Academic mobility and identities: stories from (ethnic) Chinese students and scholars en route

Extending beyond the common economistic focus in academic mobility literature, this chapter illustrates the contingent, dynamic and complex identity negotiation and reconstruction processes experienced by mobile scholars and students. It draws on two qualitative research projects: one on academics from the People’s Republic of China who had worked in Germany and the Netherlands, and another one on ethnic Chinese Indonesian students who had studied in China. Our findings demonstrate the impact of academic mobility in the production, reinterpretation, remaking and negotiation of seemingly well-defined ethno-cultural, national, gender and religious identities. Identity politics are played out in different spatial-temporalities along the mobile individuals’ mobility trajectories, which are embedded in broader transnational/ translocal structural contexts. Our findings also underline the dialectic nature of identity negotiations. While our research partners have agency to define and perform who they are and want to be seen, other social actors also play an important role in these interactive processes. These include the social group in which these mobile individuals are embedded in, their ethno-national ‘home(s)’ and the ‘others’ – may they be the majority ‘natives’ or other ‘others’ they encounter when they are en route.