32 research outputs found
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 Masterās graduates under COVID19. Based on interviews with graduates who chose to work as the ātargeted selected graduatesā (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 āstraightforwardā manner, but it has to be considered in conjunction with the geo-economic locations of their HEIs. We, therefore, propose the notion of āgeography-mediated institutionalised cultural capitalā 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 authoritiesā interventions shape graduate employment
Examining Burmese studentsā multilingual practices and identity positionings at a border high school in China
This study explores a cohort of Burmese studentsā 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 studentsā 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: habitusāfield disjuncture in a transborder context
Mainland Chinese students at an elite Hong Kong university: habitusāfield 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 studentsā 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 habitusāfield 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 ātransborder habitusā, a necessary extension of āhabitusā in a transborder context. āTransborder contextsā 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 āhabitusā and ātransnational habitusā cannot adequately address. First, the national borderline delineation presumed in āhabitusā and ātransnational habitusā can no longer account for the intricate and complex within-country border diversities. Second, although dissonances between border-crossing agentsā habitus and their original field have been sparsely noted in existing empirical work, few attempts have been made to offer theoretical accounts for habitusāfield 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 ātransborder habitusā can effectively redress these two identified gaps and will show how it can offer a more adequate explanation in empirical contexts
āMarginalā student mobilities: Cruel promise, everyday mobile belonging and emotional geographies
Time, class and privilege in career imagination: Exploring study-to-work transition of Chinese international students in UK universities through a Bourdieusian lens
Existing research and policy on international studentsā 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 studentsā career imagination. In this framework, time is conceptualised both as a form of coveted cultural capital and as an underlining mechanism that constitutes these studentsā habitus. This theoretical orientation facilitates exposition of the complex rationale behind the two observed temporal career strategies, ādeferred gratificationā and ātemporal destructuringā 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 literatureās tendency to consider international students and their career imagination as homogeneous, individualised and present-focused. Instead, the empirical findings reveal how these Chinese international studentsā 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