Contingent Mobilities and Life Course Agency: Midlife Chinese Immigrant Women as Adult Learners

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 11: Aging, Care, and the Life Course

Abstract

This study examines how midlife Chinese immigrant women re-enter adult learning and how this process reshapes their understandings of mobility, care, and agency across the life course. These women are situated at the intersection of migration, gendered expectations, and family responsibilities. They return to learning after extended interruptions, often while navigating significant midlife transitions and acculturation in a host country. Instead of pursuing education for economic advancement or survival, their learning emerges at ambivalent crossroads. These crossroads are shaped by aging, acculturation, and transnational obligations.
Using an ethnographic research design, this study draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews and fieldnotes from 20 midlife Chinese immigrant women, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings are organized around four interrelated themes. First, re-entering learning represents a response to a translated life course, reflecting emotional tensions and structural constraints embedded in migration and caregiving roles. Second, adult learning functions as a form of acculturation: beyond skill acquisition, learning spaces become sites of cultural negotiation and affective adaptation, enabling engagement with host-society norms while maintaining ties to heritage values. Third, participants redefine mobility through daily life and reflection in the host country, shifting away from definitions of upward socioeconomic mobility toward a focus on relational well-being and a meaningful lifestyle. Finally, these processes reveal a form of gendered life-course agency, as women actively reconstruct value systems, renegotiate their roles in family and society, and challenge conventional success narratives that associate immigration with upward socioeconomic mobility.
In summary, this study interprets adult learning as a contingent form of mobility and a critical site of agency in an ambivalent crossroad. It highlights how midlife immigrant women navigate social change through reflection and everyday practice.

Authors

• Bo Jian, Syracuse University

• Merril Silverstein, Syracuse University