‘Not learning’ in a learning space: spatializing embodied experiences of rural Chinese youth

ABSTRACT

Space and bodies have been conceptualized as products and producers of social relations. They are woven together to shape identities, belongings, and cultures. This paper links culture to the mutual construction of space and bodies to spatialize the embodied lives of rural Chinese boys. Stories from a qualitative study of two middle schools illustrate how these rural boys experience embodied exclusions during the making of a learning space. These students also redefine the dominant meaning of the school space through an embodied-discursive construction of their lives. They shift their interests away from academic learning and move to emphasize social knowledge that focuses on social relations and social abilities. However, their re-appropriation of the space is interpreted as a gendered expression of noncooperation, which leads to their further marginalization within the academic-oriented space. This analysis examines in which body and which space is the rural boys’ resistance produced. Turning to spatiality and embodiment provides an alternative interpretation of the counter-school culture of rural Chinese boys, which helps us more fully recognize the need for re-placing rural bodies in the Chinese education system.

KEYWORDS:

• Space
• embodiment
• counter-school culture
• masculinity
• rural education
• China

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I use pseudonyms to protect my participants’ privacy and anonymity.

2 Although I emphasize that some rural boys’ disengagement from academic learning should be understood through a co-constitutive role of space and bodies, I do not argue that this specific form of space-body association is the only way that space and bodies play their roles in rural schools. Nor do I argue that this entanglement is unique to rural Chinese students. Future comparative studies of the production of learning space in rural and urban schools and its embodied consequences will be meaningful in understanding educational inequalities in China.