Research Highlighted:
Martin, F. and Song, L. (2023). Understanding gendered transnational education mobility: Interview with Fran Martin. Communication and the Public 8(4), 257-265.
Despite the growing number of Chinese international students in the West, their lived experiences are often subsumed within grander, and often biased, narratives that treat them as homogeneous neoliberal, political, pedagogical, and racialized subjects (Xu, 2022). Based on Fran Martin’s recent book Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke University Press 2022), Fran Martin and Lin Song discuss in this interview how to account for Chinese female students’ experiences through ethnographic research. We start with questions of theory and methodology – more specifically, how the theoretical lens of affect and gender could inform our understanding of transnational education mobility, before discussing some of the key challenges Chinese female students face as they move across physical and cultural borders.
The book is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study that lasted over several years. This method allowed Martin to explore the wide variety of Chinese female students’ experiences in Australia. Although Chinese female students are often portrayed as an undifferentiated mass, they are in fact very different in terms of their family backgrounds, academic aspirations, political orientations, and understandings of gender and feminism.
One key aim of the book is to explore how education mobility feels (Martin, 2022, p. 29). But the book itself does not focus on theoretical discussions of affect. Rather, it uses various narrative and visual tools, such as research participants’ drawing of a map of Melbourne, to convey the participants’ subjective and embodied experiences. Martin explains that it is a conscious choice for the book to move away from dense and abstract discussions of affect, and into slightly less academic writing styles, to let highly affective ethnographic details speak for themselves. Therefore, the book includes stories from the field, screenshots of social media posts, and other pictorial elements. Martin calls these affect methods, which enable us to think about practices of affect in everyday life.
From the very beginning of the project, gender has been conceived as a central optic. Gender is often overlooked in studies of education mobility. But there are several reasons why the gender perspective should feature more centrally. First, in term of figures, Chinese women are more likely to study abroad. This is the same across other Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan, and warrants scholarly attention. Second, gender is also pivotal to how people negotiate their subjectivities through transnational mobility. Young middle-class urban Chinese women often attempt to break out of a certain gendered life script by pursuing education abroad. They are trying to become a self-making subject by negotiating with the neo-traditionalist ideology in China, which encourages women to get married, have children, and focus on the family. In this sense, higher education mobility is always already gendered.
As they become mobile subjects, these Chinese female students face several key challenges, since mobility is always shadowed by immobilization of various kinds along various vectors. Firstly, in Melbourne, Chinese international students are corralled into specific types of residence in the city, and as a result, excluded from local place-based social networks and certain employment opportunities that rely on local social capital. They are shut out in multiple ways while they are in Australia. Secondly, in terms of a macro picture of life trajectories, some of these women could become immobilized again upon returning to China, as class differentials cut across their opportunities for mobility after graduation. For instance, one of the participants from a not-so-wealthy family had to come back to strong family and patriarchal control when returning to China, and required against her will to work in her hometown – a small town – rather than a big city. But overall, studying abroad has been a transformative and culturally inspiring experience for these young women. Even though problems of neoliberalization are evident in Australian universities, neoliberal logics of being self-propelling and self-making market subjects could offer effective resources for negotiation as this generation of Chinese young women are confronted by state-guided gender re-traditionalization.
As the global higher education market recovers from the pandemic, Chinese international students in Australia may still be severely impacted by macro-scale geopolitical tensions, which could lead to micro-scale experiences of xenophobia, anti-Chinese racism, and social exclusion. While the future remains uncertain, we definitely need more sensitivity to the fact that Chinese students are not necessarily highly politicized. They are ordinary students, and we should get to know each other when we have the opportunity.
References:
Martin F. (2020). Chinese international students’ wellbeing in Australia: The road to recovery. The University of Melbourne. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/240399.
Martin F. (2022). Dreams of flight: The lives of Chinese Women students in the West. Duke University Press.
Xu C. L. (2022). Portraying the ‘Chinese international students’: A review of English-language and Chinese-language literature on Chinese international students (2015–2020). Asia Pacific Education Review, 23(1), 151–167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-021-09731-8.
Bios
Fran Martin is professor of cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focusses on Asia-related cultural studies and sexuality and gender studies in the context of globalization. She recently completed a major research project exploring the subjective experiences of young women from China studying in Australia, whose findings were published in 2022 in Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P.).
Lin Song is an assistant professor in communication at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. He holds a PhD in gender studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong UP, 2021). He researches on digital culture and cultural governance in China, particularly in relation to gender, sexuality, and nationalism.
Managing Editor: Tong Meng
Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM) 