Subjectivity as the site of struggle: students’ perspectives toward sino-foreign cooperation universities in the era of discursive conflicts

Abstract

While students’ perspectives are crucial for international/transnational institutions’ development, their preferences towards certain values should not be taken for granted, as the possibility of lived experience is confined by individuals’ subjectivity, which derives from power and knowledge but does not depend on them (Deleuze; Foucault, 1988). Drawing on empirical data collected from Chinese sino-foreign cooperation universities, this study illustrates how the constructed neoliberal and authoritarian subjectivity influences students’ perception towards the enrolled universities, and their struggle in self-examination about what counts as truth, especially privileged by the discursive conflicts. It further argues while such critique to the politically imposed discourses represents the first step for “the care of the self” as Foucault proposes, the students have inevitably confronted the danger of the sense of lost.