Working with structural anguish, confusion, and anger: “Negative” affect in sociopolitical wellbeing among Chinese International Students

• In Event: Wellbeing for whom and how? Addressing educational inequities in a divided world

Proposal

Amid rising far-right politics and political divides among the world (Snyder, 2018; Stanley, 2020), Chinese international students in the U.S. navigate a precarious sociopolitical landscape marked by intensifying geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. In this context, the sociopolitical wellbeing of Chinese international students can offer important lessons on how we can grapple with divided political landscapes and competing worldviews and cultivate an awareness of power, privilege, and positionality that calls us to interrogate global inequities and imagine solidarities that move beyond national or ideological boundaries. Drawing on life-history interview data from eight Chinese international students who develop critical consciousness of the gendered, racialized, and class-based structures embedded in the political projects of nation-states, and who continually engage in unlearning internalized systems of oppression, I argue that sociopolitical wellbeing and peace-building in education must include understanding, articulation, and working with difficult affect.


I situate this study in scholarship that conceptualizes youth sociopolitical well-being as multidimensional, relational, and linked to collective struggle (e.g., Wegemer et al., 2025), that highlights healing-centered values such as collectivized care, spiritual activism, and freedom-dreaming (e.g., Fernández & Aguilar; Fernández et al.). Theoretically, this paper is framed through contemporary affect theory, which views affects as world-making, circulating forces that materialize bodies, orient relations, and facilitate or block movement (Ahmed, 2013). In this study, I will track the affective processes in participants’ critical unlearning and explore how working with anguish, confusion, and anger becomes central to practices of sociopolitical well-being, enabling more authentic relationships with self and society. Methodologically, I use thematic narrative analysis with affective-discursive attention and reflexive memoing to trace how these students name, hold, and redirect difficult affects into unlearnings of intersecting systems of oppression such as sexism, racism, and ethnonationalism. I also attend to the temporalities of unlearning: resisting the everyday encroachment of systemic oppressions requires dwelling in discomfort and engaging long, repetitive, and retrospective time.


Preliminary analysis suggests that working with affective struggles, especially those difficult to accept (or even admit) and understand, is necessary for participants to cultivate deeper sociopolitical consciousness and action. I found that their “negative” feelings—such as anguish from disillusionment about the government, confusion about violent events involving ethnic conflicts, and anger about the unfairness of facing gender-based violence as a woman—are all long-lasting and important to their ongoing sociopolitical awakening and well-being. Importantly, these “negative” feelings, according to Sianne Ngai’s (2007) theorization of ugly feelings, are structural, and are diagnostic of constrained agency under racialized, gendered, late-capitalist conditions. On this reading, unlearning is less about disposal of “negative” affect than about its redirection toward analysis, alliance, and action. Thus, practiced by Chinese international students, the sociopolitical well-being originated from unlearning systems of oppression transforms fear, anger, and disillusionment into collective resistance and healing. In an era of rising authoritarianism worldwide, these practices point to how everyday affective labor can inform solidarity forging and peace-building educational projects.

Author

• Xun Yu, Univ. of Minnesota