ABSTRACT
Drawing on longitudinal research with 33 Chinese international students in 10 European countries, this article examines their polymorphic identifications towards homeland and asks how these changing perceptions constitute the underlying logic of their particular migration aspirations during the COVID-19. Specifically, the article explores how homeland identifications function as a driving force to facilitate ‘voluntary immobility' in the study destination while being used as a tackling strategy to adapt to their ‘involuntary immobility' overseas. It also examines how these identifications articulate with the students' mixing and shifting migration aspirations formulated during the pandemic. In doing so, the article demonstrates that polymorphic perceptions closely relate to the generation, exercise and reproduction of their migration aspirations that are temporally distributed.
ABSTRACT
From the perspective of migrant times/temporalities, this paper focuses on the temporal experiences among Chinese international students (CIS) who planned to enrol overseas in 2020 but instead chose to stay in China due to the COVID‐19. Specifically, it adopts 'sticky and suspended times' and 'asynchronous and precarious times' to investigate how they encounter a set of temporal disruptions at both everyday and life course levels while staying put in China. Particularly, the paper asks how CIS exercises agency to navigate through temporal dissonances and enhance their immobile state and capital accumulation. Critically, the paper develops a temporally sensitive framework to unpack the multiple kinds of temporalities CIS confront during the pandemic, further advancing studies on 'international student mobility' and 'time in migration'. Additionally, existing studies have largely focused on how time shapes people's mobility and this paper provides an empirical case on the potential of the temporal approach to understanding immobilities.
ABSTRACT
This paper draws attention to the current and possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the (im)mobility trajectories of international students (IS) and the global higher education landscape. From the perspective of migration infrastructure, this paper specifically focuses on the immobility experiences amongst Chinese international students (CIS) who planned to enrol overseas in 2020 but instead chose to take online courses in China due to the COVID-19. It asks how online courses are both facilitated and constrained by a set of institutional and technological infrastructural forces. Particularly it also explores how some CIS exercise agency to mobilise their infrastructural surroundings and overcome certain infrastructural deficiencies they encounter, with the aim of improving studying/living quality while inhabiting immobilities in a transnational context. As such, this paper challenges the oppositional nature of mobility and immobility, arguing that immobility is not the ‘flip side’ to mobility or an outcome by default, and that being immobile can be affirming and empowering. Essentially, the paper brings this infrastructurally sensitive theoretical approach into international student mobility (ISM) studies, shifting the focus from examining how infrastructures move people to how they enable people to stay, and to how they are lived and reconstructed at an everyday level. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)