| This research investigates what neoliberal cosmopolitans expect from their global education project, how they experience it through U.S. higher education, and how in the process they make sense of racial categories in the host society. Employing the framework of neoliberal ideologies, class practice, and racialization, I locate these middle-class young Asian international undergraduates lived experiences at an American university in the linkage of the macro context of neoliberal globalization. This dissertation examines how class, race and neoliberal cultural logics shape middle-class young Asians' aspirations as well as their academic and social experiences at a globalized American university through an in-depth, multi-sited, 18-month ethnography. In doing so, I explore how the meaning and role of education has been altered by neoliberal globalization and how it not only has expanded educational spaces to include a global space, but has also given those educational spaces a particular scope of value. I address the following specific questions:;1) How are Asian international undergraduates' class backgrounds and the macro context of neoliberal globalization intertwined and how do these shape their aspirations for their transnational journey to U.S. higher education? 2) What cultural logics and strategies play out through their academic and social experiences? 3) As Asians, how were they racialized on an American campus and how did they understand this and respond? Particularly, how did the neoliberal ideologies interact with their meaning-making process of race and racialization?;In order to answer these questions, I conducted a multi-sited ethnography of Chinese and Korean international undergraduates from August 2013 to December 2014. My research employed participant observation, observation, formal semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and a survey at Midwestern University (Mid U), a large public university in a mid-sized Midwestern city. This research also expanded to interviewing and observing the undergraduates in their home countries of China and Korea.;From the data analysis from my fieldwork, I found that Asian international students' global education journeys were initiated by the goals of middle-class mobility, that is, to secure or even improve their position in the global knowledge market. They practiced neoliberal tactics focused on the efficient production of marketable and tradable knowledge and social capitals in their academic and social experiences at an U.S. university. However, these experiences were often limited both in scope and their worldview of market-like logics. Simultaneously, neoliberal cultural logics regarding race shaped the students' unique understandings of, and responses to, race and racism with the meritocracy, performativity, and self-responsibilization that aligned with American color-blindness. The role and meaning of education in their strategic cosmopolitan project is privatized as an individual accomplishment and responsibility for self-management rather than as a public good. |
