Employing Performative Autoethnography in Critical Chinese Higher Education Studies: Challenges and Potentialities

• In Event: Measuring Student Attainment

Abstract

In this paper, I use autoethnography to explore the experience of being one of the first long-term foreign education faculty members in the Chinese Normal University system. The paper is rooted in qualitative methodological work on autoethnography, and theoretical work on this methodology, as well as on “foreign talents,” critical and feminist scholarship within postsecondary education, and diasporic studies. Eleven themes on methodology, foreign talent discourse, and higher education are presented. I argue for the need to employ this qualitative methodology in the development of an emerging critical sociology of higher education in China, and that analysing my experience through these theoretical and methodological lenses offers unique perspective.

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University