often portrayed in a monolithic manner in popular discourse. To offer a more comprehensive and critical representation of the Chinese international students, this paper conducts a thematic narrative review of 128 English-language and 74 Chinese-language peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2020. Drawing on post-colonial theories, this review identifies four subject positions portrayed of the Chinese international students: the (1) neoliberal, (2) political, (3) pedagogic and (4) racialised subjects. This paper celebrates heartening developments in the literature which affirms Chinese international students' epistemic contributions, legitimate pedagogic needs, notable heterogeneity and wide-ranging political, cultural and pedagogic agencies. It also highlights how aspects of these subject positions have exercised epistemic injustice on the Chinese international students. Meanwhile, it pinpoints the Chinese international students' acquiescence in exacerbating global education inequalities. Among the first to bring the dominant English-language and 'local' perspectives of Chinese-language literature in dialogue, this article notes divergent focuses and indicates unique contributions to historicising research on Chinese international students made by the latter. This article challenges popular perceptions of Chinese international students, questions production of knowledge, and pinpoints future research directions.

Adopting empowerment as a theoretical lens, this paper examines how a combination of structural (particularly class background) and individual factors (particularly empowering agents and a strong personal will to achieve) have contributed to school success and ethnic identity formation of minority students in China. Our longitudinal study on a Tibetan student (Dolma) from middle-class background who completed seven-year dislocated secondary schooling and four-year undergraduate studies in China's interior (Neidi) suggests the complexity and lack of institutional empowerment in every-day schooling. Although the implementation of preferential policies has expanded educational opportunities for ethnic minorities, the systemic failure to acknowledge the ethnic capital of minority groups at large accounts for the struggles along Dolma's educational mobilities. Thanks to two teachers who acted as empowering agents, Dolma's school adaptation in neidi was made less bumpy. While parental involvement was largely missing during the dislocated secondary schooling, her middle-class background greatly facilitated Dolma's social adaptation and educational success in undergraduate and postgraduate studies. With a strong will to represent Tibetan culture appropriately to the mainstream society, Dolma gradually learned to get ahead while retaining her ethnic salience. This study calls for more culturally reflexive policy changes to achieve institutional empowerment of ethnic minority students.

Existing scholarship on marginalised academics is mostly western-based and concerned with inequalities caused by class, gender and/or racial and ethnic differences. This article adds to this literature by highlighting how inequalities caused by the urban-rural divide in China adversely impact on the academic trajectories of rural-origin academics from impoverished backgrounds. To mitigate such inequalities, the 26 interviewed academics drew on their academic capital to achieve institutional and geographic mobilities, both within and beyond China. Such educational mobilities further allowed these scholars to convert into and accumulate economic, social, cultural and symbolic capitals (after Bourdieu). Importantly, their rural-origins and disadvantaged positioning had cultivated in them a productive habitus that is characterised by hard work, perseverance and self-discipline. Such a "habitus" played a pivotal role in orchestrating their academic ascension and upward social mobility. However, despite these successes, this article also reveals these academics' perennial financial struggles in lifting their rural-based families out of poverty, and the exclusive nature of educational mobilities, which are manifestations of systemic structural inequalities caused by urban-biased policies.

This article reviews three books: (1) "Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia: Emotional Geographies of Knowledge Spaces" (R. Sidhu et al., 2019); (2) "Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorizing Higher Education Student Mobilities" (K. Finn and M. Holton, 2019); and (3) "Refugees in Higher Education: Debate, Discourse and Practice" (J. Stevenson and S. Baker, 2018). At the time of writing this review, many universities around the world are facing unprecedented challenges brought forth by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Almost over night, universities have had to move teaching and assessment online, while closing many of their buildings on campus. These sudden changes have serious implications for students, who find themselves having to adapt to new ways of learning and interaction amid growing anxiety and uncertainty. Student mobilities, no matter daily commutes to and from universities, or transnational movements from one country to another, have been curtailed, unduly reinforced or coerced, in the face of such novel circumstances. It is, therefore, high time to consider student mobilities with renewed theoretical and empirical lenses. This collection of three books is a welcomed addition to literature on student mobilities as they focus on the 'marginal' forms of student mobilities. Here, 'marginal' refers to the marginalised positions of the students or institutions involved, or the under-explored modes of mobility carried out by students. Specifically, Stevenson and Baker (2018) zoom in to the multiple barriers that refugee students encounter daily in the UK and Australia, Finn and Holton (2019) examine the commuting experiences of 'living at home' students in England, while Sidhu, Chong, and Yeoh (2019) chart the emotional landscapes of international students choosing to study in universities situated in the relative periphery of knowledge production, i.e. East Asia. Together these three books offer much needed empirical details and theoretical tools that add to the existing, predominant focus on the 'large-scale international and intercultural movements' (Finn and Holton 2019, p. 1) of students from positions of relative privilege to study in centres of knowledge production (i.e. in the West) (Brooks and Waters 2011).

Transnational distinction is highly relevant in an age when western degree inflation intersects with harsh gender expectations for Chinese women student migrants, a significant group of players in the scene of UK higher education. Drawing on participant observation and interview data and building on existing theories of cultural capital, this article explores how 25 Chinese women students constructed 'transnational distinction'. Through investigating how newly acquired embodied cultural capital during mobility contributed to the construction of distinction, we argue such distinction is manifested through participants' cognisance of field-specific rules. Their understanding of the complex racial/ethnic and class fabrics of the British society impelled them to be creative in constructing their distinction, particularly seeking diverse peer reference groups. This adds to the extant literature through demonstrating that purposeful comparison and connections can be made across home, host and other destinations, in the women students' quest for transnational distinction.

The landscape of global higher education is changing rapidly in response to and alongside the geopolitical and geosocial global transformations, with China and East Asia becoming key players in higher education. As China's economic power and strategic reach grows against a context of global uncertainty, it has become increasingly important to develop a nuanced understanding of Chinese globalisation, not least for its significance to the balance of power relations within and beyond Asia. Higher education provides a powerful lens through which to see how China is globalising and how this might impact on the world. This is manifested in its many established and newer forms of education mobilities. Recognising the lack of research efforts to systematically understand the complexities of contemporary higher education mobilities across China, this paper proposes a typology through a thematic narrative review of more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, government and media documents. This typology of Chinese higher education mobilities reveals three key insights, including (1) a critique on the 'mobility imperative' and the role of the Chinese state, (2) a call for more longitudinal and/or retrospective research to facilitate a relational understanding of the fluid nature of higher education mobilities in China, and (3) a note on the urgency of developing a comprehensive theoretical and conceptual tool kit. This article contributes to an updated understanding of the fluid, multiple and multi-directional nature of contemporary higher education mobilities of China.

This article explores the impact of educational mobilities on the ethnic identity construction of minority students in China. Adopting 'temporality' as an analytical tool, the article highlights the dynamic temporal multiplicity in ethnic identity construction by comparing longitudinal in-depth interviews of a Mongolian student and a Tibetan student. This multiplicity of temporality is manifested in three aspects: temporality of ethnic othering; temporality of ethnic identity awakening; and temporality of 'worldly time' and 'ethnic time'. Both 'worldly time' and 'ethnic time' entail distinctive understandings about these students' pace and priorities in life. Both students defer their 'permanent' ethnic identity to an imagined future. Yet, adopting the gaze of the dominant others, both students subconsciously constructed an essentialist view of their ethnic cultures as fixed and stable, and those of the dominant cultures as alive and fluid. This article enriches our understanding of the politics of subjectivation through the lens of 'temporality'.

This paper contributes to the understanding of how shifting time, space and subject positions can impact on the political habitus of border-crossing students. Employing in-depth interview data from a longitudinal project involving 31 mainland Chinese students whose higher education journeys converged in Hong Kong, it argues that it is often unintended outcomes such as the development of a political habitus that can have lasting effects on students' longer term life trajectories. This paper's systematic exposition of these students' political habitus formation redresses Bourdieu's relative neglect of the shaping of the political habitus of 'non-professional' political agents, in contrast to his emphasis on that of the 'professionals', such as politicians. This paper also moves beyond existing literature's focus on social agents' experiences in static and unified political fields at specific times by foregrounding the experiences of these mainland Chinese students moving across conflictual political fields over time.

Drawing on in-depth interview data from 31 mainland Chinese (MLC) students in a Hong Kong university, this article conceptualises MLC and Hong Kong higher education as two dissonant but interrelated subfields of the Chinese higher education field. The article argues that these MLC students' habitus, one that possesses rich economic, social and cultural capital, prompts a strong sense of entitlement to anticipated privileges. However, this sense of entitlement is disrupted by the differential capital valuations across these fields. There is thus notable habitus-field disjuncture, which, exacerbated by the hysteresis effect, gives rise to a sense of disappointment and ambivalence. This article demonstrates how the Hong Kong education credential, which these students initially set out to pursue as a form of capital, can become a disadvantage at multiple levels; the article illustrates that capital valuation and conversion in a transborder context is not a straightforward, but rather a complicated and sometimes contradictory, process.

This article is drawn from research in an ongoing multiple case study of the identity constructions of tertiary-level border-crossing students from mainland China to Hong Kong. It begins by outlining the contextual and conceptual background of the study, followed by the presentation and discussion of the three aspects of identity being constructed, including contestation against place-of-origin stereotypical identification, passive resistance against power regulations exerted by the original context and critical critiques of the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese societies. This paper argues that, compared with the Bologna process, the parallel but inverse-directional characteristics of the border crossing between mainland China and Hong Kong have significant implications on student mobility across the internal and external European borders, which are greatly influenced by the global context, against a background of the internationalisation of higher education worldwide.

This paper draws on 'diaspora at home', a concept that encapsulates the unique dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China, as an analytical tool to explore the cross-border experiences of 23 Hong Kong students at 11 universities in mainland China. It empirically ascertains how the made and imposed claims and identifications of these Hong Kong students resulted in inclusion and exclusion as their interactions with their mainland peers and institutions deepened. Specifically, it highlights how their 'diaspora at home' status offered exclusive access to privileged higher education opportunities, preferential treatments and opportunities for upward social mobility. Meanwhile, such a status also resulted in an overwhelming sense of political liability as they unwittingly became 'political tokens' and suspected political subjects amid the increasingly tense political atmosphere between mainland China and Hong Kong. This paper pinpoints the relevance of class and politics in understanding how diasporic groups engage with higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting empowerment as a theoretical lens, this paper examines how a combination of structural (particularly class background) and individual factors (particularly empowering agents and a strong personal will to achieve) have contributed to school success and ethnic identity formation of minority students in China. Our longitudinal study on a Tibetan student (Dolma) from middle-class background who completed seven-year dislocated secondary schooling and four-year undergraduate studies in China's interior (Neidi) suggests the complexity and lack of institutional empowerment in every-day schooling. Although the implementation of preferential policies has expanded educational opportunities for ethnic minorities, the systemic failure to acknowledge the ethnic capital of minority groups at large accounts for the struggles along Dolma's educational mobilities. Thanks to two teachers who acted as empowering agents, Dolma's school adaptation in neidi was made less bumpy. While parental involvement was largely missing during the dislocated secondary schooling, her middle-class background greatly facilitated Dolma's social adaptation and educational success in undergraduate and postgraduate studies. With a strong will to represent Tibetan culture appropriately to the mainstream society, Dolma gradually learned to get ahead while retaining her ethnic salience. This study calls for more culturally reflexive policy changes to achieve institutional empowerment of ethnic minority students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores a cohort of Burmese students' lived experiences at a border high school in China and demonstrates that their multilingual practices and identity positionings constitute exclusionary effects that limit their interactions with their local Chinese teachers and peers. The paper argues that these Burmese students' in-group interactions reproduce the process of exclusion, further complicating their identity positionings. This paper confirms the established fact that transnational students are marginalized in a variety of national contexts in complex ways, and draws attention to in-group differences among transnational students with diverse backgrounds. These findings have implications for multilingual practices and education policy makers, and for a more inclusive pedagogical approach to reducing marginalization and educating students of diverse linguistic, cultural, and racial backgrounds for global citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated responses such as border closure, lockdown measures and flight curtailment have severely disrupted transnational infrastructures that sustain, channel, organize and condition international migration. This infrastructural disruption has led to the double exclusion of temporary migrants from both sending and host societies. In this context, we explore how Chinese international students in the United Kingdom and their parents in China navigate transnational (im)mobilities during the pandemic. In doing so, we develop the conceptualization of "family-mediated migration infrastructure" to elucidate the role played by transnational family relationships in brokering information, mobilizing resources, and coordinating disjointed acts of institutional players in order to sustain transnational (im)mobility. We also reveal a distinctive emotional double-bind in the process of family-mediated infrastructuring, which requires members of transnational families to strategically perform emotional engagement and detachment in complex ways. Our findings highlight the functional resilience and emotional vulnerability of family-mediated transnational migration infrastructure, and render visible the intimate fabrics that contribute to sustaining transnationalism during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research and policy on international students' study-to-work transition fall short of a temporal theoretical perspective that is sensitive to the fluid and class-stratified nature of their career imagination. Career imagination refers to how international students conceive of, enact and reconfigure their careers as they encounter novel circumstances along their life courses. Drawing on in-depth interview data with 21 Chinese international students and graduates at UK higher education institutions, this article adopts a primarily Bourdieusian framework that centres around how time, class and privilege intersect to shape these students' career imagination. In this framework, time is conceptualised both as a form of coveted cultural capital and as an underlining mechanism that constitutes these students' habitus. This theoretical orientation facilitates exposition of the complex rationale behind the two observed temporal career strategies, 'deferred gratification' and 'temporal destructuring' and accentuates nuanced inequalities pertaining to fine-grained familial class backgrounds and places of origin of these students. This article furnishes empirical cases that challenge extant policy and empirical literature's tendency to consider international students and their career imagination as homogeneous, individualised and present-focused. Instead, the empirical findings reveal how these Chinese international students' career imagination is class-differentiated, embedded within and influenced by broader temporal structures and constantly evolving. This article thus advances understanding about how temporally sensitive and better differentiated career supports should be and could be tailored for international students at policy and practice levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The landscape of global higher education is changing rapidly in response to and alongside the geopolitical and geosocial global transformations, with China and East Asia becoming key players in higher education. As China's economic power and strategic reach grows against a context of global uncertainty, it has become increasingly important to develop a nuanced understanding of Chinese globalisation, not least for its significance to the balance of power relations within and beyond Asia. Higher education provides a powerful lens through which to see how China is globalising and how this might impact on the world. This is manifested in its many established and newer forms of education mobilities. Recognising the lack of research efforts to systematically understand the complexities of contemporary higher education mobilities across China, this paper proposes a typology through a thematic narrative review of more than 250 peer‐reviewed journal articles, government and media documents. This typology of Chinese higher education mobilities reveals three key insights, including (1) a critique on the 'mobility imperative' and the role of the Chinese state, (2) a call for more longitudinal and/or retrospective research to facilitate a relational understanding of the fluid nature of higher education mobilities in China, and (3) a note on the urgency of developing a comprehensive theoretical and conceptual tool kit. This article contributes to an updated understanding of the fluid, multiple and multi‐directional nature of contemporary higher education mobilities of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This guide accompanies the following article: Xu, C.L. & Montgomery, C., Educating China on the move: A typology of contemporary Chinese higher education mobilities, Review of Education, https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3139. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]