Geography-mediated institutionalised cultural capital: Regional inequalities in graduate employment

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 COVID19. 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

Epistemic injustice and neo-racism: How Zhihu users portray ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ working in Western academia

The image of Chinese doctoral supervisors working in Western academia is riddled with stereotypes in urban myths but little research to date has been conducted on these portrayals of Chinese supervisors. Drawing on postcolonial theories, including notions of epistemic injustice and neo-racism, this research conducts a thematic analysis on around 450 Zhihu comments. It proposes that the Zhihu community has portrayed three images of the Chinese supervisors as (1) ambitious and supportive, (2) sneaky and exploitative, and (3) colonised. While the second and third images are more negative, the first image is overwhelmingly positive. In portraying these images of the Chinese supervisors, the community confronted two main underlying structural forces. These include (1) a steep ethnic/racial hierarchy where White middle-class, native speakers of English dominate and (2) an unequal classed sphere within Western academia. This paper argues that this Zhihu community displayed profound yet only partial recognition of the steep ethnic/racial hierarchy due to their internalisation of their own linguistic inferiority. Moreover, this Zhihu community perpetuates neo-racism and epistemic injustice over Chinese supervisors and postgraduate research students from working-class and rural backgrounds. Among the first to examine how Chinese doctoral supervisors are portrayed in online communities, this article provides informative insights for prospective postgraduate research applicants as well as admission professionals in Western academia. The neo-racism and epistemic injustice identified can also feed into future work on Diversity and Equality as well as decolonising efforts. Conceptually, this article innovates by combining neo-racism and epistemic injustice to form a framework that furnishes a comprehensive examination of unjust practices and portrayals in the realms of racial and knowledge inequalities in doctoral supervision. This article thus makes empirical and conceptual contributions to critical studies in international and doctoral education

Examining Burmese students’ multilingual practices and identity positionings at a border high school in China

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

Mainland Chinese students at an elite Hong Kong university: habitus–field disjuncture in a transborder context

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

Transborder habitus in a within-country mobility context: A Bourdieusian analysis of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong

This article contributes to the updating of Bourdieusian sociology by proposing the notion of ‘transborder habitus’, a necessary extension of ‘habitus’ in a transborder context. ‘Transborder contexts’ refer to spaces that belong politically to the same country, share a deep level of historic cultural and/or ethnic entanglement, but can be ideologically, linguistically and socially divergent. Such transborder contexts present empirical challenges that notions such as ‘habitus’ and ‘transnational habitus’ cannot adequately address. First, the national borderline delineation presumed in ‘habitus’ and ‘transnational habitus’ can no longer account for the intricate and complex within-country border diversities. Second, although dissonances between border-crossing agents’ habitus and their original field have been sparsely noted in existing empirical work, few attempts have been made to offer theoretical accounts for habitus–field dissonances along the axes of religion, ethnicity and ideology. Drawing on in-depth interview data from an ongoing longitudinal study that explores the identity trajectories of 31 mainland Chinese students at a Hong Kong university, this article argues that ‘transborder habitus’ can effectively redress these two identified gaps and will show how it can offer a more adequate explanation in empirical contexts