Changing Place, Changing Time: Lifestyle‐Oriented Student Switching and the Quest for Temporal Flexibilization

Abstract

Focussing on a group of middle-class women from China who studied in Australia and migrated there post-study, this paper contributes to the nascent amalgamation of educational mobility with lifestyle mobility conceptual frameworks. It analyses Chinese student-switching as a form of lifestyle-motivated middling migration facilitated by Australia's skill-based immigration regime, and driven by the graduates' desires to escape the temporal regime of overwork in recessionary China and obtain greater control over their own time. The analysis shows how the student-switchers use their class-based spatial mobility capacity to offset their gender disadvantage through temporal flexibilisation at every..