Infrastructures in migration: Mobile foreign academics in China and the ‘everyday’, ‘agency’ and ‘arrival’ focus

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research on foreign scholars working at Sino-foreign universities (SFUs), this paper explores how both migration infrastructures ‘from the above’ and those embodied in more mundane and quotidian ways intimately affect the lived experiences and moving processes of mobile individuals. With an analysis of the facilitating and constraining effects of migration infrastructures, the paper asks how different kinds of infrastructural operations help individuals accumulate capital as much as they produce challenges and uncertainties in their lives. Particularly, the paper also asks how these academic migrants exercise agency to reconstruct and extend their infrastructural surroundings, in order to overcome the infrastructural barriers and mitigate the sense of precariousness they encounter across their move. In doing so, this paper contributes to the literature on migration infrastructure both empirically and theoretically, by focusing not only on the infrastructures but also the infrastructural experiences and infrastructural agency amongst highly-skilled migrant individuals in the context of the receiving country. Essentially, this paper demonstrates that mobile individuals do not simply pass through or passively undertake migration infrastructures, but instead, they can actively reconfigure and mobilise their infrastructural terrains, thus reshaping their biographies, social worlds and subjectivities.