Studying Between the Pearl River Delta and the Midwest: Transnational Student Mobility, Class, and Racial Transformations

• In Event: Publication mentoring workshop session
  In Special Session: Gender & Race Studies - Group A

Proposal

For budget-constrained public universities, international student recruitment has become a common revenue generation strategy to counter the drastic state disinvestment in education (Altbach and Knight 2007, Robertson et al. 2002). In many university towns, commercialized luxury housing has become a new way to attract affluent foreign students and their much-needed tuition dollars. Recent news reports on Chinese college students and families “snapping up condos” and living in “the lap of luxury” sparked widespread debate about this student group’s fervent consumption of high-profile housing. In Madison—a medium-sized university town in the Midwest, ostentatious high-rises with rooftop pools, fitness centers, and ground-floor retails, have become the common residential spaces for Chinese students. While the rapid increase of wealthy international students and their pursuit of luxury rentals expediated gentrification and aggravated class divisions, international students’ experiences of educational and social marginalization indicate the persistence of racism and racialization that are intertwined with resurgent nationalism and xenophobia in Madison and other university towns.

This research is the first transnational ethnography that investigates the implications of higher education mobility on the transnational co-constitution of class, race and space. It specifically examines middle and upper-middle Chinese students migrating between Shenzhen, a rapidly urbanizing city in south China, and a predominantly-white city of the US Midwest. To examine how transnational education mobility reshapes class and racial relations in universities, this study asks: 1) How do elite Chinese transnational students mobilize wealth, capital and global aspirations through higher education and housing consumption? 2) How are these elite Chinese students racialized in the predominantly-white Midwest, while simultaneously racializing local Black and Brown students and residents? By exploring these questions, this research shows how global economic, social and cultural forces shape the seemingly “individual” pursuit of education (Tannock 2018, p.45), and how aspirations for global educational opportunities, in turn, transforms class, racial and urban landscapes in China and the US.

From July 2017-September 2018, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork focusing on middle and upper middle-class Shenzhen students’ educational experiences, housing and other consumption practices in both Shenzhen and Madison. I paid particular attention to schooling, housing, and contours of racial ideologies in order to connect social, racial and economic relations in one place (Shenzhen) to those in another (Madison) (Emerson et al. 2011; Hart 2002). I examined various research sites: educational (libraries, student activity centers, lecture halls), residential (apartments), and urban (restaurants, coffee shops, and shopping malls), as well as multiple scales: transnational (student mobility, global real estates, racial ideologies), national (higher education commodification, gentrification, resurgent nationalism), and local (UW-Madison’s budget cuts, off-campus student housing, racial demographics).

Preliminary findings indicate that the elite Shenzhen students’ access to prestigious schools in China, particularly, international programs in high schools, as well as their abundant experiences of overseas studies and travels, helped secure their educational opportunities in the US. When making housing choices in Madison, Shenzhen transnationals tended to connect their residential location and experiences to socially learned codes of elite status. Styles, newness, size, layout, location, and amenities were required to reflect the taste of the middle and upper middle-classes’. While the elite Chinese students were using socioeconomic capital to challenge the negative racialized images of the non-white, their experiences of educational and social marginalization, however, indicate the persistence of culture-based racism and rising xenophobia in the US.

The intellectual merits of this research lie in its theoretical and methodological contribution to educational literature, including but not limited to higher education, migration studies, and urban history. This study brings much-needed attention to the Midwest, which has long been peripheral in the scholarship of international higher education. In 2016-2017, nearly a quarter of foreign students in the US were in the Midwest, among which one third were from economically-thriving China (Institute of International Education 2017). The skyrocketing attendance of Chinese students in the nation’s least racially and ethnically diverse region makes the Midwest a crucial “contact zone” (Pratt 1991), where global encounters (re)constitute educational, economic and social fabrics of the local.

This research project is timely as the increasing commodification of higher education accelerates luxury real estate development and exacerbates affordable housing shortage in many US cities, and class inequalities in education access expands considerably in China. It closely engages with the current political moments, when debates about who are responsible agents for education inequalities, gentrification, and displacement are heightened, and racism and nationalism are reenergized across borders.

Author

• Shanshan Jiang, University of Wisconsin-Madison