Multidimensional,complex and contingent: Exploring international PhD students’ social mobility

Abstract

This paper is a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) by three international PhD students from Bangladesh, Japan and Nepal who pursued (or who are currently pursuing) their studies in New Zealand. In contrast to previous research which largely advanced a simplistic, downward social mobility experience of international PhD students or highly skilled migrants in general, we argue that this experience is dynamic, complex and multidimensional in nature. In doing so, we turn to Bourdieu’s theory of capital. By focusing on less-direct economic resources (e.g. ethnicity, nationality, language and social networks), we explore the multidimensionality and convolution of our social mobility which stems from migration. Setting aside a narrative of adversity and downward social mobility among international PhD students, this paper emphasizes how we actively negotiated and dealt with shifting class identity and social mobility in the host countries.

Keywords

Bourdieu capital collaborative autoethnography international PhD students social mobility

Introduction

The impetus for this research came from a mundane lunch conversation as we, three international PhD students – one from Bangladesh, one from Japan and the other from Nepal – started to reflect on our everyday struggles and loss of privilege in our host country, Aotearoa New Zealand. Wanting to pursue our PhDs and obtain better career prospects, we somehow did not anticipate our initial downward social mobility.

Ritu is from Bangladesh. Though she moved to New Zealand as an educational migrant, the key motivation for her mobility was ‘gendered’ (i.e. escaping the oppressive patriarchal structure of the home country and to become cosmopolitan) (see also Kim, 2010: 433). For Ritu, there was a pull of imagined geographies (see Desbiens, 2016) – New Zealand as a paradise of women’s rights and gender equality. She, however, was confronted with the harsh reality of post-migration downward social mobility. Before moving to New Zealand, she was under the impression that she would be able to secure some form of scholarship or assistantship on arrival. Despite being a high achieving student in her home country, she did not qualify for a scholarship in New Zealand due to the non-transferability of her academic credentials. Her degree and grades, valuable cultural capital in Bangladesh, were not recognized in New Zealand. The failure to secure a scholarship in New Zealand and the feeling of being undervalued significantly undermined her confidence. Ritu had to manage a declining socio-economic position as a casual, part-time worker with limited income. For Ritu to overcome these economic impediments, she took multiple, precarious jobs in and outside the university, relying on Bangladeshi community networks and opting to live with a couple in a sub-letting arrangement despite some of the disadvantages that posed for upward social mobility.

Shinya first moved to the United States (‘US’ hereafter) from Japan to pursue his bachelor’s degree. As he is a former college dropout with very few career prospects in Japan, he started his formal education again in the US. Despite arriving in the US with only limited English proficiency, Shinya completed his masters' degree and secured contract teaching and research jobs while gradually building a more comfortable life in the US. He then moved to New Zealand to carry out his PhD research on the social impact of the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes. This exciting opportunity, however, meant starting over the process of social mobility. Realizing that many goods and services were no longer affordable after moving to New Zealand, Shinya and his partner lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with poor insulation, struggling just to find minimum-wage employment. Even with a scholarship, the couple had a difficult time making ends meet. However, from the very beginning of his arrival in New Zealand, Shinya’s social connections and sense of belonging were facilitated by his lifestyle, especially that part which involved outdoor activities.

Jeevan was attracted to New Zealand to pursue his PhD primarily due to the reduced tuition fee policy for international PhD candidates and the international reputation of the university. He had a successful career in the development sector in Nepal before he moved to New Zealand with his family. He worked for various national and international non-government organizations in senior positions. Due to his enduring work experience as a development professional, he was optimistic about securing a permanent, part-time job in the same sector while pursuing his PhD in New Zealand. However, he soon realized, after a few unsuccessful interviews, that his knowledge, skills and experience from a developing country were not properly recognized in New Zealand. Jeevan felt vulnerable as he knew that he had effectively become unskilled labor in a foreign country. To sufficiently provide for his family, Jeevan resorted to different kinds of casual, on-call and precarious jobs such as selling food for vendors and door knocking to find survey participants.

Albeit having had different motivations to migrate and taken different journeys, all three of us left behind relatively comfortable lives in our home countries (or prior destination country) before arriving in New Zealand. This research, then, is an attempt to theorize our migration and related social mobility experiences. We probe into the multidimensionality, complexity and contingencies of our post-migration social mobility. Social mobility of international PhD students in their host country, is seen as temporary in nature (Leung, 2017; Luthra and Platt, 2016). It is often assumed that the struggle of highly skilled knowledge migrants like ourselves would recede once we secured a well-paid, full-time academic position (Leung, 2017). Despite the assumed ephemerality of hardship, there are a number of important reasons to further explore the migration and social mobility experiences of international PhD students.

International students,¹ particularly PhD students, are important transnational agents of knowledge production (Madge et al., 2015: 688). However, regardless of their academic and social status, they often experience racial and other forms of discrimination and exploitation similar to other (im)migrants² (Brown and Jones, 2013; Forbes-Mewett and Sawyer, 2016; Xu, 2020), which often have downstream implications for their wellbeing (Brown and Jones, 2013) and academic performance (Yoo and Castro, 2011). International students disproportionately experience increased mental health issues and other forms of adversity (Forbes-Mewett and Sawyer, 2016; Suo, 2019). During our own PhD journeys, we have witnessed that a disproportionate number of international PhD and master’s students failed to complete their study due to mental health issues which often were linked to the adversity of their migration experiences. Mental health is not our focus in this paper, yet it is worth stressing here that an exploration of international students’ migration and social mobility experience will help us gain an understanding of the hidden cost of globalized education and knowledge formation.

Furthermore, our research makes several theoretical and empirical contributions to migration and mobility scholarship. Our contribution extends to the complex and multidimensional nature of social mobility by critically analyzing our autoethnographic data through a Bourdieusian theoretical lens. While there is an abundance of empirical work explaining the downward social mobility and negative experiences of educational and highly skilled migrants (e.g. Bauder, 2012; Erel, 2010; Hussain, 2019; Leung, 2014, 2017), these studies have not paid close attention to their social agency and active negotiation of the loss or (accidental) gain of capital. This research seeks to redress this imbalance as migrants’ social agency and efforts to build social capital are often overlooked in conventional theoretical and empirical discourses.

Contextualizing international PhD students in migration and social mobility literature

There has been a considerable escalation in the volume of international students worldwide in recent decades (King and Raghuram, 2013). Countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (‘UK’ hereafter) and the US have become lucrative destinations for international students (King and Raghuram, 2013; Leung, 2017). The literature on international student mobility is multifaceted; examining the temporality of international students’ migration (Robertson, 2014; Rutten and Verstappen, 2013), their encounters with racism (Brown and Jones, 2013), mental health concerns (Forbes-Mewett and Sawyer, 2016), gender inequalities (Leung, 2014) and social class mobility (Leung, 2017; Rutten and Verstappen, 2013).

International student mobility is a form of migration that is of increasing significance to destination countries such as New Zealand (Robertson, 2014). Migration studies often classify migrants and their movements into two broad categories to separately analyze the migrating experiences: highly skilled and subsequently privileged migrants labeled as ‘elite knowledge workers’ (Robertson, 2014: 1916); and ‘low-skilled migrant laborers’ (Bauder, 2012; Martiniello and Rea, 2014: 1081). International students are often perceived as a homogenous category of ‘global elite migrants’ (Bauder, 2012; Favell et al., 2007) who predominantly move from developing to developed countries. However, the movement of international students and knowledge workers may not necessarily always be unidirectional. There is an emergence of changing patterns of international student mobility (Brooks and Waters, 2011; Kondakci et al., 2018; Lipura and Collins, 2020). As Madge et al. (2015: 683) suggest, the trajectory of education-related migration has become more complex due to the increased globalization and transformation of the political economy. The focus of migration studies has moved beyond a simplistic conceptualization of linear trajectories and settlements of the highly skilled immigrants from their home countries to the new destination ones. The exploration and comprehension of a non-linear, temporal and staggered progression and experience of migration are critical and timely (Leung, 2017; Robertson, 2014). Our research sits within this new vein of migration scholarship as we argue that the social mobility that stems from migration is multidirectional.

Downward social mobility or ‘contradictory class mobility’ is a common experience for highly skilled migrants or global knowledge workers like international PhD students (see Hussain, 2019; Leung, 2014, 2017; Parreñas, 2001; Rutten and Verstappen, 2013). Particularly, the educational migrants coming from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds in their home societies often experienced downward social mobility during their study overseas before they could harvest upward social mobility (Leung, 2017: 2714). Leung (2017) made a significant contribution to migration and social mobility scholarship by stressing that binary conceptualization of social mobility – either upward or downward – is problematic. Hence, our aim is to build upon her work to provide a substantive theoretical discussion of the complexity and multiplicity of social mobility patterns among international PhD students.

The social mobility experienced by international PhD students is influenced by economic factors as well as those that are less-directly economic and include race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, language, and social networks (see, e.g. Bailey and Mulder, 2017; Bauder, 2012; Erel, 2010). A complex intersection (see Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991 for intersectionality) among these factors is deemed to shape class position and mobility experience in unexpected ways such that international PhD students may have to simultaneously play the roles of ‘elite knowledge workers’ and ‘low-skilled migrant laborers’. We may be regarded as ‘scholars’ or ‘early-career academic’ in academia but treated as ‘second-class citizens’ who are expected to endure substandard working conditions and live with a general sense of precarity. Indeed, while pursuing our PhDs and working academic jobs, all three of us have also taken on low-wage, precarious jobs such as gardener, landscaper, renovator, cleaner, driver, retail and door-to-door survey interviewer for survival. However, instead of feeling an overwhelming sense of downward social mobility, we enjoyed performing these jobs because, through first-hand experience, we were better able to understand that our social positions can be different in an academic environment, outside of it, and from our pre-migration lives.

It is important, then, to conceptualize social mobility and class positioning from different dimensions: economic, cultural, social and cognitive (see Désilets, 2016; Hout, 2015; Martiniello and Rea, 2014). This is primarily because, as Bourdieu (1987) and Friedman (2014) argue, social class can be interpreted as referring to real, objectively constituted groups; a scientific construct for economic and sociological analysis; or subjectively constructed groups manifesting the sense of a person’s social position. In this research, we do not necessarily conceptualize social class from an objective economic or political position; rather, we analyze our own class identity from the subjective perspective of an individual agent’s lived experience.

In line with Leung’s (2017) work, we conceive the social mobility of international PhD students as an ongoing process through which class and other social positions and identities (e.g. gender, ethnicity and nationality) of the migrants and their families are constantly negotiated and reconfigured. Such a conceptualization allows us to specifically focus on two major aspects of migration and social mobility. First, our experience and perception of social mobility are subjective, dynamic and multidimensional. This mobility experience is not always dependent on economic factors such as wealth, income and occupations. Social and cultural factors such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, previous experience of migration, language and qualifications have significant roles to play in shaping this experience. Second, we assert that international PhD students are not merely victims of their migratory experience and the structural constraints of their host country. Instead, international PhD students are strategic improvisers (Swartz, 1997) who mitigate structural disadvantages in their host country.

Overview of immigration and (im)migrants’ belongingness in New Zealand

Alongside the history of colonization and settler society, immigrant recruitment has been the part of the nation-building project in New Zealand (Spoonley, 2015). Until the 1950s, immigrants were predominantly from countries such as Ireland and the UK due to ‘a range of restrictions based on a colonial model and racist ideologies’ (Dürr, 2011: 506). After the 1950s, immigration shifted from a ‘racial to an economic focused’ system (Spoonley, 2015). In the post-war period, the flow of European migration was destabilized by a flux of non-British, semi-skilled and unskilled labor mobility primarily from the Pacific Islands (Dürr, 2011; Simon-Kumar, 2015; Spoonley, 2015). Simon-Kumar (2015: 1172) explains that ‘[s]ince the mid-1980s, immigration policy in New Zealand has clearly worked towards neoliberal goals of attracting skilled labour and boosting economic productivity’.

New Zealand now has an annual permanent immigration target that equates to 1% of the national population . This change in immigration policy and a ‘pick and choose’ recruitment system has led to a surge in non-European immigration (Ip and Pang, 2006; Simon-Kumar, 2015). Furthermore, neoliberal policy reform led to an inflow of international students in the early 1990s (Collins, 2012). Consequently, in the last 25 years, international student mobilities have become the country’s fifth-largest export industry and the second-largest service expert sector after tourism (New Zealand Government, 2018: 10). In 2017, international education contributed an estimated $14.4 billion to the New Zealand economy (New Zealand Government, 2018: 10). Thus, educational migrants’ contribution to the national economy of New Zealand is critical (Infometrics and National Research Bureau, 2016); this has created more educational and migration opportunities (and institutional support system) for international students like us.

In the New Zealand context, non-white (im)migrants’ sense of belonging, social positions and identity construction are often mediated through the foundational framework, policy and dominant discourse of biculturalism (Butcher et al., 2006: 27; Dürr, 2011; Simon-Kumar, 2015). The commitment to biculturalism, as opposed to the framing of multiculturalism (as is the case in other settler countries like Australia and Canada), as a state ideology in New Zealand has created a sense of exclusion and inclusion particularly for the non-European/non-white (im)migrants (see Simon-Kumar, 2015). As Cassim et al. (2020: 186) noted, non-European migrants’ sense of belonging in New Zealand is a fluid, dynamic and a negotiated process. It is a particularly complex, flux, multilayered and often conflicting process for those living in superdiverse cities like Auckland³ (Spoonley, 2015; see also Dürr, 2011; Liu, 2014). Indeed, a combination of factors such as recognitions, discourses and actions of racism and other forms of discrimination can influence (im)migrants’ sense of belonging and identity (Butcher, 2002; Butcher et al., 2017; Liu, 2014). Our research, in this regard, further strengthens and contributes to this discourse of multiplicity of belongingness. It illustrates that migrants’ trajectories of belonging and inclusion in New Zealand are far less sequential and tied to economic capital than previously recognized.

Collaborative autoethnography

Autoethnography (AE) is a qualitative research method where the researchers use autoethnographical data to gain an insightful and rigorous understanding of their socio-cultural experiences and issues (Ellis et al., 2011; Hernandez et al., 2015). AE is not merely a retelling of stories or personal narratives; rather, it involves carefully organized research design and systematically collected and analyzed data. ‘Collaborative autoethnography [CAE] (however oxymoronic) thus invites community to investigate shared stories and balances the individual narrative with the greater collective experiences’ (Blalock and Akehi, 2018: 94). Concerning this, Chang et al. (2012) note that ‘[u]nlike AE, collaborative autoethnographers combine their energy and data to create a richer pool of data from multiple sources’ (89).

CAE involves a diverse range of data collection methods. Researchers can collect personal memory data, interview each other, observe and analyze each other’s self-identities or collect archival data about each other (Chang et al., 2012; Roy and Uekusa, 2020). In this research, we used two variations of these data collection methods: individual and group data collection. After deciding on the subtopics, we individually started generating self-reflective and self-analyzed data, which ‘capture [our] present thoughts and perspectives as well as [our] past’ (Chang et al., 2012: 78). The second phase of data collection involved trio conversations and interactions. In this phase, we expanded, affirmed and questioned each other’s reflective writing, which include the recollection of memories and experiences. The individual self-reflective writing and the transcripts of our conversations were organized and analyzed by using standard coding techniques for qualitative data analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

We opted for a CAE because we considered our experiences provided a rich source of information and data to analyze the dynamic and multidimensional nature of social mobility. This method was suitable for investigating our relatively similar but diverse migration and social mobility experiences (Chang et al., 2012: 17; Lapadat, 2009: 967; see also Chang et al., 2016; Lapadat, 2017), which led to deconstruction and reconstruction of our social class and identity. Our autobiographical anecdotes were systematically analyzed and used in engagement with Bourdieu’s capital theory for a nuanced understanding of the complexity of international students’ social mobility.

Framing social mobility and class position from Bourdieusian perspectives

Bourdieu’s proposition considers all forms of capital beyond the economic and emphasizes their interplay and convertibility to/from each other. It particularly helps us to focus on the intricate and multidimensional nature of social mobility and class position by emphasizing the role of capital in their cross-national spatial and academic mobilities. Bourdieu’s capital theory in migration and mobility studies is not rare (see, e.g. Bauder, 2012; Creese and Wiebe, 2009; Erel, 2010; Thondhlana et al., 2016), and Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, cultural and social capital have been frequently used to explore the migration experience, employability and negotiation of highly skilled migrants.

Bourdieu (1987) argues that an individual’s social mobility and class position are largely influenced by the volume and composition of capital that they possess. Unlike the Marxists’ idea of capital, Bourdieu (1986: 243) refers to economic (financial resources) and non-/less-directly economic forms of capital, which include cultural (knowledge, language, skills, norms, attitudes, past experiences), social (resources based on social connections and groups memberships) and symbolic (rewards accruing from status, respectability and other types of capital once recognized as legitimate) (also Bourdieu, 1987: 4). Individuals, families and groups attempt to accumulate and obtain as much higher-quality capital as possible since this determines their social status in particular social/cultural space(s) and their ability to travel across different social spaces (Bourdieu, 1989: 17; Wacquant, 2007: 268).

The notion of capital conversion to/from other capital is instrumental in the analysis of highly skilled migrants’ social mobility (Kelly and Lusis, 2006: 836). It helps us to delve into the convertibility of the capital that migrants bring from their country of origin to the host country (Erel, 2010). Sayer (1999) further explains that capital ‘have exchange-value, though the rates of exchange between the various forms of capital are always contested through the struggles of social field’ (408). In a transnational context, capital has a fluid and dynamic evaluation, conversion and exchange value (Xu, 2018). Thus, the effectiveness of a particular form of capital is not universal: it is field- and habitus-dependent (Bourdieu, 1993: 73).

The field is a social space in which social agents compete for accumulation and distribution of capital, and each field often has its own laws, rules, norms, value systems and cultural institutions (Bourdieu, 1989: 17–18). Field is not separable from habitus, which is an internalized, taken-for-granted social structure, a set of dispositions which creates and reproduces the social field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). The dialectics between field and habitus determine the value of capital. Johnson (1993) explains that ‘[t]he idea that there are different kinds of capital which are invested in different fields of activity in accordance with the specific of interests of the field’ (8) is determined by the social agents’ habitus.

Thus, a valuable form of capital in one field may not be useful in another due to field-specific norms, laws, rules and habitus (Bauder, 2012; Bourdieu, 1988; Lulle and Buzinska, 2017). Social agents’ possession of capital and social power may vary in different fields or domains. Indeed, as Ritu and Jeevan experienced first-hand, international PhD students’ overall downward social mobility can be partially due to the non-transferability of the credentials (as in their significant cultural and symbolic capital) that they obtained in their home countries. Their degrees and awards are not universal: a higher degree from developing countries is systematically less likely to be as valued as a local one in destination countries (Bauder, 2012).

Despite its obvious advantages, one of the major limitations of using Bourdieu’s theory is its near-exclusive focus on social class. Although Bourdieu emphasizes language, he did not explicitly emphasize the influence of gender, race and ethnicity on social stratification (Thondhlana et al., 2016). Nonetheless, his theory of capital has been reworked, so the concepts of race, ethnicity and gender could be linked to Bourdieu’s cultural, social and symbolic capital (see e.g. Hage, 2003; Huppatz, 2009; Huppatz and Goodwin, 2013). Research suggests that cultural capital is ethnicity bounded (Erel, 2010). Following this trend, we synthesize the concept of ‘ethnic capital’ (Borjas, 1992), which ‘is the inherent trust and advantages which stem from, and belong to, a certain ethnic/cultural group’ (Wang and Maani, 2014: 3). We contend that international PhD students’ ethnic capital can be transformed into an embodied form of cultural capital as well as symbolic capital in positive, neutral and negative ways, depending on the specific habitus and fields to which they belong. Thus, ethnic identity and representation (as in cultural and symbolic capital) can often be the determinant of our social status, prestige and reputation.

Bourdieu’s work is well regarded for his attempt to reconcile the dichotomy of structure versus agency (Béhague et al., 2008). His theoretical framework is effective for explaining the reproduction of social structure, power and position – in other words, how social structures constrain individual action. At the same time, it also insists upon the individual’s transformative agency, creativity and strategic performances (Béhague et al., 2008; Gomez, 2015). Thus, in this research, his framework helps us to strike a balance in explaining the structural constraints and adversity faced by international PhD students in the country of migration as well as their agency in adapting to, and growing into, the host societies.

Initial downward social mobility

From the countries of origin (or other destination country), we developed and brought a set of habitus and capital with us when we migrated to New Zealand. We realized that some of our capital such as cultural norms, qualifications and linguistic competence (as our cultural and linguistic capital) would not be valued in New Zealand. As Bourdieu (1989) and Moncrieffe (2006) argue, when social agents move across the social fields even within a country (e.g. education to employment, recreation to the household, one region to the other), they anticipate the possibility of experiencing a lack of interchangeability and convertibility of their capital; that is, people may experience downward social mobility, or, as we will argue later, sometimes they experience unexpected gain.

As discussed earlier, downward social mobility is often caused by the non-recognition and devaluation of pre-migration capital and the lack of locally valued resources (Bauder, 2012; Erel, 2010; Hussain, 2019). Skilled migrants require a profound adjustment to deal with such a loss of privilege in a new field (Leung, 2017; Ryan, 2011). Indeed, our own migration experiences generally resonate with the findings of preceding research. When they migrate to a developed country, temporary migrants of middle-class origin are known to be performing the labor that is not congruent with their social class in their country of origin (Batnitzky et al., 2008; Creese and Wiebe, 2009; Hussain, 2019). Identical to many of our peer international PhD students, we had to rely on the part-time and often precarious academic and non-academic jobs to earn our living which caused feelings of stress and ambivalence.

Recognizing the multidimensionality of social mobility: The role of non-economic capital

We argue that, in addition to economic factors (e.g. employment and income), our sense of class positioning and social mobility is formed and influenced largely by the intersection of multiple forms of capital. This is a major reason for why the social mobility experience is more multidimensional and multidirectional than involving a simple, downward trajectory. In this paper, we particularly consider the role of ethnic and linguistic capital (Borjas, 1992; Wang and Maani, 2014). As we all moved from a relatively culturally, ethnically and linguistically homogenous country (Bangladesh and Japan) or a multi-ethnic country (Nepal) in which we belong to a dominant ethnic group, we have lost our ethnic majority status in New Zealand (see also Bailey and Mulder, 2017; Kim, 2009). The racial/ethnic minoritization has played a considerable role in shaping our migration and social mobility experiences (see also Hernandez et al., 2015).

The discrepancy between an agent’s social power and possession of capital in different social fields is one of the leading causes of the multidimensional nature of social mobility (Bourdieu, 1986). When individuals feel empowered with possession or accumulation of valuable capital in their social domain, they may also, simultaneously, feel powerless in others. For instance, coming from a traditional, patriarchal society to the Western, less patriarchal, liberal society often gives female international students, like Ritu, a sense of empowerment and emancipation despite racial marginalization and structural constraints. She stated, ‘in many regards, I became my own boss as a woman now living in a liberal society. I could go anywhere unaccompanied if I wanted. I was making my own decisions without interferences from family’.

Migrating to a relatively less patriarchal society (New Zealand) as an international PhD student gave Ritu a sense of emancipation. The change of field and field-related value system (i.e. the value of gender equality and liberalism) made her feel more empowered as a woman. However, she also experienced a contradictory revelation and reconfiguration of her ethnic and gender identity and where she stands in the host society (see also Hernandez et al., 2015). Due to the intersection of race and gender, while she felt a sense of liberation and empowerment as a woman, she found herself vulnerable as a woman of color. For the first time in her life, Ritu was confronted with the most clichéd stereotypes of the so-called ‘brown woman’. People often tend to assume that she is married with multiple children and is abusing social services. Such racist and sexist stereotyping has a different validation of embodied cultural capital and creates an impediment to accessing skilled employment (Erel, 2010: 648). These stereotypes did not help her to possess or gain positive cultural and symbolic capital based on her gender and ethnic identity but redoubled a sense of marginalization. Despite coming from a highly educated family that was relatively liberal, she felt that her aspiration of a feminist identity in New Zealand had been denied.

A common theme that emerged from our retrospection and reflective analysis is that the dominant racial narratives and the Eurocentric racial hierarchy in present-day New Zealand shaped our mobility experience. In New Zealand, the complex rhetoric and aspiration of a multicultural society within the bicultural national framework and identity has created a complex system of racial categorization (Grbic, 2010; Rocha, 2012; Sibley and Ward, 2013). This classification not only determines access to resources, but it is also decisive in the levels of belonging, validation, tolerance and acceptance a particular ethnic group is likely to receive in New Zealand (Rocha, 2012). Different ethnic groups and their ethnic capital are diversely valued, perceived and recognized in this field. Our experiences strongly validate such a relationship between racial categorization and a sense of belonging.

In Ritu and Jeevan’s case, the systemic Western (mis)representation of their countries of origin as impoverished, disaster-prone and weak nation-states did not help them to gain positive ethnic capital in New Zealand (see Roy, 2018). Rather, the constant stigma about their ethnic and national identities made it extremely difficult to convert their ethnic capital into positive social, cultural and symbolic capital. However, Jeevan’s experience in this case is more layered and complex. Initially, he thought that people in New Zealand had a positive impression of Nepal due to the shared history of the 1953 Everest expedition.⁴ Referring to the significance of the shared history and positive impression, Jeevan noted, ‘it helped socializing with people and initiating a friendly conversation, or, sometimes made me “feel good”. In the long run, I did not gain any significant leverage out of it’. He came to realize that narratives involving Everest obscured the fact that there are considerable ‘ignorance and invisibility’ issues in New Zealand regarding Nepal (or other developing countries) (see also Roy, 2018). Akin to many other migrants from Southern Asia, he has rather confronted some racial prejudice and hostility, which gave him a sense of social exclusion. Ritu and Jeevan soon realized that, while living in a superdiverse society which generally accepts migrants and values ethnic diversity (Spoonley, 2015), the pre-existing negative ethnic/racial stereotypes would make it difficult for them to develop and sustain positive social, cultural and symbolic capitals in this particular field. The ethnic capital (as in negative stereotypes) was systematically constructed and conferred upon us by the field since arriving in New Zealand.

Shinya, on the contrary, figured himself to be in a relatively better position in New Zealand. Unlike Ritu and Jeevan, he had gender and ethnic capital (being a Japanese male) which were more positively recognized and valued in this field. Notably, Japanese culture and identity are relatively well regarded in New Zealand while Japanese people are less stigmatized than other migrant groups (which might not necessarily be the case in the US and other countries). Stereotypes and cultural representations such as cars, cuisine, electronics, pop-culture, tattoos, technology and so on are positively presented in New Zealand, while other minority cultures are more stigmatized (see Adachi’s study (2017) about the Japanese Brazilian commune in Brazil). Shinya detailed how his ethnic capital has influenced his sense of class position and life opportunities:

When I compare[d] myself with the people in the same economic stratum, I felt less recognized and valued socially and nationally than Pākehā, Māori, and white migrants from Europe and North America. But being perceived as Japanese, I felt like I was better accepted than many other non-white migrants.

Shinya’s embedded gender, ethnic and cultural capital gave him, at least, a relatively stronger sense of belonging and acceptance, if not actual economic capital. In fact, despite the usual racial discrimination against Asian and other ethnic minority migrants in rental housing markets (Ondrich et al., 1999), his ethnic capital made him (and Japanese migrants in general) less undesirable future tenants or neighbors. Along with his previous class positions in his home and other destination country, this helped him not to feel an overwhelming sense of downward social mobility.

Furthermore, our class positioning is contingent, contextual and multidimensional due to the dissonance between our experiences in two different fields – in an academic environment and outside of academia. While we often encountered overt racism (e.g. racially motivated violence or name calling) or casual racism on the street and other social spaces (e.g. racist comments on social media or even on student evaluations), we were considerably shielded within the university due to our status as early-career academic and researcher (i.e. we have proper habitus and membership in this field). Indeed, we were treated with a certain respect due to our qualifications, skills and training even though there is a latent, gendered racial hierarchy within the academia.

The quality of linguistic capital is not an absolute determinant of an individual’s social position in economic strata (even though certain employment opportunities often depend on language competency), yet it has an interpersonal-level impact as it gives a sense of alienation and subordination. Although international students are supposed to possess a certain level of linguistic capital as language test (e.g. IELTS or TOEFL) scores are required for university entrance and even immigration application, linguistic alienation and feelings of inferiority can have a significant impact on international PhD students’ social and professional life. Speaking English as our non-native language gives us a constant feeling of inferiority and lower self-esteem, and we often internalize the linguistic oppression and even avoid interactions with native-speakers (Uekusa, 2009; Woodrow, 2006). As PhD students, we were expected to comply with the global hegemony of English: doing research, writing and teaching in English (Albatch, 2007). As Bourdieu (1991) would argue, to a great extent, our academic success was reliant on the quality of our linguistic capital. If we want to be successful in the field of academia, we need to comply with the hegemony of English and cope with such structural constraints.

At the everyday interpersonal level, our distinctive accent and choice of words were denounced which impaired our confidence as emergent academics in the university. We recalled receiving student remarks on our accents and fluency in the teaching evaluations. We were told how we lacked native proficiency and our accents were difficult to comprehend. These are not racist comments⁵ as such, but represent a constant reminder of our outsider status. Despite our skills, knowledge and training, we developed low self-esteem when we compared ourselves with our native-English speaker colleagues from Ireland, South Africa, the UK and North America.

Negotiating social mobility and class positioning

Reflecting on our own experiences, we contend that international PhD students are not merely the passive victims of downward social mobility that arise from their migration process (see also Thondhlana et al., 2016). Rather, we argue that we actively negotiate the downward social mobility, socio-economic and cultural adversity and (un)employability. To navigate the loss of capital, we gained capital and developed habitus specific to the new field. We started learning what the valuable forms of capital specific to New Zealand are and thus tried to accumulate perceived locally valued and recognized capital (e.g. English proficiency, knowledge of Tikanga Māori,⁶ social networking, balanced lifestyle). This process of negotiation not only involves converting the already possessed capital from the home countries, but it also entails developing and collecting a new package of capital available to us in the new fields. (However, the availability of capital and their quality are determined by the particular fields, so, as discussed in the previous section, some capital such as positive ethnic capital were not accessible to us.) The struggle for, and accumulation of, capital can be both – strategized and unintended. We negotiated with initial downward social mobility and shifted class position and identity by employing various strategies (both intended and unintended) including drawing upon pre-established social networks (i.e. ethnic diaspora) as well as localized capital from the significant other. In this section, we highlight three major ways in which we have dealt with social mobility and belonging in New Zealand.

Relying on social capital

One way migrants can actively negotiate the loss of capital and avoid racial oppression is to rely on their own ethnic social networks in the host country (Portes, 1998; Stephens, 2008). It is worth noting that the field-specific values and norms such as superdiversity and multiculturalism often helped us build various forms of social capital to develop our agency. We have observed that many of our non-white colleagues (including Ritu and Jeevan) attempted this strategy to insulate themselves from the stress of assimilation, racial prejudice and stereotypes. Migrants generally rely on their ethno-linguistic and religious community for guidance and help (i.e. finance, job referrals, subsidized accommodation, childcare) (Joseph, 2016: 180).

Jeevan and his family relied on the faith-based networks of a local church and his university. These networks helped in meaningful ways by exploring potential job opportunities and agreeing to be a local referee for job applications. Jeevan revealed that they were provided with miscellaneous items such utensils and clothes by the faith-based social networks. When the family was suffering financial hardship, Jeevan’s wife found a temporary role in the church. The religious community as a field had also provided great emotional support for them during their settlement after arrival as immigrants. Ritu, in contrast, did not have any religious affiliation. She, however, received extended support from her ethnic community, which helped her to secure safe and stable accommodation. However, as Ryan (2011) describes, ‘[m]igration often throws people together based on shared ethnicity or nationality and we should be careful about assuming the durability of these ethnic-specific network’ (714). Ritu realized that, to gain local knowledge, better job opportunities, professional success and language proficiency, she needed to step outside of her ethnic social networks. Ritu further explained:

Soon enough, I realized that if I want to explore more opportunities, I had to give up the comfort of living in my ethnic networks. I was already subletting with a Bangladeshi couple. I needed to make friends and contacts with the dominant white group.

As Portes (1998) and Ryan (2011) explain, while ethnic networks provide newly arrived migrants with significant resources, living in the often segregated narrow ethnic community can also risk reinforcing social marginalization and limit their opportunities to collect valuable capital. Thus, making friends and connections beyond our own ethnic networks allowed all three of us to generate and accumulate new capital (e.g. language proficiency, employability, cultural knowledge).

In contrast to migrants who rely on their own ethnic networks for support, Shinya and his partner relied on pre-established connections in New Zealand through mutual white friends in the US. This helped them to increase their sense of belonging and social connectedness outside academia and facilitate Shinya’s class-reinsertion experience. The prior connections assisted the pair in renting an apartment in a sought-after neighborhood because a mutual friend was a white New Zealander real estate agent. This cross-national social capital, coupled with his positive ethnic capital, was a helpful mechanism to circumvent what is otherwise a non-white migrant’s typical experience of institutionalized racism. Furthermore, Shinya’s socialization into New Zealand culture, and thus sense of belonging, was greatly facilitated by his lifestyle. In contrast to Ritu and Jeevan, the couple’s involvement in outdoor activities meant that it was easier for Shinya to develop his social capital outside his academic and ethnic networks.

Jeevan noted that a willingness to share with supervisors and colleagues about his difficult circumstances aided him in locating useful resources, such as information, connections and references, in order to obtain work. In addition to religious, ethnic or host country networks, we all found a practical support system within the university. We found that, most of the time, people in our university network have had something to offer. Indeed, Ritu and Jeevan secured some contract teaching and research jobs through their partner and colleagues and continue to receive job referrals and other critical information from other international as well as local colleagues.

Unexpectedly gained capital

Finding a partner who is a local New Zealander has helped Ritu generate positive and useful capital. Ritu described the process:

I did not plan to get into a relationship with a white man. But when I ended up being in one, I started to see the difference … suddenly it opened many more opportunities for me; it allowed me to access some of the localized capital and resources. It definitely gave me some leverage.

The ‘whiteness’ of Ritu’s partner engendered social, cultural and symbolic capital for her. She unexpectedly gained an important form of capital (her partner’s white privilege), which enhanced her capacity for generating and collecting further capital in New Zealand. Ritu recounted the examples of getting a job contract using her partner’s social networks and, like Shinya, securing a rental unit in a sought-after neighborhood. She recognized a difference in people’s behavior towards, and perception of, her when she is with and without her white partner. Ritu explains, ‘Having a white partner means you tend to achieve wider acceptance in the white, dominant networks. People see you less of a foreigner or culturally distanced. The prejudice and harsh judgements on my ‘brownness’ started softening also.’ While meeting her partner was a non-strategic and unconscious act, it was not entirely a happenstance either. As Bourdieu would argue, she met him because of her gained membership (or social capital) to a local academic circle.

Shinya’s earned strength (see McIntosh, 2007: 98) became a critical, yet unexpected, resource for him to cope with social-economic and cultural adversities. His experiences of previously going through difficulties in Japan and the US gave him significant strength and an attitude to deal with any structural constraints and oppression, including racial hostility in New Zealand. He shared a comment:

It’s nothing as compared to what I have already gone through in Japan and the US! It is difficult in New Zealand sometimes, but we tell ourselves that we can make it as we have already made it through! We know how to deal with the system. Racism? I think I gained physical and mental strength to deal with it while I was in the US.

Earned strength can be conceptualized as a typical source for resilience, particularly, stemming from past experiences, learned behavior, cultural norms and attitude (see also Pulvirenti and Mason, 2011). As McIntosh (2007) explains, earned strength is a typical form of cultural capital that the socially disadvantaged, particularly minority women in the US, develop in order to cope with the intersection of racism, sexism, poverty, economic disparity, lack of employment opportunities and other forms of systematic social oppression. Thus, for some people, previous experiences of hardships in a field can (un)surprisingly provide a practical and interchangeable form of cultural capital to withstand future adversities in other field(s); Shinya developed a certain attitude as well as resilience in Japan and the US which unexpectedly helped him deal with hardships later on when in New Zealand.

Disposing of unwanted and undesirable capital

Besides gaining new and locally valued resources, we strategized to dispose of the unwanted capital, which is often systematically conferred upon migrants. We understood the importance of, to a certain extent, ‘making the cultural differences invisible’ (Joseph, 2013: 31). We did so by obscuring or downplaying some of the ethno-cultural practices or by developing a (selective) ‘white way of life’ because, just like many others, we have learned that highly skilled migrants’ professional career prospects often depend on the ‘cultural fit’ (Colic-Peisker, 2011; Joseph, 2013). In this process, Ritu recalled how she started developing the new habitus and field-specific norms such as drinking alcohol. (She had never consumed alcohol before she arrived in New Zealand.) She soon realized that New Zealand has a strong drinking culture which plays an important role in socializing and networking. While not drinking alcohol might be valued as a positive symbolic capital in Bangladesh, in the new field of New Zealand, it fed into the risk of consolidating the stereotype of a ‘brown woman’ from developing countries.

Migrants often tend to develop a dominant white way of life through strategic acculturation and integration processes to construct or reconstruct a new identity in the host country. Tuan’s book (1998) Forever foreigners or honorary whites? gives a comprehensive overview of Asian Americans' acculturation, assimilation and identity formation in the US. Shinya recalled that he, indeed, tried to reduce his ethnic capital by acculturating and assimilating as much as possible in his early days in the US. He understood the significant disadvantages of not being nested in his own language and ethnic communities; however, he was eager to develop localized habitus and belong to the local communities through outdoor activities in the area where he was then living, instead of relying on Japanese ethnic and linguistic capital, which he somehow perceived negatively.

In the New Zealand context, Ip and Pang (2006) similarly describe how Chinese identity back in the 1950s was devalued and undesirable in New Zealand, and there was explicit pressure of acculturation on the Chinese community. Ip and Pang (2006) further noted that, in response to such undesirability of their identity, a section of young Chinese was willing to give up their Chineseness and attempted to become as ‘white a New Zealander’ as possible. Not surprisingly, distinct ethnic precincts in Auckland have steered clear of a ‘Chinatown’ tag in order to avoid their hypervisibility and othering; it was non-Chinese business owners and customers who favored it being called ‘Chinatown’ (NZ Herald, 2015). Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory, we conceptualize these acts as ethnic minority migrants’ strategies to dispose of a certain degree of unwanted ethnic capital undervalued by the local fields. Such a strategy perceivably helped us gaining (honorary) white capital, as white capital is not fully achievable for ‘non-white’ international PhD students (Tuan, 1998).

Discussion and conclusion

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to shed light on our experience, we proposed that we move to a new social space or field of struggle when we migrate to receiving countries as international PhD students. Due to the different value system in each field, the package of habitus and capital that we brought from the countries of origin often becomes ineffective in the host country which leads to the loss of capital and initial downward social mobility (see also Lulle and Buzinska, 2017). However, a closer examination informs us that the nature of social mobility is far more non-linear, contingent, complex and multidimensional than previously portrayed. Beyond economic capital, non-economic (or less-directly economic) factors and resources such as race, ethnicity, nationality and language, often complicate our sense of class identity and belonging in a superdiverse society. We may feel empowered in one aspect of social space and simultaneously disenfranchised in the other.

To mitigate the structural constraints and adversities in New Zealand, we strategized to generate and collect field specific and locally valued capitals (e.g. making ourselves as ‘cultural fit’, downplaying ethnic practices, developing a ‘selective whiteness’, and social networking). Social mobility should therefore be characterized, not merely by significant manifestations of losses and gains of capital, but by a multiplicity of everyday consciously strategized and/or unanticipated moments (such as meeting a partner who is a local PhD student) that migrants can capitalize on. We then suggest that the dynamic and multidimensional nature of social mobility is contingent on migrants’ social agency and capability to negotiate, dispose and optimize the capital. Indeed, we strategized to comply with local norms and values, thereby collecting locally valued capitals, whatever is available to us in the field. Social agency, therefore, is central to the accounts depicted in our shared stories, and this is often overlooked in traditional theoretical and empirical views on migrants’ efforts to build social and other forms of capital. This complements the existing discourses on the social agency of international PhD students.

However, international PhD students (and migrants in general) should not be solely responsibilized to develop the agency and accumulate necessary capital to be successful in various fields in the host countries. This is because some capital, such as our ethnic capital (positive or negative), is not obtainable; instead, it is systematically conferred upon us on entering the new field (in New Zealand). Therefore, as Bourdieu’s proposition of dialectic relationship between field and habitus informs, redistribution of capital and empowerment of social actors need to be accompanied by structural transformations (e.g. anti-discrimination policies, promotion of multilingualism and multiculturalism). In the discussion of international PhD students’ (and other migrants’) empowerment, it is crucial to avoid any responsibilization of the marginalized and mystification of their social agency (Rose, 1999).

Following Bourdieu’s idea, this research poses an important question which should be further discussed and explored: How do we foster a field within academia that is receptive to the diversity of international PhD students’ cultural capital, especially ethnic and linguistic capital? Addressing this question will help us develop policy framework to foster fields (i.e. wider communities and society), which are more inclusive, multicultural and multilingual for larger migrant groups. As demonstrated in this research, we felt more protected in our academic environment because it is a field in which diversity and ‘foreign’ capital are more likely accepted and valued. Thus, we suggest that embracing and promoting multiculturalism and multilingualism at structural and individual levels may be the necessary step to create fields like our academic environment, which would be less hostile to the capital (e.g. language, culture, ideology, political view, religion, skills and credentials) that migrants bring from their countries of origin.

This research calls for a more nuanced and flexible approach to investigate not only international PhD students’ but also anyone’s migration-related social mobility and class identity. Social scientists tend to identify concrete patterns of social mobility (Crul, 2000: 240), but our experience shows that non-linearity and contingency are central to the social mobility of international PhD students. This study offers an important theoretical and methodological contributions: although it may not provide a concrete numerical formula into which we plug numbers to find the likelihood of social mobility direction and extent, using Bourdieu’s theoretical framework enables a holistic picture to be drawn. The complexity of our experiences of moving horizontally and vertically across different social fields produces unexpected outcomes. Furthermore, due to the case-centric nature of CAE and our exclusive focus on international PhD students, our findings are not generalizable. However, our methodological approaches may be applied for consideration by future studies. We encourage international PhD students (or other immigrant groups) to turn their collective self-narratives and experiences into rich, contextualized data and analysis (see Lapadat, 2017; Roy and Uekusa, 2020) to explore the multiplicity of migration and related social mobility.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal editorial team for their time to review this paper and provide valuable comments and constructive feedback. The authors would also like to acknowledge Mr. Luke Duane Oldfield for his helpful comments and suggestions.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Rituparna Roy

Shinya Uekusa

Notes

References

Adachi

(2017) Ethnic Capital in a Japanese Brazilian Commune: Nature of Children. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Albatch

(2007) The imperial tongue: English as the dominating academic language. Economic and Political Weekly 42(36): 3608–3611.

Bailey

Mulder

(2017) Highly skilled migration between the global North and South: Gender, life courses and institutions. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43(16): 2689–2703.

Batnitzky

McDowell

Dyer

(2008) A middle-class global mobility? The working lives of Indian men in a west London hotel. Global Networks 8(1): 51–70.

Bauder

(2012) The international mobility of academics: A labour market perspective. International Migration 53(1): 83–14.

Béhague

Kanhonou

Filippi

, et al. (2008) Pierre Bourdieu and transformative agency: A study of how patients in Benin negotiate blame and accountability in the context of severe obstetric events. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(4): 489–510.

Blalock

Akehi

(2018) Collaborative autoethnography as a pathway for transformative learning. Journal of Transformative Education 16(2): 89–107.

Borjas

(1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerational mobility. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1): 123–150.

Bourdieu

(1986) The forms of capital. In: Richardson

(ed.). Handbook of Theory for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, pp.241–258.

10.

Bourdieu

(1987) What makes a social class? On the theoretical and practical existence of groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–17.

11.

Bourdieu

(1988) Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

12.

Bourdieu

(1989) Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory 7(1): 14–25.

13.

Bourdieu

(1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.

14.

Bourdieu

(1993) Sociology in Question. London: Sage Publications.

15.

Bourdieu

Wacquant

(1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

16.

Braun

Clarke

(2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2): 77–101.

17.

Brooks

Waters

(2011) Student Mobilities , Migration and the Internationalization of Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

18.

Brown

Jones

(2013) Encounters with racism and the international student experience. Studies in Higher Education 38(7): 1004–1019.

19.

Butcher

Spoonley

Gendall

(2017) New Zealand’s attitudes to Asia and Asian people: An exceptional case? Political Science 67(1): 38–55.

20.

Butcher

Spoonley

Trlin

(2006) Being accepted: The experience of discrimination and social exclusion by immigrants and refugees in New Zealand. New Settlers Programme, No.13. Palmerston North: Massey University.

21.

Butcher

(2002) No place like home?: The experiences of South-East Asian international university students in New Zealand and their re-entry into their countries of origin. Doctoral dissertation, Massey University, New Zealand.

22.

Cassim

Stolte

Hodgetts

(2020) Migrants straddling the “here” and “there”: Explorations of habitus and hybrid identities among Sri Lankan migrants in New Zealand. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 30(2): 185–198.

23.

Chang

Ngunjiri

Hernandez

(2012) Collaborative Autoethnography. California: Left Coast Press.

24.

Chang

Ngunjiri

Hernandez

(2016) Collaborative Autoethnography. Oxon: Routledge.

25.

Colic-Peisker

(2011) Ethnics’ and ‘anglos’ in the labour force: Advancing Australia fair? Journal of Intercultural Studies 32(6): 637–654.

26.

Collins

(2012) Organizing student mobility: Education agents and student migration to New Zealand. Pacific Affairs 85(1): 137–160.

27.

Collins

(2000) Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge.

28.

Crenshaw

(1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299.

29.

Creese

Wiebe

(2009) ‘Survival employment’: Gender and deskilling among African immigrants in Canada. International Migration 50(5): 56–76.

30.

Crul

(2000) Breaking the circle of disadvantage: Social mobility of second-generation Moroccans and Turks in The Netherlands. In: Vermeulen

Perlmann

(eds) Immigrants, Schooling and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference? UK: MacMillan Press Ltd., pp.225–244.

31.

Desbiens

(2016) Imaginative geographies. In:Richardson D et al (eds) International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. New York: John Wiley & Sons , pp.1–6.

32.

Désilets

(2016) Negotiating 'national' and 'international' elements of culture in a transnational social field. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 25(4): 451–469.

33.

Dürr

(2011) To belong in aotearoa New Zealand: Latin American migrant experiences in multicultural Auckland. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37(3): 503–519.

34.

Ellis

Adams

Bochner

(2011) Autoethnography: An overview. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12(1): 10.

35.

Erel

(2010) Migrating cultural Capital: Bourdieu in migration studies. Sociology 44(4): 642–660.

36.

Favell

Feldblum

Smith

(2007) The human face of global mobility: A research agenda. Society 44(2): 15–25.

37.

Forbes-Mewett

Sawyer

(2016) International students and mental health. Journal of International Students 6(3): 661–677.

38.

Friedman

(2014) The price of the ticket: Rethinking the experience of social mobility. Sociology 48(2): 352–368.

39.

Gomez

(2015) A bourdieusian perspective on strategizing. In: Damon

Linda

David

, et al. (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.141–154.

40.

Grbic

(2010) Social and cultural meanings of tolerance: Immigration, incorporation and identity in aotearoa. New Zealand. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(1): 125–148.

41.

Hage

(2003) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation. New York, NY: Routledge.

42.

Hernandez

Ngunjiri

Chang

(2015) Exploiting the margins in higher education: A collaborative autoethnography of three foreign-born female faculty of color. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 28(5): 533–551.

43.

Hout

(2015) A summary of what we know about social mobility. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 657(1): 27–36.

44.

Huppatz

(2009) Reworking Bourdieu’s ‘capital’: Feminine and female capital in the field of paid caring work. Sociology 43(1): 45–66.

45.

Huppatz

Goodwin

(2013) Masculinised jobs, feminised jobs and men’s ‘gender capital’ experiences: Understanding occupational gender segregation in Australia. Journal of Sociology 49(2-3): 291–308.

46.

Hussain

(2019) ‘I was professor in India and here I am taxi driver’: Middle class Indian migrants to New Zealand. Migration Studies 7(4): 496–512.

47.

Infometrics and National Research Bureau (2016) The Economics Impact of International Education in New Zealand 2015/16. Education New Zealand. Available at: https://enz.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/The-Economic-Impact-of-International-Education-in-New-Zealand-2015-2016.pdf (accessed 7 October 2020).

48.

Pang

(2006) New Zealand Chinese identity: Sojourners, model minority, and multiple identities. In: Liu

McCreanor

McIntosh

, et al. (eds) New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations. Wellington: Victoria University Press, pp.174–190.

49.

Johnson

(1993) Editor’s introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on art, literature and culture. In: Bourdieu

(ed.) The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.1–25.

50.

Joseph

(2013) (Re)negotiating cultural and work identities pre and post-migration: Malaysian migrant women in Australia. Women's Studies International Forum 36: 27–36.

51.

Joseph

MGC

(2016) From students to permanent residents: the role of social networks in the immigration transition of Indians in New Zealand. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 25(2): 168–190.

52.

Kelly

Lusis

(2006) Migration and the transnational habitus: Evidence from Canada and the Philippines. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38(5): 831–847.

53.

Kim

(2009) Global migration and South Korea: Foreign workers, foreign brides and the making of a multicultural society. Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(1): 70–92.

54.

Kim

(2010) The gendered desire to become cosmopolitan: South Korean women's motivations for migration to the UK. Women's Studies International Forum 33(5): 433–442.

55.

King

Raghuram

(2013) International student migration: Mapping the field and new research agendas. Population, Space and Place 19(2): 127–137.

56.

Kondakci

Bedenlier

Zawacki-Richter

(2018) Social network analysis of international student mobility: Uncovering the rise of regional hubs. Higher Education 75(3): 517–535.

57.

Lapadat

(2009) Writing our way into shared understanding: Collaborative autobiographical writing in the qualitative methods class. Qualitative Inquiry 15(6): 955–979.

58.

Lapadat

(2017) Ethics in autoethnography and collaborative autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry 23(8): 589–603.

59.

Leung

MWH

(2014) Unsettling the Yin-Yang harmony: An analysis of gender inequalities in academic mobility among Chinese scholars. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 23(2): 155–182.

60.

Leung

MWH

(2017) Social mobility via academic mobility: Reconfigurations in class and gender identities among Asian scholars in the global North. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43(16): 2704–2719.

61.

Lipura

Collins

(2020) Towards an integrative understanding of contemporary education mobilities: A critical agenda for international student mobilities research. Globalisation, Societies and Education 18(3): 343–359.

62.

Liu

(2014) A search for a place to call home: Negotiation of home, identity and senses of belonging among new migrants from the people's republic of China (PRC) to New Zealand. Emotion, Space and Society 10: 18–26.

63.

Lulle

Buzinska

(2017) Between a ‘student abroad’ and ‘being from Latvia’: Inequalities of access, prestige, and foreign-earned cultural Capital. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43(8): 1362–1378.

64.

Luthra

Platt

(2016) Elite or middling? International students and migrant diversification. Ethnicities 16(2): 316–344.

65.

Madge

Raghuram

Noxolo

(2015) Conceptualizing international education from international student to international study. Progress in Human Geography 39(6): 681–701.

66.

McIntosh

(2007) White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In: ML

Anderson

Collins

(eds) Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology. 6th edn. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, pp.98–102.

67.

Martiniello

Rea

(2014) The concept of migratory careers: Elements for a new theoretical perspective of contemporary human mobility. Current Sociology 62(7): 1079–1096.

68.

Moncrieffe

(2006) The power of stigma: Encounters with ‘street children’ and ‘restavecs’ in Haiti. IDS Bulletin 37(6): 34–46.

69.

New Zealand Government (2018) International education strategy (2018–2030). Available at: https://enz.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/International-Education-Strategy-2018-2030.pdf (accessed 7 October 2020).

70.

NZ Herald (2015) Editorial: Chinatown decision up to Chinese. New Zealand herald. Available at: www.nzherald.co.nz/cultures/news/article.cfm?c_id=105&objectid=11484062 (accessed 7 October 2020).

71.

OECD (2019) Education at a glance 2019: OECD indicators. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1787/f8d7880d-en (accessed 7 October 2020).

72.

Ondrich

Stricker

Yinger

(1999) Do landlords discriminate? The incidence and causes of racial discrimination in rental housing markets. Journal of Housing Economics 8(3): 185–204.

73.

Parreñas

(2001) Servants of Globalization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

74.

Portes

(1998) Social capital: Its origins applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1): 1–24.

75.

Pulvirenti

Mason

(2011) Resilience and survival: Refugee women and violence. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 23(1): 37–52.

76.

Robertson

(2014) Time and temporary migration: The case of temporary graduate workers and working holiday makers in Australia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(12): 1915–1933.

77.

Rocha

(2012) (Mixed) racial formation in Aotearoa/New Zealand: Framing biculturalism and ‘mixed race’ through categorisation. Kotuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Science 7(1): 1–13.

78.

Rose

(1999) The Power of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

79.

Roy

(2018) Researching middle-class consumption in Bangladesh: contextualizing technology and moral economy. PhD thesis, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2292/37254 (accessed 7 October 2020).

80.

Roy

Uekusa

(2020) Collaborative autoethnography: “Self-reflection” as a timely alternative research approach during the global pandemic. Qualitative Research Journal ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print) ). https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-06-2020-0054

81.

Rutten

Verstappen

(2013) Middling migration: Contradictory mobility experiences of Indian youth in London. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(8): 1217–1235.

82.

Ryan

(2011) Migrants' social networks and weak ties: Accessing resources and constructing relationships post-migration. The Sociological Review 59(4): 707–724.

83.

Sayer

(1999) Bourdieu, smith and disinterested judgment. The Sociological Review 47(3): 403–431.

84.

Sibley

Ward

(2013) Measuring the preconditions for a successful multicultural society: A barometer test of New Zealand. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 37(6): 700–713.

85.

Simon-Kumar

(2015) Neoliberalism and the new race politics of migration policy: Changing profiles of the desirable migrant in New Zealand. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(7): 1172–1191.

86.

Spoonley

(2015) New diversity, old anxieties in New Zealand: The complex identity politics and engagement of a settler society. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(4): 650–661.

87.

Stephens

(2008) Social Capital in its place: Using social theory to understand social capital and inequalities in health. Social Science & Medicine (1982) 66(5): 1174–1184.

88.

Suo

(2019) Support centre proposed for international students suffering loneliness and culture shock. TV New Zealand One News. Available at: www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/support-centre-proposed-international-students-suffering-loneliness-and-culture-shock?variant=tb_v_2 (accessed 5 May 2020).

89.

Swartz

(1997) Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

90.

Thondhlana

Madziva

McGrath

(2016) Negotiating employability: Migrant Capital and networking strategies for Zimbabwean highly skilled migrants in the UK. The Sociological Review 64(3): 575–592.

91.

Tuan

(1998) Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

92.

Uekusa

(2009) Everyday experiences of linguicism: A sociological critique of Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs). Master’s thesis, California State University San Marcos, USA. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/122624 (accessed 7 October 2020).

93.

Uekusa

(2011) The perceived role of accent in micro-level linguicism. In: Awal

Radzi

Sultan

FMM

, et al. (eds) Linguistics Issues in Multicultural Contexts. Serdang: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press, pp.73–89.

94.

Wacquant

(2007) Pierre bourdieu. In: Stones

(ed.). Key Sociological Thinkers. 2nd edn. New York: Macmillan, pp.261–277.

95.

Wang

Maani

(2014) Ethnic capital and self-employment: A spatially autoregressive network approach. IZA Journal of Migration 3(1): 1–24.

96.

Woodrow

(2006) Anxiety and speaking English as a second language. RELC Journal 37(3): 308–328.

97.

(2018) Transborder habitus in a within-country mobility context: A Bourdieusian analysis of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong. The Sociological Review 66(6): 1128–1144.

98.

(2020) ‘Marginal’ student mobilities: Cruel promise, everyday mobile belonging and emotional geographies. British Journal of Sociology of Education 41(5): 750–754.

99.

Yoo

Castro

(2011) Does nativity status matter in the relationship between perceived racism and academic performance of Asian American college students? Journal of College Student Development 52(2): 234–245.