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The Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities in South African Schools Saloshna Vandeyar and Thirusellvan Vandeyar, Information Age Publishing,
Author(s) -
Catalano Theresa
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1111/aeq.12159
Subject(s) - publishing , negotiation , citation , immigration , representation (politics) , sociology , media studies , library science , history , social science , political science , computer science , politics , law , archaeology
unavoidably focus on Chinese students in Europe providing less detail on the many Chinese student migrants in North America, Australia, and other parts of Asia. Another minor problem is found in chapter 5 when the author changes focus a bit by looking at changing patterns of romantic engagements and marriage in contemporary China. While initially this chapter feels only loosely connected to her overall argument, as it does not focus exclusively on student migrants, by the end Kajanus has somewhat successfully used the complicated interactions between individual desires, gender norms, and family expectation in the marriage market to draw productive connections to the student migrant experience. In particular, she is able to show that while Chinese kinship practices that invest in sons’ educations might be on the wane, these same principles continue to shape the marriage market so that hypergamy or marrying up is still the norm for young Chinese women. This means that they must continue to balance their desires for higher education at the risk of becoming overeducated, “leftover women” on the marriage market. These insights no doubt reveal the insidious resilience of traditional gender and kinship norms, even in the face of dramatic change in contemporary China. In spite of trivial issues, Kajanus’ overall work does a good job at deploying theories of cosmopolitanism to understand both the desire to study abroad as well as to explain the experience of being a student and a woman in a foreign country. Her research will appeal to both scholars interested in migration and mobility as well as those interested in education, gender, and kinship—particularly in the context of contemporary China. Her careful mix of analytical frameworks allows her to meld a big picture view of the processes and forces behind the flow of Chinese student migrants with their individual stories of their educational and personal trajectories.