China with ‘Foreign Talent’ Characteristics: A ‘Guerrilla’ Autoethnography of Performing ‘Foreign Talentness’ in a Chinese University

Educational mobilities and internationalised higher education: critical perspectives

“…Other exclusions will also affect the capacity of migrant academics to engage in shared decision making around teaching. Misiaszek (2018a), for instance, reflecting on her experience in China built on the critical exploration by Koh (2003) of Singapore's 'foreign talent' discourse. The use of the term 'talent' to characterise a person implies a quality that someone might possess that would allow them to serve a utilitarian purpose.…”

Expatriation and Incapacity Created by a Multitude of Hidden Equalities

“…There are various formats used for writerly texts, Humphreys (2005) uses Vignettes to illustrate certain experiences in his academic life. Misiaszek (2018) uses a series of mediations including poetry to develop a view of her experiences in Chinese higher education. The auto-ethnographic study of Gant (2017) takes direct diary quotations to explore the challenges of bringing up a disabled child.…”

“…Buzard (2003Buzard ( , p.1608 suggests that the researcher should 'Treat any auto-ethnographic text as an inked tattoo', something that will be permanently there. The idea of vulnerability and how others might interpret the text is a concern (Humphreys 2005;Misiaszek 2018), and I particularly identify with the notion of 'not commodifying out China experience ' (2018, p.90). Although I will also admit that part of this exercise is to enable a development of my own multi-cultural identity (Mao and Shen 2015).…”

Stretching and Bending the Field

“…This seems to be intensified when the location is Beijing, a place of constant change and contradictions, of interest to so many and fully understood, like most places, by very few (including those of us who live here long-term and endeavor to, among other ways of connecting to our immediate reality, speak the language). Some of my recent postfoundational3 foci range from autoethnography that does center my small-cultures (Holliday, 1999) in China (Misiaszek, 2018) to an essay that interweaves China into more longitudinal reflections (Misiaszek, 2020a) to creative writing drawing on both cie and other fields (Misiaszek, 2020b). In reflecting on the range of my own and others' work (and how it is mis/understood), the state of the field, and this special issue (si), I argue that if one remains vigilant and does not assume or take for granted that the inherent risks of saturation and issues such as aesthetic failure, around, for example, ontologies, epistemologies, and geographic locations are resolved (they aren't), cie is a field that can be widely expansive.…”