© Aeneas Zi Wang
"Elective Liminality: Chinese Study Mothers and the Strategic Inhabitation of Temporariness in Southeast Asia"
Prof. Dr. Aeneas Zi Wang (Nanjing University)
Liminality has long been treated in migration scholarship as a condition structurally inseparable from precarity, with the in-between state of temporariness understood as one of institutional exclusion and curtailed agency. This talk posits that the growing phenomenon of pre-university education migration from China to Southeast Asia calls for a revision of that theoretical equation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Chinese study mothers across multiple cities in Malaysia and Thailand, this study examines how families deliberately engineer and sustain liminal conditions as a strategic vehicle for intergenerational mobility rather than enduring them as an imposed constraint. Our research asks how study mothers enact and negotiate extended temporariness over the course of their children’s schooling abroad, and what qualitatively distinct forms of in-betweenness emerge from these negotiations. Analysis reveals that schooling decisions, legal status choices, marital arrangements, professional trajectories, and aspirations for return or onward mobility are all organised around the deliberate preservation of an open migratory horizon. Extended temporariness allows forms of adaptive flexibility and gendered agency that the prevailing precarity paradigm neglects. This study develops the concept of elective liminality to name this condition, situating it between Turner’s obligatory liminal and his voluntary liminoid, and applies it to a comparative study of Chinese pre-tertiary education migration to Malaysia and Thailand. In doing so, it disentangles temporariness from precariousness, repositions study mothers as active agents rather than passive subjects of transnational mobility, and advances the theorisation of liminality within South-South migration scholarship.
Aeneas Zi Wang holds the Jiangsu Province Specially-Appointed Professorship and is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Nanjing University. His research interests lie in international migration and Global China studies. Prior to his current position in Nanjing, Aeneas Zi Wang was an EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at INALCO in Paris. He also holds a Visiting Associate Professorship at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Malaya for the 2025-26 academic year, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and at the Centre for Advanced Studies, LMU Munich. He serves as an Associate Editor for Migration Studies (OUP) since 2024.
Der Vortrag findet in Präsenz statt. Ort: Japan-Zentrum der LMU, Seminargebäude am Englischen Garten, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 München, Raum C007.