How am I supposed to feel? Female students’ emotional reasoning about academic becoming in transnational higher education

Abstract

This article centres on female students’ reasoning about their emotional (re)actions during the process of academic becoming. It builds on an ethnographical study of students’ subjectivity processes at a jointly run Sino-Danish university in Beijing. The article draws on a theoretical framework called emotional reasoning, bridging Sara Ahmed’s notion of emotionality and Thomas Popkewitz’ rules of reasoning, to investigate the affective structuring of students’ reasoning about academic identities in transnational education. The study elucidates how students’ reasoning about their opportunities for academic transformation is connected to racialising hierarchies of gendered and aged emotional characteristics. These interlockings can be read as reflections of the unequal interlocking of power relations in a transnational educational space. The study illustrates that, within this space, the students gain differentiated affective opportunities to act, depending on whether their bodies are surfaced as white-young-female or Chinese-young-female.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotionality
• gender
• transnational education
• racialisation
• student subjectivities

Acknowledgements

I owe many thanks to Professor Lene Myong and Professor Mette Buchardt for fruitful conversations and critical readings of the early drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 SDC is a co-operative venture between Danish and Chinese universities which offers eight joint master’s degree programmes. It is a recently established educational hub by means of which both students and programmes are able to cross borders (Knight 2014).

2 All the students in the class had a mask because the air pollution in Beijing was very intense for a period of time during the autumn and winter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jin Hui Li

Jin Hui Li is an Associate professor, Master of Pedagogy and holds a PhD in sociology of education and history of education policy. Hui’s dissertation from 2018 investigated the relation between transnational university education, the development of the nation-state and student identity. Her areas of research are history of education, sociology of education, ethnography, comparative Welfare State studies and didactics – and curriculum studies with special attention towards the relationship between education, migration and state-citizen relations within the Welfare State.