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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Kenyan women studying in Shanghai and how Chinese language learning shapes cosmopolitan imaginaries through South–South mobility. Based on ethnography, it shows how education, gender, and racialized encounters produce situated forms of world belonging beyond Western models.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how cosmopolitan imaginaries are formed, negotiated, and constrained through South–South educational mobility by focusing on Kenyan women studying in Shanghai amid China–Africa cooperation. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, it follows Kenyan women as they move between Shanghai, Nairobi, and Eldoret, tracing how their experiences as Chinese-language learners shape both their educational trajectories and subsequent roles as interpreters and cultural mediators in Kenya. In Shanghai, these women encounter heterogeneous social interactions: racialized gazes, misrecognition, and online hostility coexist with moments of friendship, cooperation, and cross-cultural openness. Their assessments of what “counts” as racism do not converge but range from critical sensitivity to strategic disregard, producing reflexive and situational ways of relating to difference. The paper shows how African students continually negotiate their positions between expectations of “opportunity,” “development,” and “internationalization,” and lived hierarchies, exclusion, and inequality.

Rather than fostering a singular or normative cosmopolitan identity, these experiences give rise to a pragmatic and relational form of cosmopolitan imagination grounded in everyday encounters. Chinese language learning plays a central role in this process. As a form of cultural capital, it enables these women to negotiate tensions between patriarchal social expectations and personal aspirations, expand their capacity for mobility, and reconfigure their modes of self-expression and agency. By situating Shanghai as a non-Western global city, the paper argues that South–South educational mobility offers an alternative entry into the world that neither reproduces Western cosmopolitan ideals nor fully escapes new hierarchies and exclusions.