Abstract
In this interview, Fran Martin discusses gendered transnational education mobility in relation to research methodology, the contradictions of neoliberal ideology, and the social implications of ethnographic research. Challenging stereotypical and often biased portrayals of Chinese international students in the Anglosphere, Martin argues for the importance of attending to the irreducible details of individual life experiences and explains how to employ affective methods to convey these details to readers. Calling for attention to gender as a key perspective in understanding education mobility, she discusses how the global neoliberal discourse underpinning this form of mobility can be restricting and empowering at the same time. She also reflects on the ways in which researchers could engage with social and policy realities and contribute to improving international students’ well-being.
Fran Martin is Professor of Cultural Studies at University of Melbourne. Her research focusses on Asia-related cultural studies and sexuality and gender studies in the context of globalization. Some of her best-known research analyses television, film, literature, and other forms of cultural production in contemporary transnational China. She is fluent in Mandarin. Her recent book, Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke University Press 2022), explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. In this interview, we start from the theoretical and methodological orientations of the book, before discussing why gender constitutes a key perspective in understanding education mobility and the social implications of such ethnographic research.
In her 2022 article based on a a comprehensive review of research on Chinese international students, Xu identi-fied the problem of “epistemic injustice”: especially in the English-language academia, Chinese international students have been misrepresented as neoliberal, political, pedagogical, and racialized subjects. Your book presents a very different picture from earlier research. The fact that Chinese readers enthusiastically embraced the book also proves this. What do you think made your portrayals of Chinese women students different?
I am glad you find the book different. I hope it is. I think the main difference lies in the method. It was a very luxurious method that I used, both in terms of resources and in terms of time. In education studies, the focus would be on international students’ pedagogic outcomes. And the methods tend to be more quantitative. My book is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study over several years. The funding that I had from the Australian Research Council enabled me to really spend time with the students and hang out with them, in line with classic ethnographic methods. This enabled me to bring out the detail, the human-level experience that the students have over time. So I really hope that the book can challenge the ideas you mentioned, which I agree are very prevalent in Australia as well as throughout the Anglosphere: this misunderstanding of Chinese students as a kind of undifferentiated mass. But once you get to know them, you cannot miss how different they are from each other, the variety of their experiences, of their backgrounds, of their personalities. During my research I have encountered students across the spectrum –in terms of their family backgrounds, academic aspirations, political orientations, and understandings of gender and feminism. In the end, what count are those irreducible details of the person, not the generalizations. I tried to include these details in the book so that they could come out for different readers. I hope they would help readers to understand this widely misunderstood group.
Your book also reads very different from typical scholarly books because you included very vivid materials collected from your fieldwork. You stated in the introduction that the book aims to explore how education mobility feels (Martin, 2022, p. 29), gesturing towards affect theories. You also referred to affect theories throughout the book. But I noticed that you did not commit to a focused discussion of affect theories, for instance as Sara Ahmed (2004) or Ian Burkitt (2002) would. How do you understand your book’s engagement with the issue of affect?
I thought a lot about affect in the lead-up to writing and researching the book. We even created a reading group here at the University of Melbourne, and together we read a lot of affect theories. What I came out of that with was the feeling that I wanted to use affect methods and think about practices of affect in everyday life, and not so much to think about affect theory. So in terms of theoretical orientation, I tried to be more in line with Avery Gordon’s (1997) and Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) work, or even Raymond Williams’ (1961) notion of the structure of feeling, which is not an ideological structure, but a historical structure that creates a commonality in the ways people feel at a particular moment in history about particular things. I refer to the work of those scholars more than I refer to that of Ahmed (2004) or Burkitt (2002). At times—paradoxically!—affect theories can be the most densely intellectualized and the most abstract writing you can find. This was not the path I wanted the book to take, because I believe that often what happens to people affectively cannot be reduced to theoretical analysis.
I wanted to get into the book what I encountered in my ethnography: participants’ subjective and embodied experiences of their world. The best way to do this, I found, was through narrative. I intentionally included stories from my fieldwork, which is not uncommon in ethnographic writing. I also included screenshots of social media posts and other pictorial elements. I wanted them to stand for themselves, so that readers could feel something of what my participants feel, which cannot be achieved by multiple pages of densely intellectual, abstract theory. There is one very affective drawing of a map of Melbourne by one of my participants in the book. In the map, she showed “this is where I fell in love,” “this is where my heart was broken,” “here is where I remember feeling excited.” These images are almost pure affect. It moves you like a form of visual poetry. So social media posts, images, and textual assemblages—these are the things that I wanted to pay respect to. That is why I intentionally moved into slightly less academic writing styles in some places in the book.
Let us talk about gender as an important aspect of the book—which, I believe, is also the reason why the book has attracted so much attention in China recently. It seems that gender is still not a prominent topic in mobility studies. How has gender become a key perspective of your book? How could a gendered perspective change the way we understand mobilities?
The project, from the beginning, was always going to be about gender. There are a lot of answers to the question why gender has become a central optic. In terms of figures, for example, there are more women students coming out of China for tertiary education in western countries than men. But if we look at the birth gender ratio in the 1990s, there are more male than female babies born in China. Therefore, we can see that women appear to be about 30% more likely to study abroad, which is interesting in itself. And it is not just China—scholars working on Asian education mobility have observed the same case across South Korea, Japan, and other countries. Yet gender is often overlooked as an optic through which to understand education mobility, with some notable exceptions. In feminist geography, scholars like Doreen Massey (2013) have argued for decades about the ways that space itself is gendered. There is also a journal—Gender, Place and Culture—dedicated to thinking through gender in relation to geographies. Mobility and immobility can be gendered as well. Typically, in many, if not all, societies in the world, femininity and women have been associated with the home, and men and masculinity have been associated with the world. Women are associated with stasis inside home; and men with moving around outside in the public sphere.
I think we need to bring the gender perspective more strongly to the field of education mobility studies. In the case of Chinese students, it seemed to me at the outset that transnational education mobility might relate in interesting ways to gendered contradictions faced by this generation of young middle-class urban women in China. My book begins by painting these contradictions as a basic starting point: on one hand, Chinese women in their twenties are exposed to an appealing neoliberal script which suggests that one should be a self-propelling, self-making, self-animating market subject; on the other hand, they also face a neo-traditionalist script bolstered by the state, which suggests that past a certain age—and that age is very clear, it is 30—they should get married, have children, and focus on the family. Almost every woman I spoke to in this generation immediately recognized this contradiction. There is a huge social pressure there. And I thought that maybe moving abroad for study for several years in one’s late teens or early twenties could have some impact on the way this generation of young women negotiate this tension. It seemed like an interesting question.
I found that becoming an international student did impact on how this generation of women navigate those contradictions—it may delay or reroute the standard feminine life script. My participants seemed to be fairly clear that after moving overseas to study, one tends to get married a few years later than one would have otherwise, or one could get completely rerouted and do something totally different. This is one of my generalizations—and I do not like generalizations—but it did seem that having studied in Australia or in the west had encouraged them into a more neoliberal style of self-conception and less of a neo-traditionalist gendered self-conception. In short, gender is central to the life conditions this generation of Chinese women students face. I think it is also probably why the book has sparked interest in China—because this contradiction and the gender question go far beyond just those women who study abroad.
I am hoping to contribute to the shared project of a group of scholars who work on gender and education mobility. Right now, I am beginning to get involved in another project with some colleagues in India who look at gender and education mobility domestically—women in India who move from rural villages to metropolitan centers for study. How does that impact on their gendered life course? I think there are interesting conversations to be had there. We should also not neglect domestic education mobility in China, which is of course much bigger than transnational education mobility. When I read through reviews of my book by Chinese readers, I came across some comments saying: “this is all very well, but these are privileged girls. Why doesn’t she care about the ordinary people?” I think this is a fair comment (although I do pay a lot of attention to class—albeit attention to the privileges of the middle classes!), and we could also expand the discussion of gendered education mobility to less privileged groups in China.
You are very right to point out these contradictions between a neo-traditionalist and neoliberal ideologies in China today. I think you were referring mainly to the situation in China domestically. When these women students are, to borrow from the title of your book, “in the West,” they appear to embrace a more transnational, capitalist neoliberal ideology that goes hand in hand with the neoliberal higher education system. This ideology can sometimes be empowering, but it is itself a form of oppression upon women. Apparently, there is a paradox here: these women must submit themselves to another set of very much gendered neoliberal ideology as they try to free themselves from the constraints of neo-traditional ideology. What is your opinion about this situation? Must they choose the lesser evil?
I think this question really gets to one of the core problems that the book identifies. I will talk about this in detail, but in short, I would say the tools of neoliberal discourse and self-making seem tactically useful to young women in navigating their positions within families, allowing them to have more power. But it is very entangled. I discuss this issue in the book’s conclusion when I consider the relationship between subjective neoliberalization, which I found to be a trend at the point of graduation for these women students, and gendered detraditionalization. As a feminist scholar in the broadly leftist tradition of cultural studies, I would personally tend to be critical of both gendered neo-traditionalism, and subjective neoliberalization, in the sense that I do think both are problems within today’s cultural politics. But in the case of this research, I found that subjective neoliberalization can actually have progressive gender effects! This is not to say that we should champion neoliberalization as the answer to everything. A key point here is that the gendered benefits of the neoliberal discourses my research participants came more and more to identify with are different from the ways in which neoliberal-style social and cultural reforms have been enacted within China. In China and in other post-socialist societies, cultural neoliberalization is accompanied by gendered re-traditionalization guided by the state. But when these Chinese women travelled abroad for study, their growing tendency to view themselves as self-entrepreneurial market subjects in a global field went hand in hand with a growing critique of neo-traditionalist gender ideologies and concrete opportunities to delay or avoid being rerouted into care work in the domestic domain. In this sense, neoliberal logics did give these women some sense of “freedom.” Of course, we could critique this and say it is false consciousness. But as a discourse with an emphasis of individual self-determination, it seemed very powerful to these young women, and brought them gendered benefits.
So in response to your question, you could indeed say it is a case of choosing the lesser of the two evils—but an important caveat is to say that I suspect things are not so simple in practice. It is one thing to get re-interviewed at the point of graduation and asked how you have changed by virtue of studying abroad. It is another thing to actually live through the coming years in your life. Can women ever decisively choose neoliberal over neo-traditional gendered selfhood? Or is it always a process of negotiation, always unsettled and involving multiple compromises, reroutings, and self-reinventions along the way? I suspect that it is not as simple as people tended to say in a recorded interview at the end of their studies.
That is also one of the things I am exploring in the follow-up study I am now conducting. This study will be interviews only, no longer so deeply ethnographic. But I will look at what happens to these women next, 3 to 5 years since I last spoke with them. So we will see. I just suspect that these logics may prove to be more entangled and harder to separate than we initially might think.
I think this is also related to another tension running through the book—the tension between mobility and immobility. I noticed this tension at two levels. The first is the macro level in terms of participants’ life trajectories. Although these women students seemed to be privileged mobile subjects, there was also a certain sense of immobility in terms of how they arrange their lives, especially if and when they come back to China. The second is a micro level. That is, how international students are constrained by their student status in the host society, for example in terms of visas and social benefits. In the book you discuss “sociospatial segregation” (Martin, 2022, p. 69) in Melbourne, which in a sense makes the students profoundly immobile. This reminded me of the “cash cow” rhetoric, where international students seem to be told to just stay put and pay money. How do you understand this tension between mobility and immobility? How do they animate international students’ life experiences?
This book is very much about mobilities, but as we know, mobilities are always shadowed by immobilization of various kinds and along various vectors, for example along class, racial, or national lines. Clearly, my participants are highly mobile in the sense that they have a chance to leave their hometowns and their home country. This makes them more mobile than many of their compatriots. But you are right in pointing out that they are often immobilized in other ways in Australia. For instance, you mentioned the architectures of sociospatial segregation. We see that Chinese international students are corralled into specific types of residence in the city, whether by universities and real estate agents colluding to get them into certain kinds of housing, or through social convention within the Chinese student diaspora. This comes both from habituated residence practices, and more strongly through social exclusion from other alternatives. The result of such social exclusion, on a broader scale, is that international students are excluded from local place-based social networks and from certain high-status employment opportunities that rely on local social capital as well as on bureaucratic restrictions on certain visa types and so on. They are shut out in multiple ways while they are in Australia.
You are also right to say that if we look also at the macro scale of life trajectories, some of the participants whose stories are included in the later chapters came back under strong family and patriarchal control when returning to China. There is one participant, who comes from a comfortable but not very wealthy family. She traveled to Melbourne and Sydney for several years of study abroad and wanted to work in an international corporation in China. But she came from a small town, and it turned out that her father would not let her go to work in one of the big cities. So now she is working in her local neighborhood in a state-run organization, against her initial will. Although she says she is enjoying the job now, we can see that she got immobilized when she went back. In the book, her story is interwoven with another story of somebody else, whose (slightly wealthier) parents did not try to keep her close to home in line with neo-traditionalist, class-based norms of feminine respectability and who consequently ended up with greater opportunities for professional mobility after graduation. We might say that compared with working-class and rural peers in China, these women students are a hypermobile group. But compared with, say, local-born residents in Australian cities, they are somewhat immobilized, and the class differentials within the group of Chinese graduates cut across their opportunities for mobility after graduation as well.
I love the way you framed the cash cow rhetoric, although it is worth noting that in Australia, that comparison is unflattering and can sometimes take a crypto-racist turn. International students do not literally have a fence around them, but there are institutional or social structures that prevent them from moving out into the broader Australian society in the ways that they would like. It is undeniably true that Australian universities have courted Chinese and other international students as a way to raise funds to plug the gap left by defunding by the Commonwealth government over many years. And some of the wealthier universities get greedy and raise profits in this way to fund new building projects and other corporate-style self-branding practices. If we follow this line of analysis, we see hundreds of thousands of Chinese students brought in over the years without corresponding social and academic welfare spending on them. Robust systems have not been put into place to ensure the sustainability of Australian international education in the social sense. So the students are being mobilized across oceans as an income source, while being left to deal with their own social immobilization through social exclusion and a dearth of effective support services.
Without downplaying the negative sides of immobilization, we should remember that it is never total. Virtually all students that I worked with have had a transformative or enriching or culturally inspiring experience as a result of studying abroad. So it is not that international students get nothing from the experience at all. Rather, it is a matter of how significant that enriching experience is within their total experience of study in Australia, and what proportion of the overall study experience it makes up, which is more for some and less for others. Regardless, there are a lot of missed opportunities to support these students to become more like socially mobile, interculturally mobile, and personally mobile within Australian society while they are here.
Your book was embraced enthusiastically by Chinese academic and popular readers. How was it received by western readers? Is there a difference in the book’s reception? Relatedly, you have been very vocal on social media about international students’ welfare and Australian higher education policies. How do you understand the relationship between your research and social engagements?
The reception by Chinese readers has been really overwhelming—and is far in excess of the response from western readers. But I have been moved and inspired by the responses I have received to the work from colleagues in Australian academia as well. Academics are not just supportive of this research but extremely sympathetic to the arguments, and extremely eager to learn about how they, as teachers and student supervisors, can do more and do better to support Chinese students.
I do see my research as closely and inherently linked with social engagements. When I applied for funding, I stated that the research would feed into policy discussions. So it is an ethical responsibility. Along with the academic book, I also wrote a major policy-oriented report entitled “Chinese International Students’ Wellbeing in Australia: The Road to Recovery.” It is open access and easily downloadable if you search online (Martin, 2020). In the report, I made several detailed recommendations around the need for more effective communication with and regulation of the experiences of international students, Chinese students in particular. I highlighted the need for increased support for local level services and agencies to work with international student communities, and increased collaboration with local, culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Australia who have the relevant intercultural skills to develop the most effective channels and systems to safeguard international students’ wellbeing.
What do you think would be the key challenges facing Chinese international students in the West, now that the global higher education market is slowly recovering from the pandemic?
If we look at the latest 2023 figures, student visa arrivals in Australia are now almost back at 2019 levels. From January to June 2023, there have been over 133,000 Chinese students studying in Australia, making up a 21% share of total international student numbers. This is a slightly reduced share, as numbers of students from India are growing and numbers from China very minutely declining, at around 2% below the previous year. Although we are almost back where we were pre-pandemic in terms of international student numbers generally, I see the same issues and problems persisting as were identified before COVID. During the pandemic, Australian higher education as a sector was thinking “will the students ever come back? What should we do?” Of course, universities and governments did not invest in improving student experience over those years. So we are back to 2019, in a way. One aspect that has possibly changed for Chinese students in particular is that with Australia’s new Labor Party government, which was elected at the 2022 federal election, bilateral relations with China have somewhat improved, or at least have ceased to worsen so dramatically as they did under Scott Morrison’s Coalition government. But the tensions between the two nations remain. Unfortunately, these macro-scale geopolitical tensions have the potential (as we have seen demonstrated) to severely impact ordinary Chinese students. Micro-scale social experiences in Australia include increasing xenophobia, anti-Chinese racism and social exclusion happening at times when bilateral tensions flare up. In this regard, the future is uncertain and there is no simple way to solve that. But I think we need more sensitivity on the Australian side to the fact that these are ordinary students, that they are not necessarily highly politicized. We have an opportunity to get to know each other while they are here. So we should do that, rather than scaremongering.
