The Cultural Politics of Emplacement

Abstract

This chapter shifts the book’s focus to international students, key agents in forming and sustaining East Asia’s knowledge spatialities. We examine their felt experiences of spaces and places as a basis to uncover the sociabilities of emplacement enabled by dynamics encounters in laboratories, tutorials, lectures spaces, student residences and neighbourhoods. The chapter offers an analysis of the politics of belonging seen through the interplay of communication, friendship and learning encounters. Drawing on their face-to-face and technology-mediated encounters, we show how student emotions are mobilised to produce, and alternatively resist, cosmopolitan sociabilities, including those that reconstruct ‘home’.