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.

The “so what?” in ethnographic writing: article report, data analysis, and comments

UCL Institute of Education

7^th May 2019, 5-8 p.m.

Room 802, IOE, 20 Bedford Way, London

Part I (5:05- 6:10)

(more…)

In this week’s seminar, Arpan Tahim  shared some preliminary data from his research on workplace-based assessment in postgraduate surgical education. This proved to be a really interesting session where we had the opportunity to learn more about video-ethnographic and reflexive techniques: please see the abstract below for further details.

Learning and assessment in the workplace

Arpan Tahim

For this session we hosted Katy Highet and Peter Browning who are currently carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in India and Colombia, respectively. They shared the experiences and challenges that they have encountered. In particular, they focussed on:

• the messiness of data;
• ethics and consent;
• positionality;
• and moral stance & participant observation.

They also talked about the ways in which they have dealt with these, and there will be a space for suggestions.

You can view and download the presentation file below.

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