Hysteresis Effects and Emotional Suffering: Chinese Rural Students’ First Encounters With the Urban University

Abstract

In the Chinese context of a stratified higher education system and significant urban–rural inequality, rural students are generally facing constrained possibilities for social mobility through higher education. Despite these structural constraints, some exceptional rural students, like all the participants in this research, manage to get themselves enrolled in the urban university. Drawing on participants’ subjective narratives about their first encounters in the urban university, I argue that the rural students in this research were confronted with two levels of habitus–field disjunctures, namely, the rural–urban disjuncture and academic disjuncture. Then, through examining participants’ narratives about their hysteresis effects and emotional suffering, I suggest the sense of feeling lost and inferior reveals how various types of domination in the external structure of the field of the urban university play a part in affecting rural students’ inner emotional worlds.