Enterprising self and bohemian nomad: Emerging subjectivities in Chinese education mobilities

Abstract

This article approaches the question of how experiences of mobility mediate subjectivities through a case study of middle-class Chinese women’s education mobilities. Drawing from longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with 56 young women who moved from China to Australia for university, the article focuses on two of their stories to illustrate how education mobility mediated their negotiation of available understandings of gendered personhood and competing life value regimes. It demonstrates that for these middle-class women, transnational education mobility may on the one hand reinforce identification with an ideal of enterprising selfhood that is prominent in both global and Chinese public cu..