Re-appropriating Bourdieu for post-national research on Sino–foreign higher education

Abstract

In this chapter we make predictions about developments in empirical worlds of Sino–foreign higher education as the 2020s unfold from beginnings marked by geopolitical and global health crises. Inspired by efforts to review and recraft Bourdieusian sociology for post-national investigations in other fields, we propose problematics for researching higher education which crosses and flows over nation-state borders, with or without student mobility. These problematics are informed by Bourdieu’s methodological autonomisation, that is, his conceptualisation of fields as relatively autonomous spaces of social activity. We consider the concerns of Bourdieusian scholars and higher education researchers with both methodological nationalism and methodological globalism. The former does not account for the global, while the latter does, but it obscures that which occurs on national and sub-national scales and in relation to the global. To enable investigation of the activity of universities in these complexly multi-scalar conditions, we canvass the utility of concepts about universities qua organisational fields and as agencies within fields of organisations, and of institutional, organisational, or university habitus. We also highlight the utility of multiple correspondence analysis for post-national research on higher education. The chapter assumes that crafting sociological tools is a priority given the still intensifying heteronomisation of higher education practice and research.