A Sociomaterial Investigation into Chinese International Students’ Navigation of a Doctoral Trajectory During COVID-19

Abstract

Despite a vast body of scholarship delving into international students’ educational experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about the doctoral group's perception from a sociomaterial perspective. Utilizing a group of Chinese international doctoral students while drawing on semi-structured interviews, the article unpacks what and how matter and human forces are entangled with one another as bricolages to shape a disrupted doctoral trajectory. It reveals that, within working and social spaces, human agency and non-human matter mediate, forge and produce a doctoral trajectory embedded within a complex lived experience of responding to shifting dynamics during the pandemic. It also shows how doctoral students aligned material and social assemblages to construct sociomaterial bricolages that facilitate a restoration of relative stability. The study contributes to the literature of international doctoral education with a nuanced disclosure of its navigation as a continual process of mobilization, negotiation and construction emerging from the performative flow of sociomaterial practices. It concludes that a doctoral trajectory represents network operations of experiencing and accounting for, not just what humans do with matter, but what matter does to human thinking and action.