Language, academic labour, and the making of a professional in higher education

Yu(Aimee)Shi

Tuesday 3rd November, 2020

This project examines the professional trajectories of doctoral students who move from China to the UK’s higher education. In contrast to much of the existing literature where attention is paid to how social actors mobilise various forms of capital to engage in transnational education migration, I focus here on what these trajectories do and how they help constitute specific global circuits of knowledge and labor. I aim to describe the process of socialisation into a particular field of expertise (e.g., academic labour) in relation to the larger regimes of citizenship (Ong, 2006). Adopting an ethnographic sociolinguistic perspective, I follow two PhD candidates at a prestigious university in London. By documenting their language use in a range of institutional settings, I hope to provide a nuanced account of the negotiation of meanings and contradictions in higher education through close exploration of their discursive/semiotic practices. Data analysis will focus on the enactment of a professional persona through the acquisition of a specific set of discursive registers, with language also being a meditational tool when they reflexively talk about their transnational experiences. Existing data suggests that these participants have fully invested in transnational higher education to perform professionally in relevant fields. This process is aligned with the formation of a self-enterprising subject, and it also enables global circuits of transnational academic labor. Data analysis also indicates the emerging forms of social hierarchisation as manifested in their negotiation of meanings and various contradictions while becoming a professional.

References 

Ong, A, (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.