Post-graduation identity work of Chinese international students in Madrid, Spain

This article examines the post-graduation identity work of a cohort of Chinese international students in Madrid, Spain. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews and longitudinal qualitative research with four focal cases, this study explores these participants’ feelings of anxiety and dislocation in response to institutional uncertainties, labor market constraints, and shifting affective attachments, and their attempts to reconcile these pressures with their sense of identity. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is applied to the relational, context-dependent transformations of capital across national regimes of value. The participants’ critical reflections reveal a fractured, ambivalent process marked by the gradual devaluation of their cultural capital. This study contributes to a cross-cultural understanding of Chinese international graduate students’ mobility challenges and reveals how the tensions between their global aspirations and localized constraints challenge these students to negotiate and reconstitute their identity work.