[EN transcript] S01E02 Who Moved My Puzzle? Identity, Temporality, Spatiality and (im)mobility

[Transcript - Full version]

Alina 01:23

In the previous episode, we discussed how we entered the field of international relations and talked about how individuals struggle and/or write their own stories under the grand narratives. The systems and structures of international relations shape everyday life, and at the same time, we are also the participants, creators and constituents of international relations.

Recently, I find it interesting that many students and travellers recorded and uploaded vlogs on social media platforms about their daily lives or travel stories in foreign countries, for example, scenes when they visited or study in some European cities. What these vlogs presented may be different from what we learnt previously from textbook articles, literature or news. For example, French cities are usually portrayed in a magnificent and romantic way. But some vlogs present a different picture: not very safe, sometimes chaotic or even messy. These clips disenchanted and challenged the social imagination of a foreign country whose image was previously shaped by the media and literature.

Living abroad is the most direct form of encounter that we have with international relations. Therefore, in this episode, we have found two guests who are studying abroad and travelling through these facets of international relations, resonating with the concepts we are learning about in their daily lives. We're going to look at the micro-components of international relations, these everyday 'minutiae', and talk about how people understand the positionality as researchers and their 'distance' from international relations. Now let's invite our guests to introduce themselves.

James 02:57

My name is James and I've been studying international relations since I was an undergraduate and I'm currently studying overseas. I'm interested in the topic of China's neighbourhood diplomacy.

Miss Zhang 03:14

Hello, everyone, I'm Miss Zhang. I studied international relations and education overseas for my undergraduate degree, and I'm currently pursuing further studies in the field of international relations. My research topic is emotion and international security.

Alina 03:29

Welcome! For our first topic, I would like to ask both of you if there was a moment when you suddenly realised that international relations is so close to your life?

Miss Zhang 03:39

For me, I wouldn't say it was a sudden feeling. I have always been interested in history, and I might think in a more integrative way. For example, I was very young when China hosted the Olympic Games in 2008, but I could feel the relationship between the country and the international community at that time, and the feeling was especially strong during the Olympic Games, so I didn't have the feeling of "suddenness".

Alina 04:09

Oh, that's true. But I've also read some comments online that say, "When people were young, they could easily get agitated and wound up about these things on the news, rather than, let’s say, paying attention to a real concern in international relations." So I'd also like to talk to you about what you think is “a real concern”.

Miss Zhang 04:30

For me personally, to describe "concerns” as either real, fake, or false might not be that accurate. When I watched the news as a child, I could not have an isolated way to view it - so when I was young, I probably mixed some personal feelings and subjective judgments into these events together. But I won't say, that such a feeling is not 'real'.

When I grew up, or when studying the IR discipline systematically, I gradually mastered some research methods, and we can see ourselves as researchers on these issues. So the "concern" at this time became more systematic, and (I can) look at the issue in a more comprehensive way (and be aware of my personal biases)

For example, going back to that example of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, as I happened to browse the music video of "Beijing Welcomes You" on the Internet yesterday, it occurred to me that when I was a child I felt very proud of my motherland and it had developed very well.

There were many famous people from Hong Kong and Taiwan presented in that music video, which actually has a great connection with China's diplomacy, domestic politics and international relations. Now, in 2024, when I look back at this music video of the 2008 Olympic Games, I will view it differently: thinking of it not just as a personal emotion, but rather from a collective and international perspective, regarding it as a collective emotion or a (global political) event. In general, I think they are all "concerns", just at different levels.

James 06:34

Since just now we've had some discussions about how individuals view international events and issues as reflected in the news and on social media, it occurs to me that, in the global pandemic (things have changed). Usually, when we think about "studying abroad", it means going to another country to experience and learn knowledge. However, during the special period of the global pandemic, we were unable to go abroad or to study under normal circumstances. People, including myself, can only study from my home using telecommunication tools.

Alina 07:42

Apart from we Chinese students who were unable to study abroad, the international students in China did not come back either. Even after the domestic situation in China got better and we had returned to schools and universities, those international students from Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and anywhere in the world, still have to attend online classes. What's interesting is that even though we were geographically far away from each other, because of the existence of WeChat, we were kind of close in our communication in the latter years of the pandemic. I even made a friend who was connecting with us in Malaysia without having met her in person at all.

James 08:04

During the pandemic, it was my first time to experience that, within the global village, when facing the same global public crisis, the differences between how states responded to Covid-19 could have such different impacts on us as individuals.

Another point is that I also experienced the differences in perceptions between states and regions. Generally speaking, the flight time from my hometown to Beijing can take more than four or five hours; but if I go to the neighbouring country, it takes less time than flying to the capital of my own country. This is an experience that is probably unimaginable for some people in (geographically) smaller and medium-sized countries. So that I can experience what we call "geographical proximity" within a region, that is, even though it is geographically very far away, since we are in the same country, so we are psychologically very close. On the contrary, regionally, although it's very close geographically, it suddenly seems to be very distant psychologically.

Miss Zhang 09:19

I agree with what James just said, and I think he is also talking about the relationship between "concerns nearby" and "concerns far away", and the relationship between the individual and the state. (I think) when you go abroad, you have a clearer sense of the sovereignty of each state, its limits, and its borders. As James said, I was abroad during the global pandemic, and there is a very clear sense of boundaries between the domestic and the abroad.

Another thing is that when I was abroad, I met people who asked me, "Where are you from?"

If I were asked this question in China, I would answer with my high school, university, or city. But when you're abroad, it's very difficult for you to keep the same answer unless it's a very well-known international city; otherwise, I might just answer my nationality. When that happens, the relationship between the individual identity and your country or your nationality is actually closely connected, and the concern becomes more obvious.

Alina 11:02

I think that this issue of "concerns far away" versus "concerns nearby", and also distance, time/temporality, space/spatiality, and movement versus immobility, is one of the best manifestations of how international relations fold into personal experience when having these overseas experiences and movements between borders in our life. My experience was also very similar to yours because I was also unable to go to Europe for my exchange programme at the time, and my home institution thought that I had already exchanged "out" so that they couldn't take me "in", so I ended up renting a small room near my home university, and I called that small room as my "campus". I called my kitchen and the desk attached to the kitchen table "library". And the classroom where I took my online classes was the balcony in my room. I jokingly called these locations the 'imagined campus of Zoom University'. At that time, I could only go to this kind of jet-lagged "online night college". I was in the UTC +08:00 time zone, but worked and rested according to Irish time.

Alina 12:11

So I was in a small room, but I felt like even though I wasn't physically moving, but because my exchange university is a place with more than 50 per cent international students, every time we had a "cloud classroom" I met people from all over the world. I often felt like I was in a time warp at that time. Then my everyday experience (of this jet-lagged cloud classroom) entangled with knowledge of international relations, human geography, and the concepts of temporality and spatiality that I was studying at that time. This opened a new door for my thesis and the direction of my subsequent research.

The day for my undergraduate thesis's topic confirmation was interesting. During the pandemic, it's hard for people to go to different places without a smartphone. But the smartphone I had at the time was technically glitchy - it usually automatically locks itself just because sometimes you click too many times by accident. I accidentally locked my phone, and because of the accidental touch and unaware clicks, the phone believed that it was lost and the person in front of its screen failed to enter the correct password to unlock. So I had to wait for about 10 minutes before I could re-enter my password to unlock it.

I had a long, blank 10 minutes on the day I needed to submit my thesis topic. At that time I really needed my smartphone to enter a place and to scan the QR code to get the milk tea I ordered. But I couldn't do anything at that time, so I could only sit on a bench next to me and I was in a daze. I felt that the flow of time was very slow, unlike the situation when I was in my small room taking an online class in a different time zone while still having my own life in UTC +08:00. Because of the online connection of people from different time zones, I could shuttle in different time zones and places and everybody was brought together by technology. So the clash between the 'slow' and the 'fast' was particularly evident in my lived experience at that time.

Alina 14:24

So I ended up researching whether social media and emerging technologies accelerate our experience of time, and what kind of impact such an acceleration has on international relations. I then turned my attention to how social media enables transnational mobilisation across geographic boundaries and borders. This experience (of Zoom University) that has had a significant impact on some of my later research as well, e.g. both for my Masters and now for my PhD. Firstly, because of my experiences of having jet-lagged online classes over Zoom, I got inspiration for the topic of my master's research Zoom diplomacy - the use of online videoconferencing software during the global pandemic to substitute the absence of face-to-face diplomatic meetings. Interacting with a machine, like a laptop, at home alone, might produce different dynamics compared to face-to-face communications - will that have an impact on the outcome of diplomatic practices?

At the same time, as a woman who studies international relations, just as we discussed in the previous episode, I was particularly aware of the fact that international relations is gendered, so I turned my attention to the group of female diplomats. They work on the front line of diplomacy and they are still plagued by gender stereotypes and gender expectations. I was very curious about the gender expectations that they have to comply with in the offline diplomatic spaces, such as the gendered dress code, and when they meet with technology, when diplomacy moves from the offline to the online, when women diplomats are facing the computer by themselves in their own rooms at home, is that different from when they are facing a group of high-level male diplomats in a magnificent, grand and traditional diplomatic space?

So when doing research, factors from a personal level, such as the location, the research interests of the department, gender, identity, our positionality... All of these things can potentially affect our research. So I would like to know if you two have similar feelings?

Miss Zhang 16:51

Yes, based on my personal experience, I very much agree with what you said. I did my undergraduate in IR in Australia. The things I studied in Australia or the issues I encountered were very relevant to the geographical characteristics of Australia; for example, we would study issues like Australia's bushfires or foreign aid towards the Pacific Island countries. When I came to the United States, I found that the focus of studying international relations over here are much more oriented towards traditional security and are less concerned about non-traditional security, say, less critical security focus. This is closely related to the position of the United States as a great power in the international system. In terms of climate change, unless you are taking a class that focuses on climate-related topics, I don't think that climate issues will be brought into every paradigm when studying the classes. It could be due to different university cultures; I also felt like IR in the States was more concentrated on realism like we often talk about game theory, nuclear deterrence, and so on.

Miss Zhang 18:28

Of course, this is at the university level or the regional level, but when I look at these issues from a personal perspective, as Alina just said - when women look at these issues, it will inevitably lead to a particular understanding of the topic. The class I'm taking this quarter previously involved feminist theory in its title, and there were only one or two men in the class. Later, the tutor changed the name to "Critical Security Studies Theory", and it ended up having more men than women enrolled, which was very interesting.

Alina 19:31

What I'm curious about is, do either of you feel that your own life experiences, for example, James mentioned transnational mobility the fact that he is studying in a neighbouring country that's relatively close to China, have had any impact on your research topics?

James 19:51

Yes, I did mention the concept of transnational mobility when I introduced myself earlier. This concept, as I understand it, is twofold. One is the movement of people, i.e. travelling, studying abroad, etc.; and the other is the flow of goods, i.e. trade and investment, which is more of a concern in the fields of study such as international relations, economics and political science. But how do we relate trade and investment in business to everyday life? It is only from my personal experience of studying abroad that I have discovered some special phenomena. When we study abroad, we have to live there and purchase some daily necessities of cooking, clothing, appliances and furniture, and so on, you will find that there are some products that are actually from China. In other words, when we go abroad as Chinese nationals, we still purchase goods made in China. This reminds me of a policy term called "internal circulation" and "external circulation" [nei xunhuan 内循环 and wai xunhuan 外循环 are policy terms from China's recent dual circulation economic strategy]. We go through the transnational movement of people and receive goods exported by way of trade, so does this belong to the "internal" or "external" circulation? What exactly does this belong to? This is actually something that, from my perspective, is an interesting phenomenon, although it's probably not a puzzle.

Miss Zhang 21:43

I also strongly resonate. For example, there are usually Chinatowns overseas, which I think is very interesting. Chinatowns in different states or cities in the United States have different styles. Some may be more in the old Hong Kong style, while others may be more modern. When I notice these phenomena or when I am in Chinatowns in different countries, I think about international migration. I would think, what generation are these immigrants from? Which part of China do they come from? Why did they (choose to) come here? How do they form communities after arriving? How do they interact with each other? What goods did they bring with them? For example, there may be Fujian gangs and Guangdong gangs, or Sichuan cuisine and northern cuisine, which are particularly prominent in one Chinatown, but may not be so prominent in other Chinatowns.

Alina 22:57

I was very resonated that one time after we talked about international mobility and how biometrics and visa systems serve as a means of security management to categorise people and achieve border control. I was in the UK at that time and had to apply for a Schengen visa. There are some interactions with technology here. Some agencies, like travel agents in some provinces in China, so far away in China, use codes to register and occupy almost all the slots for visa appointment released by the visa centres. And then sell those slots via Chinese social media platforms or online shops like Taobao. I also heard that because these Chinese agents swept away all the available slots, some people from other countries couldn't get an appointment. For example, there were some friends whose Indian peers in their labs couldn't get the slot for visa applications. There were also tips posted on Xiaohongshu (a Chinese social media app known as the Chinese version of Instagram) to teach people how to download the code from GitHub and get a slot by themselves without having to pay high prices through the travel agents.

And after all this, when you finally get a slot and go to the visa centre to submit your documents, you can deeply feel excluded and isolated as a person from the "third world" countries. This is because the people who wait in the long queue are basically people of colour or people who are clearly not from the core of Europe. We need to queue for a long time in a crowded basement where there is no air circulation and no signal.

Alina 25:12

The staff at the visa centre, such as the security guards and receptionists, were not like the polite people I generally met in the UK. They didn't use polite phrases like "could you" or "please", but rather all in a commanding way using imperative sentences. They even shouted at us. There was a girl in front of me in the queue. She had actually done nothing wrong, only that one page of her documents was pressed under a pile of paper and could not be picked instantly. However, the receptionist scolded her loudly and told her to go out and wait again, just because her documents were "incomplete". In experiences like this, I felt how systems of international mobility, visa systems, and biometrics collection create segregation and exclusion in everyday security practices. It also touched on issues of hierarchy, order and oppression in the world system as reflected in visas. We realised at the time that those who do not have to go through such a cumbersome visa process can never appreciate the predicament what we are experiencing.

Alina 26:31

Suddenly it occurred to me that as a Chinese student studying abroad, do you have any feeling that your Chinese identity has some limitations or if has broadened of your scope of study, everyday life or your research? The students I had classes with were basically from Europe or the United States, and I was often the only one from Asia and even East Asia in the classroom. I often find that some of the concepts or theories that we talked about in class cannot explain my life, the things around me, or what's going on in China or in Asia. And then I feel that I have this responsibility as the only one to speak and address this problem. And then at times, I feel like if I don't voice Asia, there might not be anyone else to pay attention to it, so I have this responsibility as the only East Asian student in that classroom. So in the end, it became - I had to speak up in class, and when I did, it seemed to be always examples of East Asia and China. So I'm very curious, as a Chinese student studying abroad, do you also feel that your Chinese identity brings some limitations to your study, daily life and research? Or has it broadened some horizons and (brought) some other opportunities?

Miss Zhang 28:06

It's not necessarily limiting or broadening. Your personal experience, your national identity, or your ethnic background makes you, like, to wear a pair of glasses that you can't take off easily. When you look at something, it inevitably becomes a certain perspective that you have internalised. Say I'm Chinese and I studied war and strategic culture as an undergraduate. At that time, due to the background of international conflicts, I thought of the phrase "victory without fighting" [bu zhan er sheng 不战而胜] in Sun Tzu's The Art of War [the phrase was a derivative of 不战而屈人之兵，善之善者也 (hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting) from no.2, III. Attack by Stratagem, Arts of War] which I had learnt in the past. So what does it mean? In Chinese culture, strategy and tactics are more emphasised, but in Western strategic culture, they may pay more attention to the use of power, material power. So I think my identity gives me a perspective on the problem. Then, my contribution and value will be different when I look at the same problem with other people who do not have this identity. What this difference brings is a plurality and diversity of theoretical contributions, and these shouldn't be competing with each other across the disciplinary field either. Our different identities bring diversity to studying IR and enrich this discipline and knowledge.

James 30:05

It occurs to me that perhaps because we are so familiar with our own country. Just as the saying goes, "Why can’t I tell the true shape of Lushan? Because I myself am in the mountain [bu shi lu shan zhen mian mu 不识庐山真面目，zhi yuan shen zai ci shan zhong 只缘身在此山中: originally from the ancient Chinese poetry Written on the Wall of West Forest Temple by Su Shi]." Why something we are familiar with can become a puzzle for students from other states?

Alina 30:29

I agree with the description of not seeing the true shape of the mountain because you're situated within it. When I was abroad, I also found that what I thought was important to study was very different from what other people thought was an interesting research puzzle.

Life studying abroad is actually highly intertwined with our studies of international relations. When international relations meet our everyday life, it always creates clashes, and these clashes are actually the entry points for new research and give us the opportunity to new ideas. Scholars that I like very much who research phenomenology, experience and practices would say that we always study relationships in the process of the encounter between us and the world. I think that's the most important thing that living abroad has taught me. One prevailing idea is that IR is usually studying "jia guo dashi 家国大事" (important issues in relation to household/family and the state/country; in Chinese, this phrase jiaguo dashi 家国大事 combines the word 'jia (home/family)' and the word 'guo (state/country)' together to indicate important national affairs), but IR is in fact constantly overlapping, colliding, and entangling with our lives on a daily basis. It is in this encounter between the personal and the international that we are constantly discovering new things to fill in the gaps.

Miss Zhang 31:54

In terms of the narrative of "jia guo dashi - important national affairs" that uses a 'family' or 'household' measure to gauge international affairs, I do not support this narrative personally. I think we should be cautious about how to use the language.

The framing of "family and state" to describe international relations is, I think, a very East Asian or maybe Chinese way of understanding. Our culture is very family-orientated - often, we use the metaphor of family or household to describe the state. Hence, the state is regarded as an analogy of family, as a fundamental unit of Chinese social structure. However, after I went to study abroad, using the unit of family to measure politics is actually not that salient when it comes to understanding the relations between the individual and the state. In the Western context, there are different measures or units of analysis, such as labour unions or civil society. So, I think if I don't agree with the term "jia guo da shi (important national affairs)" - it conveys the meaning that politics is a big deal that distances from an individual level. If I wanted to be more open to discussing this concept in future episodes, I would like to avoid using this term. When we use this term, we have to think cautiously about why it is used in this way, and not to directly apply it in our everyday conversation.

Miss Zhang 33:15

The second thing is, maybe it's to think about other possibilities, like, because my experiences of studying abroad brought me different shocks and conflicting thoughts. For example, my previous understanding of "jia guo da shi (important national affairs)", compared to what I understood after I studied abroad, was different. My previous understanding of this term seemed to be more of a sense of distance. This sense of distance made me think at first, "Is this something I can't talk about? Because the emperor is far away and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with me [tian gao huangdi yuan 天高皇帝远], so what can I do even if I talked about it? But later, as I understood more through reading more books, literature, and news, you would feel that politics is about distribution - you get what, when, how, and why? What are the justifications? The government is the main distributor of this system, and since the state and the government is involved in the distributional process, we should be conscious of discussing it as well. So it's actually relevant to our daily lives. We're no longer in the old days when we had a few taxes a year that had nothing to do directly with the emperor.

In terms of values, I do think that big things, small things, and world affairs... they're all relevant to everybody, and everybody should be involved in the discussion of these topics, just like the conversation we're having today, where we're all getting together and having different perspectives, bringing our own different experiences, and talking about it.

Alina 35:35

Although I mentioned before that you don't need to bring textbooks with you to listen to our podcast, I would like to share the joy of reading with you here. In 2019, the journal Cooperation and Conflict had a special issue on Everyday International Relations. In the opening of this special issue, scholars call for not being satisfied with IR as a discipline whose object of study is often considered separate from people's everyday lives, and to avoid being surrounded by abstract, grandiose, and unscrutinized experiences. IR scholars, along with sociologists and anthropologists, are concerned with understanding how people live their lives under exogenous structures. Meanwhile, IR scholars also seek to "know if and how lived experiences generate changes or stagnation in these exogenous structures" (Björkdahl, Hall and Svensson, 2019:129). Everyday experience plays a big role in dismantling international relations from concepts in books to our lived reality. We want to understand everyday life as a site where relations are produced, to understand lived experience as one of the generators of international relations, and hope to put IR in the spaces of everyday life.

So when asking (research) questions, one option is to leave the question of international or global change to the "grand theories" that have been criticised by the everyday turn of international relations, while the other is to choose to turn to our life, to the nearby, and we can also get new academic inspiration and ideas.

• (Reference: Björkdahl, A., Hall, M., & Svensson, T. (2019). Everyday international relations: Editors’ introduction. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 123-130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836719845834.)