The Myth of “Migrants as Problems”: Public School in Neoliberal Times and the Construction and Contestation of “Migrant” Identity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reports the findings of a sociolinguistic ethnographic inquiry into the constructions of internal rural-to-urban migrant students by one urban public school in China, and how these students positioned themselves to these constructions against the background of the school’s neoliberal transformation. This inquiry finds that, due to the case school’s pursuit of exam-performance-based academic excellence, its official documents discursively constructed migrant students as being of “low quality,” and a problem for and potential danger to the school. However, the daily positioning practices of school administrators, teachers, and these students did not just reproduce this uniformly negative discursive construction; rather, they contested it in a complex and contradictory manner. This article offers further evidence showing the complexity of identity constructions in late modern urban schools, wherein professionals and students are all involved in a marketized education context that brings crises and dilemmas to institutions.