Emotions and migration aspirations: western scholars in China and the navigation of aspirational possibilities

Drawing on qualitative research with western scholars working at Sino-foreign universities (SFUs), this paper highlights the emerging academic mobility trend moving from the Global North to South. With a theoretical focus on ‘emotions in migration’, the paper first asks how these foreign scholars’ migration aspirations towards China are initiated and nurtured before the move. Second, it explores after the move, how they emotionally encounter China in everyday life and perform agency, i.e. exercising specific ‘emotional labour’ to reframe their lived experiences and migration aspirations. Third, it examines how their capacity of materialising migration aspirations can be facilitated and constrained by a set of structural factors at the macro, meso and micro level, and how their migration aspirations towards the future are reconfigured accordingly. In doing so, the paper enriches our understanding of academic migration by focusing on the China context and unpacking the emotional predicaments involved in the lives of mobile scholars who are conventionally seen as rather privileged. Critically, this paper develops an emotionally-sensitive approach, to demonstrate that the process in which migration aspirations are generated, exercised and reproduced is an emotional, dynamic and uncertain one, constantly shaped by migrants’ agency and multiple structural forces.