The Space In-between: The Materiality and Sociality of the International Branch Campus in China

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Student mobility reflections on learning

Proposal

Although international higher education is a seemingly ‘global’ process, it touches down upon, and emerges out of, particular places and ‘localised’ sites. In this paper, I use the example of an US university’s international branch campus in China to explore the ways in which international students create meanings of their everyday space of education, interact with others within it, and expand such practice to the wider world.

Four aspects of materiality- spaces, objects, bodies, and practices- are analysed through theoretical frameworks drawn from Michel Foucault’s subjectivity and Critical Race Theory (CRT)/critical Whiteness studies. This discursive approach to materiality underscores an important shift in international student mobility research: a move away from a prevalent perspective that treats transnational students and their physical environment of education as two separate and distinct entities toward a perspective that acknowledges how people, spaces, and objects are coming together as a whole, forming our experiences in and of the world.

Methodologically, this study is based on semi-structured interviews with 33 international undergraduate students from North American or European countries. I further complement participants’ oral narrative accounts with ethnographic observations of participants’ and universities’ public social media accounts.

This paper details the explicit as well as nuanced accounts about the physical environment of participants’ international education. The main findings of this study describe how transnational students create meaning and conduct themselves within and outside of institutionally staged spaces, and how materially create power relations and interplay with other actors involved. In addition, the findings of this paper provide a detailed analysis of the branch campus – to what extent can it be considered an ‘exceptional’ space? Where is it located (in terms of global, regional or local networks)? How transnational students occupy the space and make sense of the location of their education? To what extent can it be said to be in or of China?

Author

• Kris Hyesoo Lee, University of Oxford