Rethinking International Internships: Affective Subjectivation and Normative Friction in the Chinese Context
This conceptual article reinterprets international internships not as neutral platforms for skill development, but as structured encounters with institutional normativity and affective dissonance. Focusing on the Chinese context – a high-power, collectivist regime shaped by hierarchical discipline and guanxi networks – the study theorizes internships as liminal spaces of ethical subjectivation and intercultural identity formation. Drawing on Foucault’s disciplinary power, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, boundary-crossing theory, and affect theory, it develops a normative-affective framework to analyze how foreign interns navigate disorientation, emotional labor, and embodied negotiation. Emotions such as anxiety, shame, and ambivalence are theorized as epistemic affects – forms of situated knowledge that mediate encounters with unfamiliar regimes of value, recognition, and legitimacy. Internships are thus framed not as neutral educational tools but as affective pedagogies of the self, where identity is reconstituted through ongoing engagement with institutional power and normative pressure. This framework contributes to decolonial critiques of transnational education and challenges liberal models of intercultural competence by foregrounding the emotional labor required to remain intelligible within asymmetrical systems. The analysis invites new directions in understanding how global education produces, regulates, and contests subjectivity through emotionally charged institutional encounters.
While nobody left any comments to this publication.
You can be first.
Ahmed, S. (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Routledge, London.
Akkerman, S. F. and Bakker, A. (2011), "Boundary crossing and boundary objects", Review of Educational Research, 81 (2), 132–169, https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654311404435
Andreotti, V. de O. (2011), Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337794
Bhabha, H. K. (1994), The Location of Culture, Routledge, London.
Boler, M. (1999), Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, Routledge, New York, NY.
Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Butler, J. (2004), Undoing Gender, Routledge, New York, NY.
Chen, X. and Wang, Y. (2021), "Affective asymmetry in Chinese internships: Emotional labor and normative adaptation", Journal of Intercultural Studies, 42 (1), 50–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2021.1874290
Deardorff, D. K. (2006), “Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization,” Journal of Studies in International Education, 10 (3), 241–266, https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315306287002
Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, New York, NY.
Gu, Q. and Schweisfurth, M. (2015), "Transnational connections, competences and identities: Experiences of Chinese international students after their return 'home'", British Educational Research Journal, 41 (6), 947–970, https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3175
Hanser, A. (2008), Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Hochschild, A. R. (2012), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Illouz, E. (2007), Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Jackson, D. (2018), "Challenges in international internships: Employability, cultural adjustment and career development", Journal of Education and Work, 31 (2), 213–227, https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2018.1435523
Kraidy, M. M. (2005), Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA.
Madge, C., Raghuram, P. and Noxolo, P. (2015), "Engaged pedagogy and responsibility: A postcolonial analysis of international student mobility", Geoforum, 59, 588–598, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.06.005
Marginson, S. and Sawir, E. (2011), Ideas for Intercultural Education, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY.
Mezirow, J. (1991), Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Nguyen, M. (2020), "Embodied adaptation in Confucian institutions: Affective dimensions of intercultural learning", Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 50 (4), 530–546, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2018.1559042
Otis, E. M. (2011), Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Ricoeur, P. (1981), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Sharma, S. and Phung, L. (2019), "Emotional regulation in internships: Navigating cultural expectations", International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 72, 41–52, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2019.06.003
Stein, S. (2017), "Decolonial critiques of international education: A critical review", International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 9 (1), 79–90, https://doi.org/10.18546/IJDEGL.09.1.07
Tavory, I. and Timmermans, S. (2014), Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Yang, R. (2020), "Guanxi and workplace rituals: Navigating Chinese professional culture", Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 40 (1), 104–118, https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2019.1695098
Yang, R. (2021), "Foreign interns and the performance of compliance: Emotion, ritual, and surveillance in a Chinese tech firm", Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 41 (1), 59–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2020.1836451
Zhao, Y. (2019), "Interning in opacity: Structural asymmetries and emotional regulation in Chinese internships", Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17 (2), 122–145, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1558046
Zhao, Y. (2020), "Structural constraints in Chinese internships: The role of guanxi and hierarchy", Journal of Education and Work, 33 (2), 142–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2020.1722219
Zheng, Y. (2021), "China as a global education hub: Policy, practice, and prospects", International Journal of Educational Development, 81, 87–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102379