Internal migration, stepping into the academic field, and talking to Pierre Bourdieu: a critical autoethnography

Abstract

This critical autoethnography interprets my internal migration experience in China. Using Bourdieu’s capital, field and habitus toolkit, I investigated my cultural capital transformation and habitus formulation when being educated in secondary schools and universities after internal migration to the city. Taking my lived experience as an example, the article illustrates the challenges of disadvantaged social groups in cultural capital exchange and the challenges of developing and re-­assembling habitus influenced by the doxa in the education field. The study highlights that the reproduction of the cultural capital of rural-to-urban migrant students is restricted by the rule of the urban education field. The article also suggests further research on the educational experience of different sub-groups of students with internal migration backgrounds.

Keywords:

• Pierre bourdieu
• rural-to-urban migration
• china
• critical autoethnography

Introduction

Why do you want to do a PhD?

I have been asked this question in discussions with the student advisor when I did my master’s degree, the very first interview with potential supervisors, and nearly every first-time meeting with other academics during enrolment. Asking others what motivates them to pursue a PhD always comes right after ‘What is your research about?’ and seems an unspoken social ritual.

I have heard several moving narratives about students’ motivation for completing a PhD in scenarios like group supervision meetings or welcome receptions for postgraduate students at academic conferences. One student undertook voluntary teaching in Tibet, which motivated them to improve the schooling experience of students there, while another chose to pursue a PhD because she intended to prove that a Chinese female PhD student can combat the long-lasting systemic bias in the STEM field. Through these experiences, I realised the link between academic research preferences and life experiences (Hill 2014). That is, the life experience embedded into the individual’s subconscious unknowingly influences their decision-making process. That calls me back to my migration experience, as I noted in my diary in 2011:

My earliest memory of [city name] is from when I was six. My parents took me to [city name] for a day, away from the small town I was born in. In my memory, [the city] was much bigger with so much "fancy stuff": mansions, neon lights, McDonalds, etc. My parents brought a microwave oven and a digital camera home, which we could have never bought in my hometown. The most memorable thing is the orange juice my aunt bought me in a convenience store: A bottle of fresh orange juice which I had never had before. I kept that bottle as my water bottle for a long time – it was tough enough to contain hot water. At that time, I had never imagined that one day I could move to a city that had better orange juice. When the time that I migrated with my parents to [the city] came, I felt excited about my "new life," which I had dreamed of for a long time.

I realised that my personal internal migration experience influenced my choice of topic for my PhD research, which focuses on the education inequity of students with internal migration backgrounds in China. The introduction to my PhD proposal highlights this:

Among the whole community of internal migrant students in [city name], I thought I was lucky enough… My own experiences left me eager to improve the education experiences and outcomes of internal migrants and motivated me to conduct this research… (PhD proposal, written in 2021)

After revisiting my PhD proposal, I started to reflect back on my life trajectory of getting to college and higher education. I found pieces of writing reflecting that the six years of staying in junior secondary and high school did not always bring up good memories. I have experienced nearly all the disadvantages noted by scholars that rural-to-urban migrant students could have (e.g. being denied access to public schools, discrimination from peers, etc.). Nevertheless, my migration experience was more of a motivator for enrolling in a PhD rather than data for a PhD study before I read Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Bourdieu 2007). Although Bourdieu denied the book was an autobiography, in the book, he explained his methodology of self-socioanalysis. Gingras (2010) noted that the methodology could be used as a model for analysing the social construction of self (i.e. thinking, evaluating, and acting) as habitus. Other scholars have used Bourdieu’s book to provide a theoretical contribution outlining a Bordieuan autoethnography model (e.g. Reed-Danahay 2017; Thomson 2010). However, the book enabled me to reflect on my internal migration process because Bourdieu tried to connect his life trajectory to his thinking and evaluation of French social science academia. I engaged in this book with a reflection on my experience because my experience entering the academic field as a first-generation academic with a disadvantaged socioeconomic background of moving from a small town to a city in China shared strong similarities with his life trajectory from rural France to Paris.

When drafting this paper, I searched the academic database in Chinese and English to find if there is an autoethnography study about internal migration and education. Unsurprisingly, no autoethnographic research was found regarding rural-to-urban migration in China. However, although some qualitative researchers working on rural-to-urban migration are from similar backgrounds, they avoid mentioning their lived experiences and how they connect their experiences to their research. The only piece I found is the writing of Cao (2021a, 2021b) in the editorial of Analytical Chemistry and his self-analysis published in Matter. He noted, ‘It is essential for people who have had the experience of successfully navigating these hardships to step up and share their experiences in public’ (Cao 2021b, 15803).

Indeed, a critical autoethnography can provide the reader with a role model that encourages those ‘non-traditional’ academics (Xu 2020, 179) who are disadvantaged by their gender, race, language or socioeconomic status to highlight the difficulties and challenges they face when they access academia. Thus, it can help to call more non-traditional academics to speak out about their challenges, which could help change the bias against non-traditional academics by attracting policymakers’ attention to policy adjustment for more equitable access to academia. Moreover, adding critical autoethnography of non-traditional academics in China to the international discussion of the higher education experience of first-generation college students and academics contributes to filling the current research gap in the sociology of education.

By revisiting my pieces of writing completed from 2008 to 2022, this critical autoethnography uses the methodological toolkit built by Reed-Danahay (2017) on Bourdieu’s theory developed around the concepts of capital, field and habitus (Bourdieu 1986, 1988) to explore my challenges of entering the academic field and in pursuing my higher degree research study. The toolkit further provides a lens to analyse the relationship between internal migration processes and the education trajectory of non-traditional academics.

Literature review

The phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration is not restricted to my family. According to Wang (2020, 578), China’s rural-to-urban migration is among ‘the largest population moves in the world.’ With the development of the Chinese economy and urbanisation, the number of people in China migrating to cities has increased rapidly over the past two decades (Bureau of Statistics 2021). In 2020, 170 million of China’s 1.4 billion people were recorded as rural-to-urban migrants (Bureau of Statistics 2021). This large influx of people to China’s cities has created a dilemma for policymakers, as they rely on cheap labour from rural areas to fill shortages of low-skilled workers (Wu, Tsang, and Ming 2014), but, at the same time, have to address the strain that migrants can place on public service systems, particularly in the education system (Goodburn 2009; Shen and Zhong 2018; Tan 2010; Wei and Hou 2010).

Nearly 5,000 studies have examined the disadvantaged position of rural-to-urban migrants regarding social welfare, education, and healthcare in the Chinese context (Yang, Smith, and Meyer 2022). Especially in the field of education, scholars widely agreed that there were significant inequities present throughout the education process, including in school admissions (Zhou and Cheung 2017), the schooling experience (Huang and Yi 2015; Wu and Logan 2016), and educational outcomes (Ren et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2021). It has been found that students with internal migration backgrounds in China often have limited access to public schools in comparison to their urban counterparts (Wang et al. 2019), experience discrimination from teachers and peers at school (Chen 2020), and struggle to keep up with the curriculum and to succeed on standardised tests (Liu, Holmes, and Albright 2015). Moreover, migrant parents have been criticised for not adequately prioritising their children’s education and for being incapable of providing sufficient academic support for their children (Liu, Holmes, and Albright 2015). Collectively, these disadvantages form a systemic barrier to accessing higher education for students with a background of internal migration.

The study of inequality experienced by students with an internal migration background has been the subject of investigations by numerous scholars seeking to interpret the underlying phenomenon with different sociological theories. Some scholars found that the systemic barriers are closely linked to families’ socioeconomic status (Ren et al. 2021; Zhang et al. 2019), cultural factors (Mu, Dooley, and Luke 2018; Yang 2022) or restrictions of public policy (Yu 2018, 2020). Specifically, Liu, Holmes, and Albright (2015) and Zhao et al. (2016) posited that rural–urban migrants, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status who comprise the majority within the rural-to-urban migrant group, often struggle to achieve academic success, regardless of whether they attend public schools or private migrant schools. Goodburn (2019, 129) conducted a longitudinal study on rural-to-urban migrant students’ education and employment and found:

Migrant youths typically enter the lower rungs of the urban service sector between the ages of 17 and 21, regardless of the post-junior high school pathway they choose, their earlier career aspiration, aptitude for study, or parents’ financial investment in education.

Indeed, existing research (Goodburn 2019; Gu and Yeung 2020) conveys a gloomy reality: it seems unlikely for students with internal-migration backgrounds to access higher education, as they have often been excluded from education during the compulsory education stage (years 1–9). Accessing higher education has become an unreachable dream for most rural-to-urban migrant students. Even though some research highlighted those rural students (i.e. students who receive secondary education in rural areas) might enter tertiary education or even higher education, Cheng, Xie, and Lo (2023) pointed out that their disadvantaged position had a significant negative impact on them even after receiving tertiary education.

Goodburn’s (2019) finding on the career path of rural-to-urban migrants confused me because I am the lived counterargument of their strong statement quoted above: moving to and being educated in the city when I was young, but then receiving higher education rather than serving bubble tea in a restaurant by the street. Moreover, the timeframe of their longitudinal study was precisely when I got my secondary education in China. The conflict between my lived experience and Goodburn’s (2019) research findings has inspired me to write an autoethnography, which ‘places personal experience within social and cultural contexts and raises provocative questions about social agency and socio-cultural constraints’ (Reed-Danahay 2009, 29).

Literature was sought to theorise the disadvantaged experience of ‘non-traditional’ doctoral students/early career researchers. I found myself not alone. Amankulova (2018) noted in an autoethnography that only a small number of students from rural backgrounds in Kazakhstan can continue postgraduate study because national poverty has made it even harder for the rural population to access higher education. It is noted in the literature that systemic structural inequalities in academia exist worldwide (Waterfield, Beagan, and Mohamed 2019). Scholars generally believe that the inequalities of policies and resources have marginalised academics from working-class and/or impoverished backgrounds (Amankulova 2018; Kim and Ng 2019; Waterfield, Beagan, and Mohamed 2019; Xu 2020), language or racially minoritised groups (Ives and Castillo-Montoya 2020) and inequitable power relations (Weng 2020).

There have been several studies that conceptualised non-traditional academics’ inequity using Bourdieu’s theory. Luo, Guo, and Shi (2018) noted that the Chinese higher education system does not provide a pathway to elite universities for low socioeconomic students, and Xu (2020) claimed that the striking rural–urban disparity and unequal distribution of power and resources shaped the disadvantaged positions of those non-traditional academics, the majority of whom are from rural areas of China. However, although Xu (2020) mentioned that cross-border mobilities might change the cultural and symbolic capital situation and bring more possibilities for non-traditional academics, little research has been conducted in the context of the rural-to-urban migration process before the tertiary education stage.

Theoretical underpinning: social mobility and Bordieuan toolkit

The Bordieuan toolkit of capital, habitus, and field has been widely utilised (Thomson 2010; Reed-Danahay 2017) within the social science discipline, specifically in education and cultural studies. According to Bourdieu, various domains of social life can be conceptualised as fields divided by various types of cultural, economic, social, or even symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1990, 1998). Thomson (2010) argued that the unique nature of school education is evident in the fact that the school serves not only as a field for the struggle for capital among social agents (e.g. students) but also as a mechanism for cultural reproduction.

For students, the ‘objective of the game’ within the educational field is the reproduction of specific linguistic, scientific, and cultural knowledge, symbolically evaluated and represented through test scores, qualifications, or resumes (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) have noted that individuals from families with high levels of capital valued in the education field, particularly cultural capital, have an advantage in the competition as they are familiar with the rules of the game. By contrast, those from other social and economic groups do not achieve as much cultural capital (Thomson 2010). Thomson (2010) argued that cultural reproduction within the educational field is a major factor in maintaining inequitable educational outcomes across generations.

The notion of habitus is introduced here to define an individual’s or a social group’s strategy of capital investment, accumulation, and transformation to strengthen their position in a specific field (Al Ariss et al. 2013; Albright, Hartman, and Widin 2018). Thomson (2010) argued that social agents (students) are disposed to think in ways that reproduce the field, such as particular kinds of knowledge and ways of thinking. Most scholars believe that previous experiences can be overridden by new experiences, leading to changes in the formulation of habitus (Barrett 2018; Musofer and Lingard 2021; Yang 2014; Zysiak 2019). Habitus tends to be durable and transposable but not unalterable (Musofer and Lingard 2021), which forms a logic of practice (the way of thinking and behaving) that guides an individual’s decision-making process, no matter whether they are in secondary education stage or after entering the academic field.

The particularity of being a student with an internal migration background in the higher education field enables this study to illustrate the capital mobilisation and acquisition process of this specific social group in China and the reconstruction process of habitus when stepping into the higher education field.

Methods

Critical autoethnography is a qualitative research method combining elements of ethnography and autobiography to examine the researcher’s cultural experiences and identities (Behar 2022). This approach involves systematically studying the researcher’s personal narrative and cultural background, including analysing cultural artefacts and self-reflection on the social, cultural, and political aspects of their experiences (Leavy 2017; Richardson and St Pierre 2000).

Furthermore, this study uses Bourdieu’s [(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice toolkit (Bourdieu 1987, 101) as a lens to reflect on my experience before entering the higher education field. Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is characterised by reflexivity, making it well-suited for use as a theoretical framework in critical autoethnography (Gingras 2010). Bourdieu’s books Homo Academicus (Bourdieu 1988), The State Nobility (Bourdieu 1998) and Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Bourdieu 2007) are considered as critical autoethnography because they are all ‘both ethnographic and sociological studies of higher education in France’ (Reed-Danahay 2017, 149) In this study, I employed critical autoethnography to investigate my experiences as a student with an internal migration background and to reflect on how these experiences have shaped my position and habitus within the higher education field. The study also adds to the methodology toolkit that Reed-Danahay (2017) developed using Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, field, and habitus by adding the application and discussion of Bourdieu’s concepts of illusio and doxa.

The data for this study were generated from my own records, including two written diaries (2008–2010 and 2010–2011), photographs and posts on various online platforms (825 social media posts from Facebook, WeChat Moments, and personal website from 2012 to 2022), 89 notes from memos on my mobile phone since 2015, and a diary following communication with a psychologist in 2022. These sources were chosen because they document my migration experiences from the early stage of my internal migration in 2008. Further, they present a rich and diverse range of materials for analysis.

The analysis of cultural artefacts and self-reflection approaches were utilised to make meaning of the data (Chang 2016). In the study, I coded and analysed the data using the Bordieuan theory toolkit, including capital, field, and habitus. The data were classified into emergent themes based on this theoretical framework of the contributors to practice (i.e. capital, habitus and field), resulting in the identification of three themes: cultural capital transformation, the doxa in the education field, and challenges in entering the higher education field and developing academic habitus. The following sections will present the results of this analysis and explore these themes in more detail.

Findings and discussion

Internal migration and education choices: ‘all in for cultural capital.’

The experience of internal migration not only motivated my PhD research but has also had a significant impact on the course of my life. Just like never having fresh orange juice before internal migration, the disadvantage in cultural capital, as well as other capitals, was evident in my academic work, personal records, and even notes with my psychologists that document the migration experience:

I was a high-achieving student in my hometown. I was thinking I would survive the junior ­secondary school entry exam. The student ID number in the urban school is given based on the ranking of the entry exam. However, I am 33 of 40 in the class, with a shallow mark in English. In fact, my English teacher told me I only got 8 out of the total 30 marks. It is fair because I completed that exam basically based on my intuition: guessing the answer. (Diary, written in 2011)

After talking with classmates later, I found my urban peers had started learning English or other languages in kindergarten. However, learning English was a privilege in my hometown. I had never learnt English before year 3. Rather than the few textbooks and audio tapes I had, my urban peers had a lot more study options than I did: private supplementary tutoring or courses offered by foreigners, which could never be offered in my hometown. At that time, I could never have known Bourdieu’s claim that cultural capital is classified by classes, and I had never realised that internal migration could lead to such a disadvantaged position in the urban education field.

In contrast to the self-selected strategy of ‘playing the game’ for students (Bathmaker, Ingram, and Waller 2013, 723), my early migrant experience and educational choices were entirely dependent on my ‘social agents’: my parents. Like the parents described in the literature, they had high educational expectations for me and ‘took verbal forms of action’ (Xu and Montgomery 2021, 563). However, they did much more than just reminding me that ‘You need to study hard.’ They adopted a strategy that I describe as ‘all in for cultural capital’: It meant that my parents gave up everything that was not related to my academic development (e.g. their leisure activities) but worked hard to pay for everything I said that could benefit my education: the tuition, private tutoring, and even other cultural capital development activities (e.g. going to the cinema).

However, despite the limited budget, my parents still wanted to provide me with the best education they could afford. They enrolled me in a private foreign language junior secondary school because we were rejected from free public schools¹ because of their local admission policy. The private school’s tuition was extremely expensive, burdening my family. (PhD proposal, written in 2021)

Moreover, migrating to the city was in itself one component of their strategy: I would have never accessed those cultural capital development opportunities if we had stayed in my hometown. Migrating to the city and putting full family effort into education is more like an unguided adventure rather than a ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting mode. ‘Concerted cultivation’ was introduced by Lareau (2002, 747) to describe middle-class parents’ engagement in fostering children’s talent through organised leisure activities. Converted cultivation is more applied to the middle and upper class (Irwin and Elley 2011), and it is a more dedicated path towards success in education. One of the reasons that the middle and upper class can apply the strategy is that they already know and can assess how the game in the urban education field is set up and what strategy they need to apply to help their children. Thus, their children’s cultural capital development is orchestrated based on children’s talent (Lareau 2002). Lareau (2002, 747) describes working-class parents’ parenting method as ‘natural growth.’ Specifically, parents only care for children and leave children to organise their activities themselves. As my narrative shows, I played a more active role in choosing the cultural capital elements that I wanted to acquire while my parents supported me financially. Indeed, even though my parents might have intended to apply converted cultivation, they had to trust me, follow the ‘natural growth’ approach, and choose to go ‘all in,’ because they lacked knowledge and experience about the higher education system (Cheng, Xie, and Lo 2023).

As Bathmaker, Ingram, and Waller (2013) noted, students may develop self-awareness about acquiring and mobilising capital. Upon entering the field of higher education, I came to realise the disadvantage of a lack of valued and recognised cultural capital in the urban education field:

As the curriculum of my hometown is far behind that of the new school, I have had to catch up on a lot of the content. I have nothing in common with my classmates because I do not even know what a digital game or K-pop music is. (Diary, written in 2011)

The above quote shows the distinction between me and my urban peers in the knowledge and understanding of varied cultural aspects. The asymmetry of cultural capital is not limited to curriculum learning but also encompasses many cultural elements of daily life, such as leisure reading, attendance at concerts or dramas (embodied cultural capital), and access to cultural objects and services (objectified cultural capital) (Li 2011). This suggests that the acquisition of cultural capital also encompasses a range of cultural experiences and resources that can shape an individual’s cultural capital and social position.

I found the statement ‘nothing in common’ in my diary interesting when I tried to interpret it using the lens of Bourdieu. I did not state, ‘I know nothing (I have no cultural capital)’ because I may have the self-awareness that I actually have cultural capital. I was good at playing Chinese chess (objectified cultural capital, as a form of tangible objects of culture), and I had some knowledge of daily life (embodied cultural capital). This is the cultural capital that is developed and valued in my hometown. However, as long as I moved to the city, some of the cultural capital that I carried with me to the city from the small town was unfortunately not recognised and valued in the urban education field, which made me feel different from others.

My perception of being disadvantaged regarding valued cultural capital persisted throughout my pre-university education and influenced my daily experiences, as reflected in my diary entries from that time. In 2010, I noted in my diary:

They [my classmates] have formed a small group to discuss what to do during the weekend. They talked about going to the cinema and then having a party. I have only been to a cinema once if the movie played on the playground at night counts. I have never been to a party before. I do not even know what behaviour is appropriate. Actually, I have seldom had conversations with them, they asked me once, but I was afraid that I could ruin the party. I wanted to hang out with them, but it was something I did not know, pulling me back and locking me inside my room.

I thus wrote, ‘I was the one who has already been left behind by peers, the school, and even the society.’ The statement of being ‘left behind’ made me further reflect on my position in the urban education field, as I placed myself at a disadvantage to my dominant urban peers. I was not involved in the rule negotiation of the game but followed the rules set up by others. This perception intensified upon entering the higher education field, eventually becoming tied to my parents’ decisions to migrate internally:

Not everyone wants to go from small to big cities, and,

from big cities to foreign countries like you do.

Not everyone expects a higher wage and a better life as you would like.

I do not like [City Name]. I do not like everything about it.

I want to return to [Town Name] as a primary school teacher. (Social media post, written in 2015)

Throughout my secondary education, I experienced a sense of self-consciousness and a conflict between the self-consciousness and the ‘all in for cultural capital’ strategy implemented by my parents. This feeling led to feelings of doubt about my parents’ approach to my education. The doubt and uncertainty reflected what Bourdieu (1998, 181) described as ‘the murder of the dead father’ in the progress of transforming from ‘public to nobility’: becoming an elite student in a top university. He stated that the first ‘murder’ happens when an individual tries to deny the consciousness of ‘the public’ coming from the hometown; and the second ‘murder’ happens when denying ‘the petit-bourgeois habitus.’ In my situation, I conducted the ‘murder’ first by disposing of the habitus from the small town, and I murdered them again by questioning their ‘all in for the cultural capital strategy’ they already possessed. I realised that I did not actually ‘murder’ my parents because I did not attempt to change their behaviour, but instead, I was trying to ‘murder’ the habitus that they passed to me through family education.

However, upon entering the higher education field and attempting to use my understanding of ‘the rule of the game’ to formulate ‘the logic of the practice’ (Thomson 2010, 10), I had a much stronger feeling of how to gradually ‘internalise and normalise’ my parents’ educational expectations (Xu and Montgomery 2021, 565). Xu and Montgomery (2021) stated that children tend to transfer their parents’ educational expectations as a kind of motivation in their study. That was reflected in my finally understanding that there was no other way but to continuously transform and acquire cultural capital, to get institutionalised cultural capital such as getting into undergraduate study or being acknowledged in the academic field:

I thus put all my effort into my study. I worked hard in high school and ended up going to university, then to further my studies in [Country Name], and now completing a PhD in [Country Name]. (PhD proposal, written in 2021)

I earned everything myself. I sometimes felt jealous of someone who could easily win something [scholarship or publication]. (Social media post, written in 2021)

Later in the secondary education stage, I felt that I had to accept my parents’ decision to migrate to the city, as I recognised that I was in a situation where I could only continue my current path. This suggests a sense of resignation or acceptance of the circumstances in which I found myself, perhaps due in part to a feeling of being ‘in the middle of nowhere’ when I was in high school (Social media post as self-reflection, written in 2020): I was disconnected from my previous social and cultural fields and most of my friends from childhood; and I could not make new friends easily in high school because of the massive difference in our cultural backgrounds (Hu and West 2015).

In general, whether my effort is the passive acceptance of parent-led cultural capital conversion or self-led acquisition of cultural capital or not, its essence is a process of reproducing other capital (such as economic or social capital) as cultural capital through school education. It is worth noting, however, that such a conversion process is not equal for internal migrants who are in a disadvantaged position in the education field. As I was rejected by public schools in the city, my parents paid much higher tuition fees than local urban students to enrol me in a private foreign language school. In junior secondary school, I had to catch up with the curriculum content to survive in exams while my urban peers were participating in extracurricular activities or taking advanced classes (e.g. advanced curriculum for high school):

We [my family] have moved into a suburb that accommodates new migrants from other cities because the property lease prices are affordable there. It is geographically “the middle of nowhere”: at the very boundary of the city. One of my daily routines involves taking a bus for approximately 40 minutes to get home from secondary school. During that time, I can either listen to some music through my MP3 player (the only leisure equipment I have) or complete my homework on the dark and rickety bus. Several times, I have seen a girl in my class taking the same bus, to undertake piano lessons, with the latest iPods. We have never talked in three years; we are on the same bus, but we do not seem to be in the same world. (Diary, written in 2011)

It is worth mentioning that the narratives in my individual migration process have supported the critique of the ‘rucksack approaches’ used in migration research using Bourdieu’s theory (Erel 2010). The rucksack approach defined that individuals can bring capital from their origins to utilise or depose capital in the new field. The approach is criticised because it ignores individuals’ agency: individuals producing and reproducing (mobilising, enacting, validating) cultural capital in an education setting. My narratives show ‘the complex interplay between past and present’ (Reay 2004, 434): I kept the cultural capital that was valued, deposed the capital that was not valued, and, more importantly, tried to acquire more other forms of cultural capital which were more valued in the urban education field.

Nonetheless, if an individual has an unfavourable position in the educational field, any efforts to reproduce cultural capital may require a more significant investment in other types of capital (e.g. economic capital, in my case). This unbalanced conversion process may yield positive results in a specific field (the education field). However, at a macro level, it may be unable to generate additional benefits due to a decrease in the total capital held by the household. This suggests that the reproduction of cultural capital may be more challenging for those in disadvantaged positions (Mu and Jia 2016), as the exchange rate and the rule of the game are set by the people who are in the dominant position in the field, and so the benefits of this process may be limited in scope.

The ‘doxa’: unspoken ideologies in the education field

Upon returning to my writing pieces in this study, I found I had made numerous self-reflections on internal migration and education. These reflections, in childhood terms, often described the Bordieuan ‘doxa’: the commonsense beliefs, values, and practices within the education field, both at the pre-undergraduate and higher education stage (Bourdieu 1979; Deer 2012).

This understanding of the hidden ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1990, 11) is reflected in the cultural capital transformation process, as I described ‘nothing in common’ with peers in secondary school:

In class, I was often ridiculed for my slightly different pronunciation from that of [the city] and for my inability to participate in discussions about StarCraft [a digital game] and Taylor Swift with my classmates. As a result, I often felt invisible in the classroom, except when I provided an incorrect answer to a teacher’s question that was obvious to others… I even began to suspect that my school uniform was not as white and neat as my classmates wore, even though we were all required to wear the same style. (Diary, written in 2011)

Allen and Anderson (1994, 70) have extended Bourdieu’s notion that taste (as a form of art, music, and literature understanding) is a ‘social weapon’ that ‘reflects a symbolic hierarchy that is determined and maintained by the socially dominant in order to enforce their distance or distinction from other classes of society.’ It became clear to me that the arbitrary distinctions in taste (Hayward 2004) I was experiencing in the classroom were not limited to the curriculum but were more present outside the school context (Yang 2022). For example, digital games and American singers were never subjects tested by exams. Hayward (2004) argues that subtle stylistic differences, such as certain accents or linguistic forms, may mark the speaker and contribute to feeling invisible: being excluded and marginalised from the community of urban students.

The effort of embedding myself into a community of urban peers started when I realised the distinctions between us, described as ‘mimetic identification’ (Butler 2011, 116). Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) defined this as the process of developing a ‘second nature’ by conforming to social norms repeatedly:

I began practising the [city name] dialect with taxi drivers and reinforcing my understanding of the region by watching local TV programs and reading books. (Diary, written in 2011)

Moreover, looking back on my experiences, I could see evidence of how I tried to conform to the doxa of the educational field in a self-reflection on my reading habits:

Looking back, I may not have read a book for myself in years. My dream is also only a dream of being others. It is extreme, isn’t it? … Reading books to fit in with peers is not a healthy or fulfilling way to live. (Social media post, written in 2016)

Combining the two examples of dialect and reading, I find what Hayward (2004) referred to as a fixed pattern of personal integration: reinforcing or attempting to undo to fit in with the classificatory and evaluative dispositions institutionalised in the education field. In the case of dialects, I tried to eliminate the negative effects of my outsider dialect by learning the mainstream dialect. In the case of reading habits, I used reading to reinforce mainstream knowledge in the local field. As Hayward (2004) noted, those practices showed their advantage in acquiring habitus which suited the specific field. Although Sayer (2010) indicated that habitus is not easily influenced by critical reflection and conscious manipulation, the unspoken institutionalised classification guided or forced me to adopt the new practice by influencing the value of my capital and the formulation of habitus.

Bourdieu (2000, 135) defined the way of practice as illusio: ‘a way of being in the world.’ Actively seeking changes in habitus could be seen as an investment which is ‘taken in and by the game’ in the field (Wacquant and Bourdieu 1992, 112). That is, individuals develop their way of being in the process of playing in the field. In the narrative, the investment is not just taking ‘what I have’ from the small town into the game but also making an effort to know the rules of the game and moderate the approach to fit in the doxa in the field.

According to Musofer and Lingard (2021), habitus tends to be durable but not unalterable. The illusio of changing habitus to suit the doxa in the field can never be easy and is useless and painful. In my social media reflections, I used two metaphors to describe my feeling about the habitus transformation process in my internal migration experience:

I feel like an ant, with a big dream in my head, a weak body that does not match this dream, and carrying stuff much heavier than I can afford. (Social media post, written in 2017)

[My effort] was like thrusting a plastic knife into the air, seemingly unable to do anything but make myself feel better. I was playing a game I could never win. (Social media post, written in 2020)

These narratives highlighted my challenges and struggles when faced with the dominant group’s values and standards defined in Bourdieu’s theory, but they also ignored what people can achieve in their practice of reflexivity (Adams 2006; Sayer 2010), that is, my resistance to a dominant rule (doxa): the self-awareness of a critical distance from the social world.

Things were made worse by a lack of deliberation because of the lack of capital and disadvantaged position in the education field. Moreover, even if I was succeeding in the capital transformation in the pre-tertiary education field, the social trajectory still negatively influenced my practice in the higher education field.

Stepping into the higher education field with a mismatched habitus: le miraculé, so what?

When reading through Bourdieu’s own social trajectory, I found what he called le miraculé (Bourdieu 1990): he came from a small and isolated village in southern France, and was a first-generation high school graduate entering the academic field, but had extraordinary success in academia (Bourdieu 2007). However, I felt that game-playing would never end and actually would be the start of a new game in the academic field. I can hardly say I succeeded in the academic field. In fact, just entering the new game, which was going on in the academic field, was a struggle for me. Our similar experience of internal migration and disadvantaged background enabled me to reflect on what Bourdieu (2007, 89) noted:

I discovered little by little… the particularities of my habitus… appear to me to be linked to the cultural particularities of my region of origin. … if some of my most banal reactions were often misinterpreted, it was often because of the manner … in which I sometimes manifested them, a mixture of aggressive shyness and a growling…in a sense too seriously, and that is contrasted so much with the distant assurance of well-born Parisians…

It reminds me of all the ‘first times’ when stepping into the academy: trying to clarify the notion of rural-to-urban migration in the first supervision meeting, speaking too fast and nervously in the first conference presentation, and feeling burnt out after leading one seminar with several postgraduate students – all totally different from what I had experienced before. People knew each other in the town, and there were always so many relatives and friends coming and supporting you when you talked or performed, either in the community garden or the town hall. However, I had never experienced that kind of support since my internal migration, instead I had a sense of being criticised and judged by my internal migration identity. The lived experience of being ‘a nobody’ from a small town came to my mind, and then I felt myself ‘overreacting’ (diary, written in 2021) during the process of being a mimicker of ‘well-born academics’ in the academic field.

In Bourdieu’s book Homo Academicus (Bourdieu 1988), he defined ‘academic capital’ as a specific form of capital that plays a significant role in the academic field. Academic capital is an institutionalised form of cultural capital that includes prior educational achievement, a ‘disposition’ to be academic, and specially designated competencies (Naidoo 2004, 459). My example of ‘overreacting’ or being ‘a mimicker’ illustrated non-traditional academics’ struggle to acquire academic capital. In the process of academic capital acquisition, I once again faced the ‘nothing in common’ scenario I faced in junior secondary school: I still felt lonely and helpless.

Bourdieu (2007) highlighted the correlation between an individual’s habitus and cultural background and how habitus can be a sense of style, decency, humour, and reality in shaping an individual’s practice. Bourdieu stated that habitus is ‘as fish in water’ when it matches a specific social world, making it well fitted to the field (Wacquant 1989, 43). Nevertheless, narratives from Bourdieu and my personal artefacts provide an example of the other side of the coin: the mismatched and disadvantaged habitus in the academic field shaped Bourdieu’s ‘mixture of aggressive shyness and a growling’ and led me to see a psychologist because of a crisis in interpersonal sensitivity and paranoid ideation caused by ‘extreme stress and worry’ (in psychologist notes in 2022):

I thought I had excellent interpersonal skills with people with more power relationships than me – I felt pretty used to it. I can learn a lot from them and can sometimes leave a good impression… However, I did not know how to communicate with my PhD colleagues at an earlier stage – I just did not know how – because I had no experience. I was always the person who was in a relatively disadvantaged position… because of my internal migration ­experience. (Diary sent to a psychologist in 2022)

As noted by Bourdieu’s (1987, 101) ‘[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice,’ it would be reasonable to make the statement that when stepping into the academic field, the disadvantaged position in habitus also leads to difficulty in practice. It is worth noting that although my parents and I made great progress in providing me with a pathway into academia by exchanging other capital for cultural capital, the habitus of being an academic, as the way of style, decency, humour, and reality, could not be passed from my parents to me. Instead, it was incumbent on me to exert greater efforts in cultivating the habitus necessary for success in the higher education field. In my mind, unlike my more privileged ‘well-born’ colleagues, I had to rely on my capacity for reflexivity, a task that is essential but often overlooked.

Concluding notes

Prior to composing this paper, I met with a visiting scholar from Germany, during which I was once again confronted with queries such as ‘why do you want to do a PhD?’ The discourse on internal migration and the academic field eventually ended with ‘it will be hard [to survive in academia] if you are different from others [who are at an advantaged position in the higher education field].’ Indeed, my own experiences with internal migration have given me first-hand insight into the manifold inequalities, including cultural inequality, that internal immigrants frequently endure.

In the context of China, I present a case of the exchange and reproduction of cultural capital among internal migrants in the educational field. From a micro perspective, this case illustrates the various difficulties faced by Chinese internal immigrants, including their disadvantaged position in the field, the additional costs required for the conversion of cultural capital, the misalignment between their habitus and the field, and the challenges and struggles they encounter when attempting to enter the academic field. The marginalised position may lead the holders to be in an ‘anti-institutional mood’ and thus ‘uncover the social processes that maintain the established order and marginalise them, to take sides and feel sympathy with other marginal groups, both within academia and in society in general’ (Behtoui and Leivestad 2019, 227).

However, I am more concerned about parents’ struggle and sacrifice for their children with such a disadvantaged background. This article notes that the ‘all in for cultural capital’ strategy is more of an unguided adventure. As schools function as a mechanical system that reproduces the social stratification system (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), social exclusion by class, or position in the field, is still happening in the school setting in China. Thus, it is important to make parenting more than verbal support: parent–teacher partnership may be more explored by schools and policymakers to help parents play a more important and active role in their children’s education.

Despite prior research reporting the changes in the characteristics of students with internal migration backgrounds, and improvements in their pre-tertiary education access over time (Hu and West 2015; Yang 2022; Yang, Smith, and Meyer 2022), this paper notes that getting access to higher education is not the perfect end, but is just the start of forming an equitable education environment for this specific underrepresented social group. Since the easing of policy restrictions (Yang 2022), the emerging issues of capital disadvantages, the challenges and struggles of migrant parents for their children’s education, especially the formulation of students’ habitus in the urban education field, need researchers’ further attention. It is worth noting that even though internal migration families are playing the game in the education field as a whole, this study provides an example of the conflict, negotiation and compromise within the family. Further research attention could be placed on the education decision-making process within internal migrant families, which has not been researched ethnographically.

I was reading Educated by Tara Westover when I received the revision decision of this manuscript. In her novel, she critically reflected on how her upbringing and early life influenced her identity construction and her trajectory to becoming a historian. I had a strong empathy for Tara because she also mentioned the influence of parenting and what effort she has thus had to make to succeed in academia: combating the influence of the original fundamental Mormons family on her habitus, completing her undergraduate study and earning a doctorate. I realised that I am actually much luckier because my parents put all their effort into my education, while Tara’s father denied her access to schools. However, no matter whether our families supported us or not, the long-term effect of the habitus passed over from our original families still influenced us significantly. Westover (2018, 292) wrote, ‘You’ve been pretending that you’re someone else. Someone better. But you are just this.’ It is as simple as what I have done in the academic field, pretending to be a ‘well-born Parisian’ (Bourdieu 2007, 89) and trying to get acknowledged by the community to which I never belonged.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr Jo Smith, Dr Frauke Meyer, Dr Esther Fitzpatrick, Ms Xiangchen Zhang and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The author has no funding to report.

Notes

1 Different from the UK, for rural-to-urban migrant students in China, enrolling in public schools is difficult because it requires the household to be registered in the city. As we were migrants, our household couldn’t register.