Wednesday 8 December 2021, 16:00 - 17:00 –  Dr Shanshan Jiang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

For the fifth week in our fall seminar series, we are delighted to host Dr Shanshan Jiang who will present a paper entitled: 

Diversity without Integration? Racialization and Spaces of Exclusion in International Higher Education

In predominantly white universities in the Global North, international students are frequently exposed to racism, xenophobia, and other forms of exclusion. In particular, resurgent racism and nationalism prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic have been increasingly targeting students of color in academic, residential and social spaces. It is urgent to interrogate racialization and exclusion in higher education as many institutions celebrate diversity but are still silent on integration. In this talk, Dr. Shanshan Jiang investigates the ways in which race and racialization shape academic and social spaces as well as educational experiences. Conceptualizing race as a transnational construct, she specifically examines how students from China’s Pearl River Delta negotiate a predominantly white Midwestern university in the US. She further reveals how Chinese students are objectified as capital and a diversity signifier, and at the same time, how these foreign students of color perpetuate the global racial hierarchy by internalizing the whiteness ideology and China’s racial discourses on anti-Blackness. 

 

About the speaker

Shanshan Jiang holds a PhD in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her scholarship examines the political economy and the racial construction of transnational education mobility. Drawing on theories from education, urban geography, migration studies, and transnational racial theories, she studies class, racial and spatial relations during the era of globalization of education. Her dissertation project Between the Pearl River Delta and the US Midwest: Class and Racial Transformation through Transnational Higher Education, examines how the urban capital, wealth, and global aspirations of elite Chinese transnational students facilitate the market-driven globalization of higher education and gentrification in the US. Her recent publications could be found at Comparative Education Review and the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

First published: 1 November 2021

<< Events


Please register here.