Assembling affective infrastructures in educational migration: international students’ journeys to and in China

The expansion of international education has generated institutional, social, digital, linguistic, and career infrastructures that mediate international student mobility. Yet less is known about how these infrastructures are felt and assembled across uneven higher education contexts. This article conceptualises educational migration as a process of assembling affective infrastructures that shape preparedness, belonging, and post-study aspirations. Drawing on a comparative case study of a Shanghai university and a hinterland university in China, based on two rounds of qualitative interviews and participant-selected digital snapshots, the analysis shows how infrastructural conditions become consequential when international students experience them as reassuring, pressuring, or aspirational and connect them to practical action. In the Shanghai case, dense and globally connected infrastructures often facilitated ease and translocal belonging, while also softening Chinese-language engagement and longer-term local commitment. In the hinterland case, thinner local infrastructures placed greater demands on students’ own assembling work, while supporting stronger investment in Chinese learning, relational networks, and China-oriented futures. The article argues that adaptation, integration, and employability are not simply individual or institutional outcomes, but provisional mobility effects produced through affective alignment, mediated dependence, and uneven infrastructural conditions. This framework foregrounds how infrastructure, affect, language, and aspiration recursively shape educational migration trajectories.