Mobile Study / Mobile Selves is a multi-phase, longitudinal study of Chinese women students in Australian higher education, conducted by Prof Fran Martin and supported by a Future Fellowship (FT 140100222, 2015 – 2020) and a Discovery Projects grant (DP230100442, 2023 – 2026) from the Australian Research Council.
In recent years, large numbers of young women from China have chosen to study in Western nations including Australia. Motivated by desires to overcome gender discrimination in China’s labour market and to escape the neotraditionalist ideology that increasingly restricts women’s opportunities at home, significantly more Chinese women than men travel overseas for degrees. They typically do so during a formative period of their lives, between ages 18–24. This raises the question of how education mobility affects these women’s lives in the long term.