Self-perceived identities of female doctoral students in mobility: empowered transformation or eroding academic commitment?
基于对35名中国海外女博士生的深度访谈，研究她们在跨国流动中如何构建和协商学术身份，发现流动可能产生“加热”或“冷却”效应，既带来赋权也可能削弱学术承诺。
International mobility among doctoral students is increasingly common, yet the experiences of female doctoral students remain underexplored. This study draws on in-depth interviews with 35 Chinese female doctoral students studying abroad to investigate how they construct and negotiate their academic identities within complex transnational contexts. Using Kaufman and Feldman’s multidimensional framework of self-perceived identity and the theory of intersectionality, the analysis highlights identity formation along two axes: intelligence – occupation and cosmopolitanism. Four identity types emerge: mobile academics, mobile non-academics, returning academics, and returning non-academics. The findings demonstrate how gender intersects with mobility to shape identity formation. Mobility does not necessarily reinforce academic identity; it can produce both heating and cooling effects. Due to their dual marginality – as Asian women in host-country contexts and as newcomers in academia – mobility often generates a cooling effect, undermining confidence and academic commitment. Yet, despite these challenges, mobility still brings empowerment to many female doctoral students, primarily in two ways. First, by revealing the shifting meanings of being female across socio-cultural contexts, it creates space for self-reflection, allowing identities to be affirmed, reconfigured, or transformed. Second, knowledge, skills, and symbolic capital gained abroad further enable students to make career and life decisions that better align with their self-perceived identities. These findings underscore the nuanced consequences of transnational mobility for female doctoral students and call for future research to examine how mobility challenges, negotiates, and potentially reconstructs prevailing gender norms from a gender-geography perspective.