Emotions and migration aspirations: western scholars in China and the navigation of aspirational possibilities

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative research with western scholars working at Sino-foreign universities (SFUs), this paper highlights the emerging academic mobility trend moving from the Global North to South. With a theoretical focus on ‘emotions in migration’, the paper first asks how these foreign scholars’ migration aspirations towards China are initiated and nurtured before the move. Second, it explores after the move, how they emotionally encounter China in everyday life and perform agency, i.e. exercising specific ‘emotional labour’ to reframe their lived experiences and migration aspirations. Third, it examines how their capacity of materialising migration aspirations can be facilitated and constrained by a set of structural factors at the macro, meso and micro level, and how their migration aspirations towards the future are reconfigured accordingly. In doing so, the paper enriches our understanding of academic migration by focusing on the China context and unpacking the emotional predicaments involved in the lives of mobile scholars who are conventionally seen as rather privileged. Critically, this paper develops an emotionally-sensitive approach, to demonstrate that the process in which migration aspirations are generated, exercised and reproduced is an emotional, dynamic and uncertain one, constantly shaped by migrants’ agency and multiple structural forces.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• migration aspirations
• emotional labour
• structural forces
• western scholars in China

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their constructive and valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See more details at http://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/ministries/201907/18/content_WS5d2fe2b9c6d00d362f668742.html and http://english.www.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2018/01/04/content_281476001540748.htm.

2 Under previous system, foreigners can apply for either of two types of work permits – employment license for foreigners issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, or a foreign expert work permit provided by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs. The unification combines these two into single unified work permit. See more details at https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-work-visa-unified-work-permit-benefits-foreigners/.

3 See http://english.www.gov.cn/services/work_in_china/2018/01/26/content_281476026692276.htm.

4 SFUs are certified with independent legal status while Sino-foreign colleges and programmes are without independent legal status or affiliated to local universities. Also see Lu (2018).

5 ‘Ivy’ is the pseudonym; ‘F’ represents female; ‘30s’was the age range at interview; ‘Germany’ is where the participant is from; ‘SSH’ means her discipline belongs to ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’ category; ‘lecturer’ is her position at the interview. This schema applies to all the interviewees cited in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China [Grant Number 17CSH049].