Mobile educational space and imaginative travellers in-situ: A case study of a UK international branch campus in China

This paper problematizes the neglect of spatiality and materiality of international branch campuses in extant studies and challenges the predominant representation of transnational education students merely in terms of their corporeal immobility. Based on a case study of a UK international branch campus in China, this paper incorporates interview narratives and ethnographic observations to reveal the students' experiences and imaginations, and to delineate the unique texture of the spatiality of the campus. In examining the dynamic interrelations between imagination, materiality, and (im)mobility in transnational educational spaces, this paper highlights the students' imaginative process, in which spatial imagination and imaginative space (re)produce each other and are complicated by the various sources of power at play. The international branch campus thus functions as an infrastructure of im/mobilities, which is both locally embedded and transnationally connected; it enables students' imaginative mobilities, transforming them into 'imaginative travellers' who have never physically been abroad but whose being and belonging are constantly negotiated by their everyday experiences in a mobile educational space.