Flexible Citizenship in the Making: Mobility Labour among Chinese Minor International Students in Canada

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Migration, Mobility, and Navigating State Systems

Abstract

Over the past two decades, international education in Canada has expanded beyond universities into the K-12 sector, making secondary schooling a key site where cross-border futures are imagined and pursued. Yet minor international students remain under-studied and are often discussed through integration lenses that understate what it takes to sustain cross-border life during adolescence. Adopting a transnational perspective, this article rethinks Aihwa Ong’s “flexible citizenship” through Chinese minor international students in Canadian secondary schools. Rather than treating flexibility as an adult, choice-based strategy, I show how it is learned as practical dispositions shaped across multiple social worlds while they move through shifting policy, schooling, and migration regimes in both China and Canada.
Drawing on narrative interviews with 22 Chinese minor international students across several Canadian cities, I develop the concept of mobility labour: the sustained, distributed work through which minors learn to live transnationally. Findings identify four linked forms of mobility labour. (1) Navigational labour translates school-board, ESL placement, course selection, and pathway planning into workable steps. (2) Exposure labour combines learning with managing public visibility in class because of language or racial identity, including being called on, corrected, stereotyped, or laughed at. (3) Positioning labour involves securing a viable place in peer life through group projects, lunch table or school clubs. (4) Maintenance labour sustains everyday routine and interdependence. The analysis reads Chinese minors’ mobility labour as a form of strategic yet constrained adultification, in which young people speak and act for their families in transnational social fields while carrying institutional uncertainty.

Author

• Yifan Liu, University of Toronto