Producing cosmopolitanism, consuming ‘Otherness’: Unpacking Narrative Claims of Western-situated International Students in China

• In Event: Multidisciplinary and multinational perspectives on Chinese education mobilities

Proposal

This qualitative study I overview in the paper offers a critical exploration of often personal and multi-layered ways in which transnational students from Anglophone and European countries make sense of their underlying motivations and experiences of studying for English-taught undergraduate degrees in China. While existing literature prevalently focuses on how differences are (re)produced through ISM, experiences of Western-situated international students in this study suggest differences are simultaneously consumed through ISM. Through an analysis of the narrative claims recounted in semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations of participants’ visual/textual narratives on their social media accounts, this paper ventures to tease apart 1) the ways in which these international students’ identities are constructed and performed, in relation to producing differences; 2) the aspects of ISM that produce and consume Otherness in China, as the opposition to their White, Western cultural orientation as the norm.
The research emanates from an ethnographic case study I conducted with 33 North American and European transnational undergraduate students at an US university’s branch campus in China. The data is collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, which I complement with (digital) ethnographic observations of participants’ visual/textual narratives on their social media accounts.
Findings point out, while many students reported that the decisions to come to China were impulsive and non-strategic, there was an evident similarity in terms of the desire of ‘who’ they wanted to become and were investing in becoming. In other words, there was a dominant, almost identical, image of the bona fide cosmopolitan, which study participants aspired to be, and constantly tried to ‘(re)produce’ through their journey. In addition to documenting participants’ explicit claims itself, I explore how binary oppositions and boundaries between “us” and “them” as nuanced account of stories play a vital role in the construction of the subject positions. The dichotomous oppositions used in the international students’ narrative claims create various Others in both home and destination countries, and infer hierarchical orderings of their own modes of mobility and cultural norms.
In addition, this paper also addresses issues related to the performance of cosmopolitanism; through which Western-situated international students create the Others, and simultaneously ‘consume’ the difference of the host country by reinforcing their own cultural norms. While they seek for something ‘different’, they ironically develop ‘a world of common sense’ to imagine the host country, through which western-situated international students simultaneously transgress and reinforce a singular, Western-centric perspective.

Author

• Kris Hyesoo Lee, University of Oxford