Body in migration: Bodily experiences and strategies amongst foreign scholars in China

Abstract

AbstractTaking an embodied approach, this paper conducts ethnographic research on foreign scholars working at Sino‐foreign universities. First, it examines both bodily comfort and dissonance they encounter while living in China. Second, it investigates how some scholars deploy bodily strategies at everyday and transnational level to overcome bodily discomfort and reframe lived experiences. As such, the paper demonstrates that embodiments, especially in the context of migration, are always, and necessarily, situated, multiple and ever‐changing, as they are structurally positioned, agentively reconstructed and temporally/spatially distributed. Critically, with a focus on the newly emerged academic mobility pattern moving from the Global North to the South, this paper brings a bodily sensitive theoretical framework into academic migration studies, unpacking the interacting dynamics between places, migrant bodies, agency and subjectivities. It thus expands the analytic utility of the approach of bodies/embodiments and further facilitates the body turn in migration studies in new theoretical and empirical directions.